Buffet made 10% return on investment and his company now holds $43 billion in cash, much of it invested in foreign currencies.

ABC News online briefly mentions worries about trade and ignored the sharecropper quote altogether. Berkshire owned about $21.4 billion in foreign currency spread among a dozen countries at the end of the year. Buffet said this hedge against the U.S. dollar does not mean he is unpatriotic, but he voiced a warning about the nation's growing trade and fiscal deficits. Voiced a warning? Memo to ABC: "sharecropper society" is a wee bit stronger than that.