The cash pile is bigger (a long term trend) and also bigger than usual as a fraction of investments (somewhat anomalously so).

But a much less noticed trend has been the reduction of leverage. Berkshire is not a heavily leveraged firm, but they do have a bit of gearing. It looks higher if you include the non-recourse debt inside the utilities and rails as I do in this post.

As the cash has stacked up in recent years, besides T-bills one of the destinations has been retiring debt [as a proportion of the firm, not in absolute terms]. For example, Berkshire's nominal total shareholders' equity has risen at 10.9%/year in the last 8 years. The "gearing" debt (gap between that equity and total assets) has risen at only 6.00%/year: the debt wedge has been gradually shrinking as a result.

Picking a rather arbitrary past stretch as a leverage baseline, for period ends between 2013-Q2 and end 2018-Q4, total consolidated assets averaged 2.160 times equity. This quarter it is down to 1.843.

Phrased another way, Berkshire would have to borrow another $132.9 billion to be back to the leverage level that was normal a few years back. I think they would be happy to do so (and could easily do so) if they thought there was a good investment opportunity available. So for elephant hunting purposes the buying power isn't something like "the cash minus $80bn" or whatever. I think it is maybe $130bn more than that.

Jim