Investing legend Warren Buffett is issuing a warning, saying that the fiscal situation in the US is inching closer to a point of no return.
At Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting – where Buffett announced his retirement – the Oracle of Omaha warned that the US government’s fiscal deficit can spiral out of control if policymakers fail to close the gap between revenue and expenditures.
-->Data from the Treasury Department shows that the US has spent $1.31 trillion more than it collected so far this fiscal year, which runs from October 1st, 2024, to September 30th, 2025. The figure marks a $242 billion increase compared to the deficit recorded during the same period last fiscal year.
According to Buffett, the US government cannot continue running large fiscal deficits indefinitely, warning that the country’s fiscal situation could become unsustainable and dire as early as 2027.
“We’re operating at a fiscal deficit now that is unsustainable over a very long period of time. We don’t know if that means two years or 20 years because there’s never been a country like the United States…
And it has the aspect to it that it gets uncontrollable to a certain point that essentially you just give up on it. Paul Volcker kept that from happening in the United States, but we came close. We’ve come close multiple times, and we still have very substantial inflation in the United States, but it has never been runaway yet. And that’s not something we want to try and experiment with because it feeds on itself.
I wouldn’t want the job of trying to correct what’s going on in revenue and the expenditures of the United States with roughly a 7 gap, when probably a 3 gap is sustainable, and then the further away you get from that, the more you get to where the uncontrollable begins.
I think that it’s a job I don’t want, but it’s a job I think should be done, and Congress does not seem good at doing it.”
