Warren Buffett discusses Wall Street's speculative frenzy: the current market is like a church with an attached casino, or it could lead to asset prices remaining high for a long time

Mars Finance news: according to a report by Glonghui, during an interview with CNBC, Buffett responded to the question of why “Berkshire currently holds a massive pile of cash of approximately $380 billion, yet the market is highly focused on why it has not carried out large-scale mergers or investments for so long.” His response was: “Prices are too high, and there are too few deals.”

Buffett said, “As for deploying cash for Berkshire, this is not an environment that we would consider ideal.” He emphasized that the company has the right management team and can be selective in choosing opportunities: “Sometimes we do nothing, but sometimes we are very active.”

When discussing the current macro stock market environment, Buffett used the metaphor of a “church with a casino attached” to describe the speculative atmosphere on Wall Street. People can move back and forth between the church and the casino; there are still more people in the church than in the casino, but the casino has already become extremely attractive to people.

He pointed out: “If you buy and sell one-day stock options, that is not investing, and it is not speculation—it is outright gambling.” Referring to a recent case in which U.S. soldiers used confidential information from Venezuela military operation details and profited $400,000 in the prediction market, he said: “Unless you can know, like that person, when we will move into Venezuela, no one can explain why they buy one-day options. The number of such cases is astonishing.”

“We have never encountered a group of people more driven by a gambling mindset than the crowd today.” Buffett added that the surge in gambling enthusiasm does not necessarily mean the market will collapse, but it will cause a large amount of assets’ prices to remain at high levels for a long time.