Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s Warren Buffett usually laments that his company has more cash than investment opportunities. Now he’s envisioning an acquisition so big that he’d have to sell some stocks to free up funds.

“I would hope something would come along where I would have to sell something that I like to buy something huge I like even better,” Mr. Buffett, Berkshire’s billionaire chairman, told reporters at a press conference today in Omaha, Neb.

Mr. Buffett, 76, built Berkshire over four decades, buying out-of-favor stocks and companies to transform it from a failing textile maker to a $168 billion holding company in industries as diverse as insurance, ice cream, and electricity.

The firm, which has about $46 billion in cash, is as prepared as it’s “ever been” to buy a “big business outright,” he told shareholders at the company ‘s annual meeting yesterday.

“He’s shouting from the rooftops: ‘Bring me enormous deals. There’s no deal that’s too large for us to look at,'” a managing partner at New York-based T2 Partners LLC, which owns $30 million in Berkshire shares and options, Whitney Tilson, said. “Let’s say a $40 billion acquisition came along, he might need to raise $10 billion of additional cash.”

Mr. Buffett invests premiums from subsidiaries such as Geico Corp., the fourth-largest American car insurer, until claims need to be paid. Last year Berkshire’s MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co. bought PacifiCorp from Scottish Power Plc for $5.1 billion in the firm’s biggest deal since the 1998 acquisition of reinsurer General Re Corp. for $17.6 billion. Berkshire also bought its first non-American company, paying $4 billion for 80% of closely held Israeli toolmaker Iscar Metalworking Cos. in July.

“We’ve got plenty of things to sell if we needed to,” Mr. Buffett said, having asked overseas investors for recommendations following a shareholder meeting that drew about 27,000 people to Omaha’s Qwest Center Saturday. “So far the cash is coming in faster than the ideas.”

In response to a question from a South African journalist, Mr. Buffett said, “I must have told 30 of the South Africans alone to call me collect if they find anything that fits.” One of the recommendations makes a “fair amount of sense,” he said, calling all of them “long shots.”

Berkshire’s stock portfolio, $61 billion as of yearend, includes equities such as Coca-Cola Co., American Express Co., and Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp. Mr. Buffett, who first disclosed an 11% stake in Burlington Northern last month, said Saturday higher fuel prices have made railroads more competitive against the trucking industry.

“As oil prices go up, higher diesel fuel raises costs for rails, but it raises costs for its competitors — truckers — roughly by a factor of four,” he said.

One investment Mr. Buffett had to defend was Berkshire’s $3.3 billion stake in PetroChina Co. China National Petroleum Corp., owned by the Chinese government, holds a controlling stake in PetroChina as well as oil reserves and pipelines in Africa’s Sudan. Leaders in Sudan have been accused of supporting genocide in the western region of Darfur.

“We have no disagreement with what PetroChina is doing,” Mr. Buffett told shareholders after announcing that a resolution calling for Berkshire to sell its PetroChina shares was voted down by a margin of 53-to-1. “If there was a disagreement, it would be with what the Chinese government is doing.”

Berkshire’s own shares are up about 3,600% since 1987, six times more than the New York Stock Exchange Composite Index, which measures the performance of all the companies listed on the Big Board. They rose $650, or 0.6%, to $109,250 May 4 in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. They have dropped 0.7% this year, compared with the 6.2% advance of the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index.

Mr. Buffett’s annual meetings are as much a chance for admirers to hear the world’s third-richest man opine about the economy and markets as to be updated about Berkshire.

Berkshire businesses related to residential construction have been hurt by a housing slump in the American economy that is likely to continue for “quite a while,” Mr. Buffett said. Mortgage lenders seeking more business loosened underwriting standards last year, triggering default rates that pushed at least 50 companies to file for bankruptcy, shut down operations or seek buyers in the last 16 months, according to Bloomberg data.

The subprime mortgage crisis won’t be “any huge anchor” to the economy, he predicted, though lenders and borrowers will have “plenty of misery.”

“It will be a very big problem for those involved, but I think it is unlikely that factor alone triggers anything in the larger economy,” Mr. Buffett told the crowd at Omaha’s Qwest Center. The prediction assumes unemployment doesn’t increase “significantly” and interest rates don’t go up “dramatically,” he said.

Berkshire, which gets about half its profit from insurance, capitalized last year on a retreat by rivals wary of covering the Gulf Coast after the record 2005 hurricane season. Investors shouldn’t expect underwriting profit to jump 82% again, as it did in the first quarter, he said.

“The insurance earnings are going to go down, there’s no question about that. It’s up to Mother Nature how much,” he said. “What we really hope over time is more or less to break even on underwriting of insurance.”