Cash as a Position

The amount of cash we have – we would spend $100 billion if something is offered that makes sense to us, that we understand, offers good value, and where we don’t worry about losing money.

The problem with the investment business is that things don’t come along in an orderly fashion, and they never will.

I’ve had about 16,000 trading days in my career. It would be nice if every day you got four opportunities or something like that with equal attractiveness. If I was running a numbers racket, every day would have the same expectancy...But we’re not running that kind of business.?

We would rather have conditions develop where we would have like $50 billion in cash rather than $335 billion in treasuries. But that’s just not the way the business works. We have made a lot of money by not wanting to be fully invested at all times.

We don’t think it’s improper for passive investors to make a few simple investments and sit with them for life. But we’ve made the decision to be in the business, so we think we can do a little better by behaving in a very irregular manner.

If you told me that I had to invest $50 billion every year until we got down to $50 billion in cash, that would be the dumbest thing in the world. Things get extraordinarily attractive very occasionally. The long-term trend is up. But nobody knows – Greg doesn’t know, Ajit doesn’t know, nobody knows what the market is going to do tomorrow, next week, or next month. Nobody knows what business is going to do tomorrow, next week, or next month. But they spend all their time talking about it because it’s easy to talk about, though it has no value.

Every now and then you find something. Occasionally, very occasionally – but it’ll happen again, I don’t know when – it could be next week, it could be 5 years off, but it won’t be 50 years off – we will be bombarded with offerings that we’ll be glad we have the cash for.