All Blog Posts from Econwatch

Billionaire investment guru Warren Buffett says the U.S. economy is "now out of the emergency room and appears to be on a slow path to recovery" but the massive federal spending to stave off financial collapse has left the country in "uncharted fiscal territory."

Buffett, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece that while he supports the government stimulus plan, the country must be on guard against "greenback emissions" – the residual effects of increasing debt that could plague the nation down the road.

Buffett writes that "enormous dosages of monetary medicine continue to be administered and, before long, we will need to deal with their side effects. For now, most of those effects are invisible and could indeed remain latent for a long time. Still, their threat may be as ominous as that posed by the financial crisis itself."

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As folks in Washington and the rest of the country grumble about the depressed job market and underwhelming consumer spending reports, the calls for a second stimulus continue.

"I think that a second one may well be called for," Warren Buffett , the widely respected investor, said Thursday morning on ABC's "Good Morning America."

"Our first stimulus bill... was sort of like taking half a tablet of Viagra and having also a bunch of candy mixed in," he said, "as if everybody was putting in enough for their own constituents."

Indeed, new reports show the money from President Obama's $787 billion economic stimulus package is potentially being doled out unevenly. An analysis from the New York Times shows rural areas are receiving a disproportionate amount of funds for transportation projects.

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Not even the legendary investor and Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett, can give U.S. investors confidence in the market. In fact, according to Buffett, only Barack Obama can handle that chore, and so far neither of them has been able to move the needle.

Speaking on CNBC today, Buffet said, "What is required is a commander in chief that is looked at as being the commander in chief in a time of war and the support that generally he needs and other things that have to be given up. When we get all this solved and go back to yelling at each other, you know, and putting in pet projects and doing all that sort of thing.

"But for the time being we should put that, as much as we can, aside and then frankly, nobody but the president now will be believable to the American people. I mean, you can't--people have heard--they don't--names like Paulson, Geithner, Bernanke, those--that's just a muddle to them.

"The only authoritative voice in the United States who says, 'This is what we're going to do, this is what we're not going to do,' and very specifically, is the president of the United States."

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