Berkshire's Cash Pile Just Fell $14.3bn. Greg Abel Spent $24 Billion to Do It.

Net equity purchases of $19.8bn and a buyback that went from $235m to $4.2bn. Against a break-even near $14.5bn, that is what a quarter which actually moves this balance sheet looks like.

Berkshire Hathaway’s cash and Treasury bills fell to $359.2 billion at the end of June, from $373.5 billion three months earlier. That is the first decline since 2022 and the largest since the first quarter of that year. It is also the third decline in eighteen quarters, so the interesting question is what it took.

It took about $24 billion. Net purchases of equities ran $19.8 billion in the quarter, after the book handed $8.1 billion back to the pile in the three months before. The buyback went from $235 million to roughly $4.2 billion. Both of those are Abel’s, and both are new.

I had put the break-even at $14.5 billion a quarter, from Berkshire’s own inflows. This quarter cleared it by about nine billion, and the pile moved almost exactly as that arithmetic said it would. What I want you to keep is not the fall. It is the measure the fall has to be read on, because the widely quoted series and the company’s own series disagree about direction in two of the last six quarters, and one of them will be wrong about this one too.

I also made this as a film. It does the one thing text can’t: the adjustment is worked on screen, line by line, so you watch the published figure become the real one instead of taking my word for it.