On Saturday, May 2nd 2026, Warren Buffett sat in the audience at Berkshire Hathaway's annual meeting in Omaha. For the first time in sixty years, he wasn't on the stage. He's 95. He's now chairman, not CEO. And in front of the world's financial press, he said three things worth writing down.
One: the US stock market is “a church with a casino attached,” and the casino is winning. Two: the United States is “not immune” from runaway inflation. Three: Berkshire is sitting on a record $397.4 billion in cash and Treasuries — the largest corporate cash hoard in American history — and not deploying it.
That last number is the one that should make you pause. The greatest capital allocator of the modern era, with the best deal flow on the planet and sixty years of pattern recognition, is choosing to do nothing. He didn't say markets will crash. He said something more uncomfortable: he doesn't see anything worth buying.
Read that again. Then look at the table below.
A century of annualised returns, by decade
| Decade | Stocks | Cash | Bonds | Real Estate | Gold | Inflation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1930s | -0.9% | 1.0% | 4.0% | -1.2% | 5.3% | -2.0% |
| 1940s | 8.5% | 0.5% | 2.5% | 8.1% | -0.8% | 5.4% |
| 1950s | 19.5% | 2.0% | 0.8% | 3.0% | 1.0% | 2.2% |
| 1960s | 7.7% | 4.0% | 2.4% | 2.2% | 1.6% | 2.5% |
| 1970s | 5.9% | 6.3% | 5.4% | 8.7% | 28.6% | 7.4% |
| 1980s | 17.3% | 8.8% | 12.0% | 5.9% | -2.5% | 5.1% |
| 1990s | 18.0% | 4.8% | 7.4% | 2.7% | -3.1% | 2.9% |
| 2000s | -1.0% | 2.7% | 6.3% | 4.0% | 14.1% | 2.6% |
| 2010s | 13.4% | 0.6% | 4.1% | 3.8% | 3.4% | 1.8% |
| 2020s | 11.9% | 1.9% | -2.4% | 10.2% | 8.0% | 4.5% |
| Average | 10.3% | 3.3% | 4.3% | 4.7% | 5.6% | 3.2% |
Read the columns honestly. Stocks lead the long-run average. Nobody is disputing that. The interesting columns are the ones nobody puts on a billboard.
Gold averages 5.6% annualised over nine decades — a yellow rock that earns no dividends, runs no factories, and answers to no quarterly call. It quietly outperformed real estate, bonds, and cash. It was the best-performing asset of two complete decades — the 1970s (28.6%) and the 2000s (14.1%). It is currently delivering 8% annualised in the 2020s while bonds are losing money.
Real estate — the asset class everyone has heard about at a dinner party — averages 4.7%. Lower than gold. And in the 2020s, it is the second-best performing asset on the table.
Bonds, the supposed safe harbour, are running at -2.4% in the current decade. Cash, sitting in a deposit account, is delivering 1.9% against 4.5% inflation. It's losing.
The pattern that matters is not “stocks always win.” It’s that the asset which leads each decade keeps changing, and the two decades when stocks went sideways or backwards (the 1930s and the 2000s) were the two decades when tangible assets quietly carried the portfolio home.
A footnote about 1971, that explains everything that happened next
The 1970s row in that table — gold at 28.6% annualised — looks like an outlier. It isn't. It's the most important data point in the whole graphic, because of what happened the year before the decade started.
For most of the post-war period, gold was not really a market. It was a fixed price. Under the Bretton Woods system, the United States dollar was pegged to gold at $35 per ounce. Every other major currency was pegged to the dollar. Gold didn't move; the dollar simply was gold, by international agreement, and had been since 1944.
Then on August 15th, 1971, Richard Nixon went on television and ended dollar convertibility into gold. He called it temporary. It was permanent. The “gold window” never reopened.
What happened next is the most important monetary chart of the modern era:
From $35 in 1971, to over $800 by 1980, past $3,000 in 2025, to above $4,500 in April 2026. Roughly fifty-five years, against the same dollar. Or, viewed from the other side of the trade, the dollar has lost more than 98% of its purchasing power against gold since the year the link was severed.
This matters because the assumption everyone makes — that cash is safe and gold is risky — is a recent invention. For most of recorded human history, gold was the savings account and paper was the speculation. The fifty-five years since 1971 are the experiment, not the rule. And the experiment is now visibly creaking under the weight of $39 trillion of US debt, persistent deficits, and a 95-year-old Warren Buffett warning that runaway inflation here is “not impossible.”
What Buffett actually said
The full quote, from Berkshire's 2026 annual meeting:
Notice the phrase he reaches for: the dollar was going to disappear and the land wouldn't disappear.
That is the entire thesis for tangible assets in one sentence, from a man who has been investing for eighty years.
The land doesn't disappear. The painting doesn't disappear. The watch doesn't disappear. The bar of gold doesn't disappear. The dollar in your account is a promise, ultimately backed by a government balance sheet. Tangible assets are not a promise. They are the thing itself.
The four things tangible assets actually do for you
This is not a hard sell. It's a simple list of jobs, with realistic expectations attached.
They survive currency events
When Weimar Germany printed itself into oblivion in 1923, the people who held farmland, art, and gold ended up with farmland, art, and gold. The people who held Papiermarks ended up using them as wallpaper. Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Argentina, Lebanon — the same lesson, in colour, repeatedly. You don't insure your house against fires you expect. You insure it against fires you don't.
They are uncorrelated to your equities
Look at the 2000s row again. Stocks: -1.0% annualised over ten years. Gold: 14.1%. The whole reason a portfolio works is that not everything moves together. If your pension, your business, and your stock portfolio are all denominated in the same currency and exposed to the same financial system, you are not diversified. You have one bet, dressed up in three outfits.
They transmit between generations differently
A Patek Philippe, a piece of land, a sculpture, or an allocation of physical gold can be moved across borders, held outside the banking system, and passed to children without an intermediary deciding whether the wire goes through. For estate planning purposes — particularly in the UK, with its 40% inheritance tax and increasingly aggressive Treasury — tangible assets that qualify under specific reliefs (agricultural property, business property, certain art under conditional exemption) are quite literally the difference between leaving 60p of every pound versus 100p of every pound to the next generation. A house can be taxed. A relationship with a thing your grandchild loves cannot.
They are stores of meaning, not just value
This is the one no spreadsheet can capture. The painting on the wall has a return profile, but it also has a daily dividend you can see. The watch on the wrist marks time and tells a story. The piece of land has cycles, seasons, and presence. People who hold tangible assets tend to think in decades, not quarters — and that long-horizon temperament is itself one of the most valuable financial assets a person can develop.
What the table is really saying
If you take the 90-year average row at the bottom of that grid and rank it honestly:
- 01Stocks10.3%
- 02Gold5.6%
- 03Real Estate4.7%
- 04Bonds4.3%
- 05Cash3.3%
- 06Inflation3.2%
Stocks deserve their place. Nobody is arguing otherwise. But the widely-held belief that you should be 100% in equities and treat tangible assets as eccentric is not what the data says. The data says tangible assets, taken together, beat bonds and cash over almost any period you choose, and were the only thing standing between long-term wealth preservation and ruin during the two worst decades for stocks in the past century.
Buffett has chosen cash because he is patient, not because he is bullish on the dollar. His own words this weekend make that clear. The cash is optionality — dry powder for the moment when, in his phrase, “they don’t answer the phones.” Most people don’t have $397 billion of optionality. What they have is a portfolio, a pension, a house, and a finite working life.
The question worth asking, calmly, is not “should I sell my stocks?” The question is:
If the man who has been the greatest defender of American equities for sixty years is sitting in cash and warning that the dollar is not immune, do I really have nothing in tangible assets at all?
For most people reading this, the honest answer is some version of “my house, and not much else.” That is a single asset, denominated in the local currency, leveraged with a mortgage, and physically immobile. It is a fine thing to own. It is not, on its own, a portfolio.
The closing thought
Gold was fixed at $35 in 1944 and stayed there for twenty-seven years. In the fifty-five years since the peg broke, it has done something the dollar simply could not do: it preserved purchasing power without anyone's permission.
That isn't an argument for selling everything and buying gold bars. It's an argument for the boring, unfashionable, unglamorous idea that a portion of serious wealth has, throughout human history, been held in things you can touch. Land. Metal. Art. Watches. Wine. Things that don't disappear when the institution holding them does.
Buffett, sitting on his cash, is making a version of that bet in his own way. The NYU table, read column by column, has been making the same point quietly for a hundred years. And the gold price, every time you check it, is the receipt.
The fire is not certain. But the insurance is cheap, and the house is where everything you love lives.