Warren Buffett acknowledges that this morning's June jobs report is disappointing, but he's sticking with the economic optimism we heard in yesterday's CNBC live interview.
While some are saying the economy may be heading back to a recession,Buffett tells Bloombergthis morning, "I would bet very heavily against that. How fast the recovery will come, I don't know. I see nothing that indicates any kind of a double dip."
Even so, he says President Obama can't be happy with this morning's reportfrom the Labor Department that payrolls increased by just 18,000 in June as the unemployment rate increased to 9.2 percent.
"It means that we're still a ways off from getting to where we should be. We're seeing growth around the world, but it's not mushrooming."
Buffett repeated his belief that once the residential construction rebounds, "We will come back big time on employment."
He's predicting a decline to an unemployment rate of 6 percent "within a few years."
Buffett also told Bloomberg that Berkshire has bought about $4 billion of common stocks since February. That would seem to account for at least part of the holdings that Berkshire kept confidential when it filed its Q1 portfolio statementwith the SEC.
That mid-May filing did list a new MasterCard stake as of March 31, worth about $68 million at today's close.
In today's interview, Buffett said new portfolio manager Todd Combs had bought "just two stocks so far," and implied one of them was MasterCard.
Here's the entire Bloomberg interview:
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