 Buffett: Deficit concern led him to put his money where his mouth was |
Warren Buffett, the billionaire investment guru, has predicted the dollar will continue to weaken and said he has for the first time been buying foreign currencies. "Through the spring of 2002, I had lived nearly 72 years without purchasing a foreign currency," he was quoted by Fortune magazine as saying.
Since then, his investment group Berkshire Hathaway has made "significant investments" in, and still holds, several currencies, he said.
"To hold other currencies is to believe that the dollar will decline."
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Mr Buffett, who in the 1990s famously preferred investing in "bricks-and-mortar" companies to the booming dot.coms, said he was hedging against the dollar because he was worried about the size of the US trade deficit. He said the deficit had "greatly worsened, to the point that our country's 'net worth' so to speak, is now being transferred abroad at an alarming rate".
If this continued it would lead to "major trouble", Mr Buffett said.
He did not say which foreign currencies he now held.
In recent months, Mr Buffett has criticised the Bush administration's tax cuts as a gift to the rich and agreed to join the team of California governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger as economic adviser.
One-Minute World News 
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