Berkshire Spends $9.6bn on Buybacks as Operating Profit Falls

Berkshire Hathaway earned $12,705m of operating profit in the third quarter of 2026, down 5.8 per cent from $13,485m a year earlier, according to the news release the company published on 7 November 2026. Over the same three months it spent about $9.6 billion buying its own shares, the largest quarterly repurchase of the year, and finished September reporting $377.4 billion in cash and United States Treasury bills.

The decline came almost entirely from insurance. Underwriting profit fell to $1,352m from $2,369m, a drop of 42.9 per cent, and insurance investment income fell 14.1 per cent to $2,734m. Everything Berkshire owns outside insurance grew. Across the first nine months of the year operating earnings are still up 8.0 per cent at $37,034m.

What the $377bn actually contains

The consolidated balance sheet in the quarterly report posted the same day splits that figure three ways: $36,034m of cash at the insurance and other businesses, $336,735m of short-term investments in US Treasury bills, and $4,666m of cash at the railroad, utilities and energy group. A footnote on the same page records that the Treasury bill line includes $20.5 billion of unsettled purchases at 30 September 2026, bills the company had agreed to buy but had not yet paid for. The matching obligation sits a page later as a $20,489m payable, and the filing says the amounts were paid shortly after the balance sheet date.

That detail reverses the direction of the number. At the end of December 2025 the same three lines totalled $373.3 billion against only $167m of unsettled purchases. Measured as reported, Berkshire's cash and bills rose about $4.1 billion over nine months. Measured net of bills bought but not yet settled, they fell about $16.2 billion. The honest reading is that Greg Abel has been spending, and that the cash mountain routinely quoted as evidence of caution is flattered by where the settlement dates happened to fall.

The timing gives the quarter its context. As Parallax Nexus reported on 6 November, the Philadelphia semiconductor index had just fallen 12 per cent in a single session, its second-largest one-day drop on record, and the Federal Open Market Committee had held rates at 3.75 to 4 per cent on 28 October with two members dissenting in favour of a rise. Berkshire was buying its own stock into that.

The money that did move

Treasury stock at cost rose to $93,348m from $78,939m over the nine months, a $14.4 billion increase matching the repurchase total in the press release. Berkshire had 1,418,900 Class A equivalent shares outstanding on 30 September 2026, against an average of 1,426,372 during the quarter. Insurance float, the money the group holds between collecting premiums and paying claims, was about $178.5 billion, up roughly $2.1 billion since the end of 2025.

Net earnings fell much further, to $22,112m from $30,796m, a drop of 28.2 per cent. That line is close to meaningless as a measure of the quarter, because accounting rules push unrealised swings in the equity portfolio through the income statement. Berkshire says so itself, in bold type, in the release.

What the filing does not show is where most of the money went. The release names no acquisition, and $9.6 billion of buybacks accounts for well under half of the nine-month fall in settled cash, leaving the balance in equity purchases and operating uses that the quarterly disclosure does not itemise. The case against reading this as a change of strategy is straightforward: $356.9 billion of settled cash and bills is still more than the entire $335,515m equity portfolio it sits alongside, and a company with that much idle money has not run out of caution.