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Buffett has $9B to burn
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September 17, 1998: 9:17 a.m. ET
Billionaire investor Warren Buffett is waiting for the market to hit bottom
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - Berkshire Hathaway, the publicly held investment vehicle owned by billionaire Warren Buffett, has $9 billion to burn.
Stock market mogul, Buffett, told shareholders Wednesday the cash position is the largest the company has ever held on a dollar basis, according to the Wall Street Journal. He also reportedly stated that recent stock market declines have not been "dramatic," adding that if the market continues to slide, exposing bottom basement stock prices, "you can be pretty sure that we won't have $9 billion in cash when we meet next year."
During the annual shareholders meeting, Buffett declined to discuss the state of the stock market, but his admission that Berkshire is sitting on a large sum of cash suggests he believes the market has not yet bottomed out.
Indeed, Buffet gave a brief interview Tuesday to the Omaha World-Herald in which he said stocks still aren't all that cheap. "There's more value there than when the Dow was 1,500 points higher, but it's not at any screaming bargain level," he said.
Berkshire's investment holdings got a shot in the arm last month when Buffett dumped all the company's U.S. government long-term zero-coupon bonds.
The move triggered a 323 percent surge in second-quarter earnings for Berkshire Hathaway, driven primarily by after-tax investment gains of $864 million in the second-quarter and $1.3 billion in the first half from the bond sale.
From 1967 to 1997, Buffett has realized average annual returns of 25.6 percent on his investments, which are weighted heavily in favor of big capitalization stocks. At the end of 1997, Buffett had $4.6 billion in zero coupon bonds. 
--from staff and wire reports
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Berkshire Hathaway
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