Warren Buffett has spent nearly 60 years at the helm of Berkshire Hathaway, shaping markets, moving capital, and delivering the kind of steady, deadpan commentary investors treat as its own economic indicator.
Even as he prepares to step back from daily leadership after decades in charge, he has no intention of disappearing. Earlier this month he said he plans to "go quiet," but he also made it clear he'll keep writing his annual Thanksgiving letter. For a man who prefers substance over spectacle, it was a fitting promise.
With Thanksgiving approaching, one of his sharpest lines has resurfaced, reminding Americans just how close the country came to a very different holiday table.
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In a 2010 CNBC interview reflecting on the financial crisis, Buffett said, "That week around Lehman, if government hadn't acted then I'd be having my Thanksgiving dinner at McDonald's instead of a big turkey dinner at my daughter's." It was a joke, but the point behind it wasn't.
The crisis he was referring to was the most dangerous financial rupture in modern U.S. history. The collapse of Lehman Brothers, one of Wall Street's largest and most interconnected investment banks, in September 2008 set off a chain reaction that moved at unimaginable speed. Liquidity vanished almost overnight.
Commercial banks were teetering. AIG, the world's biggest insurer at the time, was "at death's door." Many of the country's biggest corporations relied on short-term financing that suddenly didn't exist. Some were only weeks away from running out of cash. The U.S. financial system wasn't just under pressure — it was buckling.
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Two years later, Buffett tried to capture the scale of that moment in his "Dear Uncle Sam" letter published in The New York Times. He opened with his trademark understatement: "My mother told me to send thank-you notes promptly. I've been remiss."
What followed was one of the clearest firsthand accounts of the crisis from someone who had a front-row seat. He wrote that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had been pushed into conservatorship, several major commercial banks were on the brink, a giant Wall Street investment bank had already fallen, and AIG was collapsing. Many large industrial companies, unable to tap commercial paper markets that had evaporated, were weeks from exhausting their cash.
He described it bluntly: "All of corporate America's dominoes were lined up, ready to topple at lightning speed," adding that Berkshire Hathaway "might have been the last to fall," but that offered no comfort. And it wasn't only corporate America in danger. "300 million Americans were in the domino line as well," he wrote, noting that jobs, income, 401(k)s, and money-market funds that seemed steady days earlier had turned fragile overnight. "A destructive economic force unlike any seen for generations had been unleashed," and there was no hiding from it.
He made one point clear above all others: only the federal government had the power to slow the collapse. Buffett acknowledged its flaws — "Often you are wasteful, and sometimes you are bullying. On occasion you are downright maddening" — but in those days, speed mattered more than perfection. The government stepped in, deployed emergency measures, restored liquidity, and stabilized markets before the dominos could fall.
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His CNBC remarks echoed that same reality. The U.S. economy was still facing slow growth and elevated unemployment in 2010, but he said the outcome would have been far worse without swift intervention. Quantitative easing, deficits, tax debates — those were ongoing issues. The urgent point was that policymakers had acted when hesitation would have been catastrophic.
That's what gives his Thanksgiving line its punch. It wasn't a dramatic flourish. It was Buffett's way of reminding Americans that the economy they rely on every day runs on confidence, speed, and decisions made in moments that most people never see. If Washington had frozen during the darkest week of 2008, he believed the damage would have reached every household in the country — including his own.
Fifteen years later, with Buffett preparing to hand off leadership but still weighing in with the dry humor that made him a folk hero of finance, the message sits comfortably alongside the turkey and stuffing: the system holds only when someone steps in at the right time. And as he saw it, the right time was that week around Lehman — when a McDonald's Thanksgiving was closer than anyone realized.
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