James Cullen: Is Buffett Buying American Express (AXP)?

Via the CollegeAnalysts.com, James Cullen ponders is Warren Buffett Buying more American Express (NYSE:AXP) shares?

Last Friday, Warren Buffett was on CNBC for several hours in the morning answering questions on all sorts of topics with his usual reserved wisdom. If only I could get Warren to speak with me for three hours…

One of the big revelations was that Buffett has been adding to either Wells Fargo (WFC) or American Express (AXP) – both extremely large positions in the Berkshire Hathaway (BRK) portfolio.

Earlier in the program, Buffett noted the macro slowdown had spread across demographics to impact even high-end consumers, as evidenced by the things American Express has been saying:

Well, it – obviously, I pay a lot of attention to what’s happening. And we’ll say at American Express – and Ken Chenault talked about that here a month ago – but they are experiencing credit deterioration and they’re experiencing it sort of in all segments. So they’re seeing the rich customers slow down in payments, slow down in purchases. And American Express can describe that rather than I, but I pay a lot of attention to that sort of thing. And incidentally, it will get cured at some time in the future, but right now the situation is getting worse and I would say that I don’t see any early end to that.

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FYI - On August 14th, Jon Ogg at 247WallSt.com wrote the following:

So far there are some changes seen in the holdings of Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE: BRK-A).  We have consolidated these into groups and this group is from A to G, and this is for the quarter ended on June 30, 2008:

• American Express Co. (NYSE: AXP) over 151.6 million shares.       
• Anheuser Busch Cos. Inc. (NYSE: BUD) taken to under 15 million shares from over 35 million shares on last report
• Bank of America Corp. (NYSE: BAC) 9.1 million shares         
• Burlington Northern Santa Fe  (NYSE: BNI) 63,785,418 shares
• Carmax Inc. (NYSE: KMX) 21.3 million shares
• Coca Cola (NYSE: KO) roughly 200 million shares
• Comcast (NASDAQ: CMCSA) 12 million shares
• Comdisco Holdings (CDCO) over 1.5 million shares
• Costco Wholesale (NASDAQ: COST) 5.254 million shares
• Gannett Co. (NYSE: GCI) 3.447 million shares
• General Electric Corp. (NYSE: GE) 7.777 million shares
• GlaxoSmithkline (NYSE: GSK) 1.51 million shares