Berkshire Hathaway ‘s ownership of Treasury bills has grown so large that Warren Buffett’s conglomerate is now the fourth-largest holder in the world, owning about 5% of the entire bill market, according to an estimate from JPMorgan. The Wall Street investment bank estimated that Berkshire’s T-bill position has more than doubled over the past year, adding that the $314 billion stake as of the end of March accounted for 5% of all outstanding short-term government bills. Berkshire’s holding now surpasses foreign banks, the Federal Reserve, Local Government Investment Pools, offshore money market funds and stablecoin, JPMorgan said. Buffett is known to purchase Treasury bills at weekly Treasury auctions, sometimes in increments of $10 billion. The government sells T-bills in terms ranging from four to 52 weeks. While interest rates have dipped from multi-year highs reached last year, they are still fat enough to earn Berkshire billions of dollars in interest income on its gigantic pool of bonds every year. Treasury bills with maturities between one month and one year today all pay yields above 4%. At Berkshire’s annual meeting last weekend marking 60 years under Buffett’s control, the 94-year-old Oracle of Omaha reiterated his confidence that one day the mountain of cash equivalents will be deployed, stressing that it’s crucial to stay patient for good opportunities. “Every now and then you find something and occasionally, very occasionally, but it’ll happen again, I don’t know when. It could be next week, it could be five 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,” he told an arena full of shareholders on May 2. Buffett revealed that Berkshire almost put $10 billion to work recently, but ultimately didn’t pull the trigger. The Berkshire chief, who’s stepping down as CEO at the end of the year, noted that one problem in the investment business is that well-priced assets don’t come along in an orderly fashion. “We came pretty close to spending $10 billion, not that long ago, for example, but we’d spend $100 billion” if the right opportunity came along, he said. “I mean, those decisions are not tough to make when something is offered that makes sense to us and that we understand and offers good value.”
