Shadowing Practice: Warren Buffett Is Selling NOW. The $397 Billion COLLAPSE. - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
1
Everyone thinks Warren Buffett is selling Apple to avoid a potential 21% capital gain tax hike.
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But that doesn't fit his history.
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Buffett has always been a forever investor.
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He doesn't panic sell.
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Something else is driving this.
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He's been building cash and shifting heavily into short-term US treasury bills at a scale rarely seen in his portfolio.
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That kind of move usually shows up when cracks start forming in the economy before they're visible.
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Because when Buffett stops holding, he's not reacting to headlines, he's reacting to what's coming next.
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By the close of the first quarter of 2026, Warren Buffett's holding company, Berkshire Hathaway, was holding a record pile of cash.
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That figure came to $397.4 billion.
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Not stock, not businesses, just cash and government paper.
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Doing nothing but waiting.
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To understand the scale, it's larger than the annual output of countries like Finland, Portugal, or Chile.
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On its own, it rivals the value of many of the world's biggest companies.
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And it didn't appear suddenly.
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Between 2023 and 2024, Berkshire dumped a net $172.9 billion in stocks,
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with roughly $134 billion sold in 2024 alone.
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It was the biggest sell-off in the company history.
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While markets were hitting record highs, Buffett was doing the opposite.
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He was selling quarter after quarter.
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And the selling never stopped.
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In the first quarter of 2026, the firm unloaded another net $8.1 billion.
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After the 2022 bear market, the next two years weren't supposed to be scary.
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2023 and 2024 turned into some of the strongest years for United States stocks in decades.
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Markets climbed, portfolios recovered, and for many people it felt like the only mistake was being outside of the market.
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And right in the middle of that, Buffett built up his reserve.
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His cash pile more than doubled.
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People should have paid attention.
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Every business show on TV calls this smart tax planning, a careful man trimming his tax bill before rates climb.
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But it contradicts Buffett's own past.
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In 1986, the corporate tax rate was set to jump from 28% to 34%.
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That should have set off a fire sale if taxes ever drove his choices.
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Instead he left his core holdings in place.
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For 60 years he built fortunes by sitting still.
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Tax rules have never once knocked him off of a stock he believed in.
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Buffett has said his favorite holding period is forever.
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His best time to sell a great business is almost never.
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Coca-Cola is the proof.
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He's held it for decades, riding it through booms and busts.
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He never once dumped, not even to dodge a tax bill.
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So we're supposed to believe he sold his Apple stock just to save a few cents on a tax form?
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Buffett didn't just trim his portfolio, he reduced his Apple position from nearly half of Berkshire's stock holdings down to about a fifth.
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Then he did something even more surprising.
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On January 1st, 2026, he stepped down as the boss of Berkshire Hathaway and handed the day-to-day control to Greg Abel, staying on as chairman.
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The timing mattered, the cash pile was already built, and the major selling had already happened before the transition.
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And Abel's first move as the new chief, well, he kept right on selling.
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Nothing changed.
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What does Buffett see on the horizon that the rest of us don't?
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There were only a couple of moments in Buffett's career where he stepped back from stocks almost entirely.
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One of them was 1969.
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Markets were running hot, driven by what were later called the nifty-fifty.
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These were high-flying names like Polaroid, Xerox, and Avon that investors treated as guaranteed winners.
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Buffett looked at the bigger picture and decided there was nothing left worth buying, so he did the unthinkable.
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He shut down his investment partnership and handed the money back to his own investors.
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He simply walked away.
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What came next proved him right.
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By 1973, that bubble had burst, and a brutal bear market wiped out years of gains.
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The big names got slaughtered.
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Polaroid crashed about 91% from its high, Avon fell roughly 86%, and Xerox dropped almost 71%.
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These weren't obscure or low-quality companies, they were some of the most respected names in the market at the time.
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A great company is not the same thing as a great stock.
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Buffett realized that years before anyone else.
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Thirty years later, he did a softer version of the same thing.
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In 1999, the dot-com mania was in full swing.
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Companies with no profits were being valued at billions.
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Pets.com became a household name more for its advertising than its business model.
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While the market was celebrating the new era, Buffett publicly pushed back, Warning that returns built on speculation wouldn't last.
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He wasn't caught up in the hype.
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He believed the market was priced so high that returns would crawl for years.
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Months later, the Nasdaq began a fall that he raised about three quarters of its value.
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Pets.com went straight to zero.
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Microsoft stock dropped 50% in a year.
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It took 17 long years to climb back.
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Intel did even worse.
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What ties those two moments together isn't luck.
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When he stepped back in 1969, his reasoning was simple.
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He couldn't find anything worth buying at a sane price.
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He did not predict the crash.
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He just saw the gap between what businesses were worth and what people paid.
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He doesn't guess the storm, he just looks at a gap between price and value and only steps back when that gap gets too wide.
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Two exits, two moments where he stepped away.
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It's something he's almost never done.
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Now place early 2026 on top of that.
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The total value of the US stock market compared to the real economy is sitting at historically stretched levels again.
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In some measures, it matches previous peaks.
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In others, it exceeds them.
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Buffett even has a name for this, the Buffett Indicator.
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It stacks the value of all stocks against the size of the economy.
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He says if the danger line gets close to 200%, you are playing with fire.
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It hit that level in 1999 right before the crash.
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In early 2026, it's back there.
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The market is now dominated by a handful of tech giants known as the Magnificent seven.
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Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Tesla.
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At times, those seven names alone have made up a third of the entire S&P 500.
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That level of concentration means a small group of stocks is doing a huge share of the market's heavy lifting.
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There was a similar pattern in 1969 during the Nifty Fifty era.
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For Buffett, this is less about prediction and more about recognition.
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Because when the same structure shows up again, it usually isn't random.
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For years, Apple was Buffett's untouchable favorite, the one tech business he said he truly got.
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Then he gutted it.
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Between 2022 and 2024, Apple's sales grew by about 1.5% per year.
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A successful company, absolutely, but not a fast-growing one.
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At the same time, the stock kept climbing.
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By 2024, investors were paying more than 30 times the company's annual earnings to own it.
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The stock was dramatically outpacing the actual business.
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Apple's growth did pick back up later, as newer iPhone cycles pushed sales higher in 2025 and 2026.
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But the timing is critical.
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By the time growth came back, the price had already raced miles ahead of it.
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That is what Buffett looks for.
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He knows what happens next better than almost anyone.
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A great business can keep doing fine, growing its profit each year, and the stock can still crash.
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Why?
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Because the price was borrowing against a future that never arrived.
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He wasn't selling because Apple was bad business.
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He was selling because the stock and the business were telling two different stories.
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At some point, Buffett had to decide which one he believed.
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But Apple wasn't alone.
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The biggest tech firms poured more than $200 billion into AI gear in 2024.
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Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta led the charge, building data centers and buying mountains of chips from Nvidia.
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It was an arms race of spending rarely seen.
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And the payoff?
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The actual profit flowing back from AI products?
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Goldman Sachs dug into it hard, and they found it painfully thin.
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OpenAI is the poster child for the AI boom.
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The world treats it as a money machine, yet its own numbers tell a darker tale.
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It pulls in billions in sales but loses far more than it makes.
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For every dollar it earns, it burns through $1.25.
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And the money moves between those giants in a strange circle.
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NVIDIA pours billions into OpenAI.
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OpenAI then spends that money buying Nvidia chips.
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Microsoft hands OpenAI billions too, but a chunk comes as credit for Microsoft's own cloud service.
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The cash leaves one pocket and lands right back in another.
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None of it requires an actual outside customer to turn a profit.
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The money just spins from one giant to the next.
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It looks like a successful business ecosystem, instead it is just a closed loop of corporations paying each other.
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In the late 1990s, the dot-com boom laid mountains of fiber-optic cable across the country.
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Firms bet internet demand would explode overnight.
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It didn't, at least not fast enough.
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Most of that cable sat dark for years, and the companies that laid it went broke.
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Buffett's late partner Charlie Munger said almost the same thing about the AI frenzy before he died.
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In his final interviews, he tore into the hype, calling it crazy and lining it up next to wild crypto bets.
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He spent his last days warning anyone who would listen.
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The tech world is laying dark cable all over again, just faster.
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So what'll pull the plug this time?
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The warning signs were never in the stock market, they were in the job market, and Buffett's selling lined up with it almost perfectly.
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Claudia Som, a former Federal Reserve economist, came up with one of the simplest recession warning systems ever devised.
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It watches just one thing, unemployment.
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More specifically, it looks for a very particular shift in the unemployment rate, which has reliably shown up when the economy starts turning south.
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The rule is simple, it tracks the three month average of unemployment
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and compares it to the low point from the past year.
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When the average climbs half a point above low, history says a recession has likely already begun.
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In the 11 recessions since 1950, this alarm went off every single time.
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In August 2024, the alarm crossed its line again.
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The reading hit 0.53 points above the floor.
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Buffett's heaviest selling of both Apple and Bank of America didn't bunch into the exact same window.
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He slashed his Apple stake by nearly 50% from April through June of 2024.
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Bank of America liquidations followed from July through September as the red line got crossed.
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At that precise moment, the most careful investor alive headed for the exit.
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The same jobs alarm rang again in 2001, 16 months after the dot-com burst began in 2000.
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It rang again months after the great crash of 2008 started, and once more after the 2020 shock.
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Every time it sounded before the official numbers caught up.
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Stock prices can stay disconnected from reality for years.
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They can rise on optimism, momentum, and the belief that tomorrow will be better than today.
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Hiring is different.
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The moment real companies start cutting real jobs, something has broken underneath.
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The SOM rule triggered in 2024, but the recession everyone expected never fully arrived.
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Instead, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates, hiring stabilized, and the economy managed something closer to a soft landing.
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By early 2026, the indicator had eased back toward normal levels.
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Even Saum cautioned against treating it like a crystal ball.
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The post-pandemic job market was unusual enough, she argued, that it might not follow the same patterns as past cycles.
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If this was just a short-term recession bet.
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This was his moment to pile back in.
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He could have admitted his timing was early and he bought back into the market that proved him wrong.
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Instead, he did the opposite.
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Berkshire Hathaway's cash pile swelled to its biggest size ever, long after the scare had supposedly passed.
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And that says a lot.
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The market was acting like the danger was over.
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Buffett was acting like it hadn't arrived yet.
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Buffett was supposed to have a sacred bond with the Bank of America.
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Back in 2011, the institution was bleeding.
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Buffett rode in with a $5 billion lifeline and a public show of faith.
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That move steadied the whole bank.
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He was its white knight.
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He started dumping his stake in July 2024 and kept slicing it all the way into 2026.
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Buried in the bank's filings is an asset called held-to-maturity bonds.
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The bank snatched them up while interest rates sat near zero, planning to hold them for years.
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Then rates shot up and the market value of all those old low-rate bonds collapsed.
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The damage was huge.
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By 2023, Bank of America was sitting on more than $100 billion in paper losses.
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At the peak, it topped $130 billion.
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Imagine you buy a house at the top of the bubble and lock in a cheap mortgage.
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Then interest rates double and the housing market collapses.
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Your home is suddenly worth far less than you paid.
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You can't sell.
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Selling would lock in a big loss enough to wipe you out.
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So you try to wait it out.
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You hold a thing that quietly bleeds value and you pray the market comes back first.
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That is the held-to-maturity trap.
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That $100 billion black hole was nearly seven times the loss that killed Silicon Valley Bank in 2023.
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The bank vanished in a matter of days, the moment depositors realized the danger.
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The pressure on the Bank of America did not vanish.
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It lingered.
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This doesn't affect one bank.
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It is a threat to the whole system.
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Nearly every big American lender loaded up on the same low-rate bonds during the cheap money years.
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JP Morgan did it, so did the regional banks, and now they all sit on the same buried losses.
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By itself, the loss isn't fatal.
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A bank can simply wait for the bonds to mature and collect their full value.
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The problem is that banks don't control when depositors ask for their money bank, and if withdrawals start piling up, the waiting is no longer an option.
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The bonds have to be sold, and the losses stop being theoretical.
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Silicon Valley Bank proved how fast that death spiral runs.
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It took days.
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Buffett knows banks better than almost anyone.
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He rescued the Bank of America with his own money.
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He saw what was coming, and then he walked away.
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For two years, everyone watched the inverted yield curve.
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Short-term bonds were paying more than long-term ones, a pattern that has preceded almost every modern recession.
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But the inversion is often just a warning.
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The real trouble tends to arrive afterward when the curve begins to unwind
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and the economy catches up to what the bond market was signaling all along.
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Think of it as an earthquake warning system.
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The inversion is the early tremor, the long, low rumble that says pressure is building.
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Everyone braces during the rumble, but the real damage, the part that levels buildings, comes when the shaking stops and the ground suddenly settles.
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That settling is the un-inversion.
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The US curve entered exactly that phase in late 2024, climbing back toward normal through 2025 and into 26.
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The record inversion of 2022 and 23 has now begun to unwind.
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That's the same sequence that appeared before the recessions of 2000 and 2008.
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Not because an uninverted curve is dangerous by itself.
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It's dangerous because of what usually causes it.
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The curve normalizes when the Federal Reserve starts cutting rates, and the Fed does not reach for the emergency break when the road is clear.
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The uninversion is not the cause of the storm.
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It's proof that the people with the most data have decided things are serious
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and they can see the cracks forming in real time.
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By the time the alarm stops, they have decided the ground is about to move and the everyday investor, well they watch the curve return to normal and they feel relieved.
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To them it's good news.
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Look at the whole timeline and the picture becomes clear.
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The jobs warning appeared in 2024.
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Buffett's biggest selling happened around that same period.
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The yield curve began moving back toward normal.
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Banks were still sitting on losses from rate shock, and quarter after quarter Berkshire's cash pile kept growing.
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Any one of those things could be dismissed on its own, but together they explain why Buffett wasn't acting like someone who thought the risks had passed.
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He was selling, he was raising cash, and he kept doing it even as markets pushed to new highs.
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That is the part that matters, because Buffett isn't known for predicting crashes.
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He is known for refusing to pay tomorrow's prices today.
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And by early 2026, he was holding nearly $400 billion, waiting for something he believed was worth the wait.
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Now we're reaching Buffett's endgame.
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By late 2024, Berkshire's treasury bill holdings had reached roughly $288 billion.
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That was more short-term government debt than the Federal Reserve itself was holding at the time.
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By the first quarter of 2026, Berkshire's total cash pile was approaching $400 billion.
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Buffett has spent his entire career telling investors that cash is a terrible long-term asset.
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So why was he suddenly sitting on more of it than ever before?
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The answer is that Buffett has never viewed cash as an investment.
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He views it as buying power.
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When assets become expensive, cash looks lazy.
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When assets become cheap, cash becomes valuable very quickly.
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He has run that play before.
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In 2008, while the rest of the financial system was scrambling for liquidity, Buffett was one of the few people in a position to provide it.
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He handed Goldman Sachs a $5 billion lifeline.
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The terms were so good they still teach them in business schools.
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He cut a similar deal with General Electric.
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He had cash in hand and the nerve to use it.
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He didn't predict the 2008 crash.
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He was simply ready for it.
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What's different now is the size of the war chest.
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In 2008, he worked with tens of billions.
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By early 2026, the pile had grown to roughly $400 billion and he stacked it on purpose, at the very top of a roaring bull market.
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He didn't scramble it together mid-crisis.
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He was stockpiling cash while everyone else was spending it.
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And then he handed Greg Abel a loaded weapon and one order, wait.
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And the handoff itself is part of the message.
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A man who truly believed the good times would roll forever doesn't step down.
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He doesn't spend his last act as a boss turning everything into cash.
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He invests.
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But Buffett wanted to protect Berkshire Hathaway and give it a solid foundation.
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He wanted it to be standing no matter who held the keys when the bad times arrived.
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That is the cold, ruthless genius of it.
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Everyone else sees a man sitting out the fun.
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What he actually built was simpler and scarier.
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He built it quarter after quarter while everyone else joined the party.
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Now Buffett is waiting for the music to stop.
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So what is it that Warren Buffett does differently that makes him so successful?
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Find out in This Is How Warren Buffett Made $85 Billion.
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Or click on this.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “Warren Buffett Is Selling NOW. The $397 Billion COLLAPSE”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: Buffett, billion, stock, bank, cash. This video has 283 sentences and 3238 words to shadow. The speech runs for 18:11. The speaker talks at a natural 178 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. Only 81% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| pile noun | /paɪl/ | A mass of things heaped together; a heap. |
| recession noun | /ɹɪˈsɛʃn̩/ | The act or an instance of receding or withdrawing. |
| investor noun | /ɪnˈvɛs.tə(ɹ)/ | A person who invests money in order to make a profit. |
| curve noun | /kɚv/ | A bend, such as in a road. |
| inversion noun | /ɪnˈvɚ.ʒən/ | The action of inverting. |
| depositor noun | A person who makes a deposit, especially a deposit of money in a bank. | |
| lifeline noun | /ˈlaɪfˌlaɪn/ | A line to which a drowning or falling victim may cling. |
| rumble noun | /ˈɹʌmb(ə)l/ | A low, heavy, continuous sound, such as that of thunder or a hungry stomach. |
| unwind verb | /ʌnˈwaɪnd/ | To separate (something that is wound up) |
| maturity noun | /məˈtjʊəɹɪti/ | The state of being mature, ready or ripe; the prime state of productibility and self expression. |
| bury verb | /ˈbɛɹi/ | To outlive. |
| indicator noun | /ˈɪn.dɪˌkeɪ.tə(ɹ)/ | A pointer or index that indicates something. |
| wipe verb | /waɪp/ | To move an object over, maintaining contact, with the intention of removing some substance from the surface. (Compare rub.) |
| hype noun | /haɪp/ | Promotion or propaganda, especially exaggerated claims. |
| predict verb | /pɹɪˈdɪkt/ | To make a prediction: to forecast, foretell, or estimate a future event on the basis of knowledge and reasoning; to prophesy a future event on the basis of… |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| show up verb | To appear, arrive, or attend, especially suddenly or erratically. |
| come back verb | To return to a place. |
| step down verb | To resign or retire from an office or position of authority. |
| walk away verb | To withdraw from a problematic situation. |
| build up verb | To erect; to construct. |
| burn through verb | To use up in a hasty or destructive manner. |
| caught up verb | Involuntarily involved in a situation. |
| come up with verb | To manage to produce, deliver, or present (something) by inventing, creating, thinking of, or obtaining it. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has always been · has said · have made |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | was set · was already built · being valued |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | anyone who would · rate, which has · someone who thought |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 32 contractions and reduced forms, such as didn't, doesn't, isn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: theoretical /ˌθi.əˈɹɛt.ɪ.kəl/, underneath /ˌʌndɚˈniθ/, earthquake /ˈɝθkweɪk/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: recession /ɹɪˈsɛʃn̩/, inversion /ɪnˈvɚ.ʒən/, prediction /pɹɪˈdɪkʃən/, speculation /ˌspɛk.jəˈleɪ.ʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: maturity /məˈtjʊəɹɪti/, indicator /ˈɪn.dɪˌkeɪ.tə(ɹ)/, portfolio /pɔːtˈfəʊ.liˌəʊ/, economist /iˈkɑ.nə.mɪst/, supposedly /səˈpoʊ̯.zɪd.li/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like pile, recession, investor.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.