Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Marc Faber: This Crisis Is Just The Appetizer

Just for the record, published on CNBC: This Crisis Was Just the Appetizer: Marc Faber

  • "It's a total and complete disaster and the crisis we had is just the appetizer to the big total breakdown of financial markets and of governments in five or 10 years time when the whole system goes bust," Faber told "Worldwide Exchange."

    The G20 meeting is not likely to find a solution that would prevent a future meltdown, as the people who are supposed to implement the new measures are the same people who were unable to foresee this crisis, he said.

    The issues of excessive leverage and the "uncontrolled, unbound credit growth," as well as the bulging deficits and interest rates at zero are not being addressed, he added.

    "My view is that this G20 meeting is a complete and total waste of time," he said. "Nothing will be achieved except that they will implement regulations that are even worse than the regulations that brought us all these problems."

    Starting with 2002, former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and current chairman Ben Bernanke "managed to create a bubble in everything." But inflation pressures are building up, and the Fed's measure of inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, is not relevant, according to Faber.

    "If you have interest rates at zero essentially you discourage people to save and encourage them to speculate," he said. "I look at the US dollar. Whenever a currency is weak, it's weak because of some inflationary pressures."

    Emerging markets are the place to be in the long term, because their economies are gaining importance in the world, bit this will lead to geopolitical tensions, Faber warned.

    "I think that people will have to rethink the world and that they should have little money in the US and have 50 percent of their funds in emerging economies," he said.

3 comments:

solomon said...

The saying by Marc had been around for some time. The next challenge will the currencies crisis like Jim Roger is suggesting.

When u have no bullet left in interest rate regime, it cann't afford to go beyond zero. If the current crisis deepen or prolong, one needs another mechanism to boost the economy. Don't tell me a war or a natural disaster, OK...

For the next couple of months, the speculation of currencies and hard commodities will be back. So, central bankers are u prepared to hike rate to defend by then??

Richard Cranium said...

What is Marc Faber selling?

I geddit. He's hoping all the US dollars get redeployed in emerging economies and commodities where he has most of his money.

He missed the March 09 rally, and he's kicking himself. So, he's talking down the US market.

All these talking heads are the same. Everyone's selling his own brand of snake oil. But we don't hear him proffering any solution out of this mess.

Moolah said...

I do have most of Dr. Faber's commenrs posted. Click on the label: http://whereiszemoola.blogspot.com/search/label/Marc%20Faber