Cindy Gordon

Warren Buffett just warned that the US dollar could collapse and admitted he doesn't understand most of the stock market anymore. 95 years old, sitting on $380 billion in cash, and the first time watching from the sidelines instead of actively investing. And what he revealed at this weekend's Berkshire shareholder meeting is genuinely concerning: On the market, Buffett didn't hold back. He compared it to "a church with a casino attached" and said the casino has never been more packed. On one-day options: "That is not investing. It's not speculating. It's gambling. Totally." He pointed to the Avis short squeeze THIS WEEK. A rental car company that's been around for 50 years getting meme-squeezed in 2026. The same behavior that blew up retail traders with GameStop is back, except now it's hitting boring legacy companies with zero business being volatile. "We have lots more regulation now, but people spend their time figuring out how to get around the rules rather than follow the rules." That one sentence explains more about the current market than every CNBC segment combined. When asked why he's hoarding $380 billion instead of investing it, Buffett said something no one expected: "I understand fewer of the businesses as a percentage of the whole than I did 10 years ago. I have not learned new industries for some years. I'm not going to have an edge on a whole bunch of younger people that have actually grown up with it." Think about what he's actually saying... This is a man who made $140 billion by understanding businesses better than anyone alive. And he's telling you the current market is so detached from reality that even HE can't make sense of what's being valued and why. He quoted IBM's Tom Watson Sr.: "I'm smart in spots and I stay around those spots." In 60 years of managing money, he said MAYBE five were "really juicy." Five out of sixty. That means 92% of his career was spent WAITING while everyone else gambled. And he still ended up richer than all of them. Then the conversation turned to inflation and that's where it gets really interesting: Buffett said America is "not immune" from runaway inflation. He brought up countries that went bankrupt "six or seven times" in his lifetime. Compared today to right before Volcker had to rescue the dollar, when Americans were borrowing at 12% to buy farmland earning 6% because they believed the dollar would disappear. "Cash is trash" was the mentality. Nebraska farmers collapsed because of it. Entire communities wiped out not by a recession but by a BELIEF that the currency was dying. And Buffett sees that same energy building again. Then someone asked the question everyone wanted answered: Do you see a crash coming? "If you saw it coming, it wouldn't happen. The things people are talking about and thinking about? It's not going to happen. But there are things that can come out of the blue." He compared it to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 that triggered World War I. Nobody was discussing or anticipating it. But it changed the world overnight. "That's particularly true now because of the things that can come out of the sky." A 95yo man who has survived every crash, every war, every crisis of the last six decades just told you the market is a casino, the dollar isn't safe, and the real collapse will be something nobody sees coming. $380 billion in cash is his answer because he believes things are about to get much worse.

US troops in Germany aren't there to protect Germans. They're there because without German bases, America's reach across Europe, Africa and the Middle East collapses. Ramstein is the largest American air base outside the US. Stuttgart hosts EUCOM and AFRICOM, the commands running US military activity across Europe and Africa. Landstuhl is where wounded American soldiers from Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria were flown for treatment. Drone operations in Somalia are coordinated through German soil. Withdraw them and you don't weaken Berlin, you blind Washington. It's insane most Americans, including Trump, still think they're doing Germany a favour.