Warren Buffett Offers To Buy Entire United States For $12.2 Trillion In Cash, Stock

Famed investor Warren Buffett today offered to buy the United States in its entirety from the federal government for $12.2 trillion in cash and Berkshire Hathaway Class B stock.

“This is probably the best way to solve the banking crisis, the real estate crisis, the crisis with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a bunch of other crises, too,” Buffett told a hastily assembled Omaha, Nebraska news conference. “The American government needs a lot of cash, and cash is something I’ve got a lot of.”

Buffett pointed to his long term investments in See’s Candies, the Washington Post, and NetJets, a fractional jet ownership company, as evidence of his “buy and hold forever” strategy.

“My primary investment criterion is finding undervalued, perhaps poorly managed assets likely to perform well over the long haul,” Buffett told reporters. “The United States of America fits that to a tee.”

Buffett said that if his offer were accepted, he would institute “a sweeping review of management practices, as I would with any other investment I make. Congress, banking regulators, and the White House would probably be fired or sold off. I don’t think anyone thinks they’ve done a very good job.”

Buffett added that voting would now be limited to “Berkshire-Hathaway stockholders, at our annual meeting here in Omaha,” but that they were “likely to do a much better job of running the country than our elected officials have. I mean, I don’t see Charlie Munger and myself attacking Iraq or giving home loans to people without proof of income.”

The United States was “a fundamentally good country,” Buffett said, “but with lousy leadership and too many layers of bureaucracy. If I have the opportunity to buy the country, I’ll sell off Washington to the Disney people, and they can turn it into a theme park or something about democracy.

“We’ll have this country running great in no time flat,” Buffett said. “And besides, if the government doesn’t sell itself to me, it can always sell itself to China. That’s what it seems to be doing, anyway.”