Paul Farrell On The One Thing Buffett, Gross, Grantham, Faber, And Stiglitz All Agree On: “Bernanke Plan A Disaster”
by ilene - November 2nd, 2010 2:50 pm
Paul Farrell On The One Thing Buffett, Gross, Grantham, Faber, And Stiglitz All Agree On: "Bernanke Plan A Disaster"
Courtesy of Zero Hedge
By now it is more than obvious except to a few economists (yes, we realize this is a NC-17 term) that QE2 will be an absolute and unmitigated disaster, which will likely kill the dollar, send risk assets vertical (at least as a knee jerk reaction), and result in a surge in inflation even as deflation on leveraged purchases continues to ravage Bernanke’s feudal fiefdom. So all the rational, and very much powerless, observers can do is sit back and be amused as the kleptogarchy with each passing day brings this country to final economic and social ruin. Oddly enough, as Paul Farrell highlights, the list of objectors has grown from just fringe blogs (which have been on Bernanke’s case for almost two years), to such names as Buffett, Gross, Grantham, Faber and Stiglitz. And that the opinion of all these respected (for the most part) investors is broadly ignored demonstrates just how unwavering is the iron grip on America’s by its economist overlords. Which brings us back to the amusement part. Here are Farrell’s always witty views on the object which very soon 99% of American society will demand be put into exile: the genocidal Ph.D. holders of the Marriner Eccles building.
From Paul Farrell’s latest: Sell bonds now, Fed’s QE2 is doomed to fail.
Warning, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s foolish gamble to stimulate the economy will backfire, triggering a new double-dip recession. Bernanke is “medding” too much in the economy, say Marc Faber, Bill Gross, Jeremy Grantham, Joseph Stiglitz and others.
The Fed is making the same kind of mistakes Japan made that resulted in its 20-year recession. The Washington Post says Larry Mayer, a former Fed governor, estimates that to work it would take QE2 bond purchases of “more than $5 trillion …10 times what analysts are expecting.”
Bernanke’s plan is designed to fail. And, unfortunately, that will make life far more dangerous for American investors, consumers, taxpayers and voters.
“I’m ultrabearish on everything, but I believe you’ll be better off owning shares than government bonds,” said Hong Kong economist Marc Faber at a recent forum in Seoul. He sees a repeat of dot-com-bubble insanity today. Faber publishes the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report.
And Warren Buffett agrees,
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Marc Faber: Fed’s QE2 Could Trigger Market Correction
by ilene - October 30th, 2010 5:10 pm
Marc Faber: Fed’s QE2 Could Trigger Market Correction
Courtesy of asiablues at Zero Hedge
By Dian L. Chu, Economic Forecasts & Opinions
Marc Faber, publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom report, discusses the potential impact of further quantitative easing (QE2) by the U.S. Federal Reserve in a Bloomberg interview on Oct. 36 (clip below).
Correction Triggered by QE2?
Faber sees Democrats--"sadly enough"--would get a shot at still retaining the majority, which would mean the monetary and fiscal policy will most likely stay on its current course.
Equity has done well in Sep. and Oct months; however, Faber thinks the markets are stretched in the inflation trade, and weak dollar, high commodity and precious metal prices, along with high equity valuations, all suggest a correction is overdue.
Now, with QE2 being largely priced in, anything less than $1 trillion from the Fed would disappoint the markets and may trigger a correction in U.S. stocks, which could result in more quantitative easing.
But the correction should provide a buying opportunity for investors leading to an up cycle, instead of another bear market.
Equity Better for the Next Decade
Looking at investing for the next ten years, equities, emerging economies in particular, would be a relatively better place to invest than U.S. government bonds, and cash. However, Faber advises against financial, auto, and aircraft. He’s been in the high tech sector and likes Microsoft (MSFT).
Precious Metals Due for Pullback
Faber is currently recommending agriculture commodities, and the accumulation of precious metals. On precious metals, he thinks they are overdue for "some kind of correction" by year end, and expect the next leg up in 2011.
Dollar Near An Inflection Point
Faber says dollar is oversold, while in contrast, some of the foreign currencies such as Yen and Franc are overbought. So, an inflection point could be near for a short-term dollar rally which could temporarily push down asset prices.
He warns investors to be very careful about shorting dollar and long assets as the trade has become quite crowded.
Expect a Strong Pullback of Chinese Economy
Although not quite gloom and doom, Faber does expect a "strong pullback" on the Chinese economy due to its many imbalances.
According to Faber, the 0.25% interest rate hike effective Oct. 20 by the PBoC is "meaningless," because of skyrocketing property prices, and the cost of living inflation has gone up much more than the official figure.
He notes food prices have seen high inflation, and because of low GDP per capita where food would account for a high percentage of total expenditure, Faber estimates that the typical consumer…
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Paul Farrell Explains Why The Fed-Wall Street Complex Will Self Destruct By 2012
by ilene - October 5th, 2010 3:52 pm
Paul Farrell Explains Why The Fed-Wall Street Complex Will Self Destruct By 2012
Courtesy of Zero Hedge
Some rather scary predictions out of Paul Farrell today: "It’s inevitable: Wall Street banks control the Federal Reserve system, it’s their personal piggy bank. They’ve already done so much damage, yet have more control than ever.Warning: That’s a set-up. They will eventually destroy capitalism, democracy, and the dollar’s global reserve-currency status. They will self-destruct before 2035 … maybe as early as 2012 … most likely by 2020. Last week we cheered the Tea Party for starting the countdown to the Second American Revolution. Our timeline is crucial to understanding the historic implications of Taleb’s prediction that the Fed is dying, that it’s only a matter of time before a revolution triggers class warfare forcing America to dump capitalism, eliminate our corrupt system of lobbying, come up with a new workable form of government, and create a new economy without a banking system ruled by Wall Street." And just like in the Hangover, where the guy is funny because he’s fat, Farrell is scary cause he is spot on correct.
Handily, Farrell provides a projected timeline of events:
Stage 1: The Democrats just put the nail in their coffin confirming they’re wimps when they refused to force the GOP to filibuster Bush tax cuts for billionaires.
Stage 2: In the elections the GOP takes over the House, expanding its strategic war to destroy Obama with its policy of “complete gridlock” and “shutting down government.”
Stage 3: Post-election Obama goes lame-duck, buried in subpoenas and vetoes.
Stage 4: In 2012, the GOP wins back the White House and Senate. Health care returns to insurers. Free-market financial deregulation returns. Lobbyists intensify their anarchy.
Stage 5: Before the end of the second term of the new GOP president, Washington is totally corrupted by unlimited, anonymous donations from billionaires and lobbyists. Wall Street’s Happy Conspiracy triggers the third catastrophic meltdown of the 21st century that Robert Shiller of “Irrational Exuberance” fame predicts, resulting in defaults of dollar-denominated debt and the dollar’s demise as the world’s reserve currency.
Stage 6: The Second American Revolution explodes into a brutal full-scale class war with the middle class leading a widespread rebellion against the out-of-touch, out-of-control Happy Conspiracy sabotaging America from within.
Stage 7: The domestic class warfare is exaggerated as the Pentagon’s global warnings play out: That by 2020
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China Now Second Largest Economy After the United States
by ilene - August 16th, 2010 2:00 pm
China Now Second Largest Economy After the United States
Courtesy of Jr. Deputy Accountant
Bubble? What bubble?
NYT:
After three decades of spectacular growth, China passed Japan in the second quarter to become the world’s second-largest economy behind the United States, according to government figures released early Monday.
The milestone, though anticipated for some time, is the most striking evidence yet that China’s ascendance is for real and that the rest of the world will have to reckon with a new economic superpower.
The recognition came early Monday, when Tokyo said that Japan’s economy was valued at about $1.28 trillion in the second quarter, slightly below China’s $1.33 trillion. Japan’s economy grew 0.4 percent in the quarter, Tokyo said, substantially less than forecast. That weakness suggests that China’s economy will race past Japan’s for the full year.
Former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund and filthy Group of 30 operative Kenneth Rogoff is convinced there’s a bubble: “You’re starting to see that collapse in property and it’s going to hit the banking system,” said Rogoff, 57, who also serves on the Group of 30, a panel of central bankers, finance officials and academics led by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. “They have a lot of tools and some very competent management, but it’s not easy.”
As opposed to #1 with no tools and completely incompetent management, right? I’m not naming names, I need not.
Marc Faber called a Chinese collapse in 9 to twelve months back in May, giving us a few more months to stock up on buttered popcorn and duck feet:
“The market is telling you that something is not quite right,” Faber, the publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom report, said in a Bloomberg Television interview in Hong Kong today. “The Chinese economy is going to slow down regardless. It is more likely that we will even have a crash sometime in the next nine to 12 months.”
I doubt Tim Geithner actually feels China’s hot breath on his neck because last time I checked, our Zimbabwe Ben printing press was still in full working order and recognized by the global economy as all-powerful mover of the cheap money-hungry monster.
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Marc Faber: Relax, This Will Hurt A Lot
by ilene - July 27th, 2010 11:42 am
Marc Faber: Relax, This Will Hurt A Lot
Courtesy of Tyler Durden
Marc Faber closed out this week’s Agora Financial Symposium with a speech that pretty much recapitulated the view that the end of the world is if not nigh, then surely tremendous dislocations to the existing socio-political and economic landscape are about to take place (with some very dire consequences for the US). His conclusive remarks pretty much summarize his sentiment best: "We’ve had a trend for most of the past 200 years: GDP of countries like China and India went down while the West surged. That’s now changed. Emerging economies will go up, and your children in the West will have a lower standard of living than you did. Absolutely. We won’t sink to the bottom of the sea. But other countries will grow much faster than us. The world is very competitive, and the odds are stacked against us. Americans, with their inborn arrogance, will not let it go that easily, so there will be lots of tension going forward." While long-time fans of Faber will not be surprised by the gloom and doom (not much boom) here, anyone else who still holds a glimmer of hope that at the end of the day the CNBC spin may be right, is advised to steer clear of Faber’s most recent thoughts.
And while we do not have the full presentation yet, the salient points have been recreated below courtesy of the Motley Fool. For those who desire a far more in depth presentation from the inimitable Mr. Faber, we direct you to his June 2008 capstone presentation: "Where is the boom, and the doom" – link here.
On reality: My views are not all that negative. I think they’re just realistic. I want to face reality. You have people like Paul Krugman who thinks we should have another bubble to pull us out of this. He actually said that. But he said the same thing in 2001. And you know how that turned out.
On unintended consequences: The Fed doesn’t seem to have learned anything at all from its mistakes. Their current policy of cutting rates to zero is designed to create sustainable growth, but they’ve created larger and larger volatility in markets. There are many unintended consequences of their actions.
The oil bubble of 2008 is a good example. In 2008, the price…
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Marc Faber’s Must Watch 2010 Presentation
by ilene - June 7th, 2010 10:46 pm
Courtesy of Tyler Durden
As someone once said, the only man who can tell a room full of people they are doomed and get a standing ovation, Marc Faber, gives a terrific hour long presentation to the Mises Circle in Manhattan on May 22, discussing the economy, interest rates, markets, why having massive output gaps (see previous post for Bernanke’s most recent dose of lunacy on the matter) and hyperinflation can easily coexist, why the Fed will never again implement tight monetary policy, why Greenspan is a senile self-contradictor, why Paul Krugman is a broken and scratched record, and the fact that pretty much nothing matters and we are all going to hell. Little new here for long-term economic skeptics, but a must watch for all neophytes who are still grasping with some of the more confounding concepts of our dead-end Keynesian catastrophe and not only why the world can not get out of the current calamity absent a global debt repudiation, but why gold is the asset to own, even though one must not be dogmatic and shift from asset class to asset class in times of tremendous currency devaluation (i.e., such as right now). 2010′s must watch Marc Faber presentation.
One thing we disagree with Mr. Faber on, is that Asian banks did not buy CDOs during the housing bubble – this is patently wrong. As a detailed perusal through the Goldman discovery will confirm, Goldman looked increasingly eastward, first to Europe, and then to Korea, Japan and Taiwan, when finding the dumbest money around to invest in monstrosities such as Timberwolf, Abacus and others. If Mr. Faber is investing based on the assumption that Asian banks are free of this relic of the credit boom, we urge him to promptly reevaluate his investment thesis as he will certainly lose money here.
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Marc Faber’s Latest on Banks, U.S. Equity Valuations, Gold
by ilene - June 7th, 2010 2:21 am
Marc Faber’s Latest on Banks, U.S. Equity Valuations, Gold
Courtesy of Adam Sharp of Bearish News
The humble and wise Mr. Faber talks to Bloomberg TV. Highlights:
- “Quite a lot” of technical support on the S&P 500 at 1045
- Stocks are oversold near-term
- “Quite happy” to hold physical gold over other asset classes
- There was no real recovery, look at tax receipts — they are lower YoY
- June/July rally is likely, but won’t go above major resistance at 1220
- Market will probably be lower by late Fall 2010
- Fed will use strong bond market to ease “massively”
- Banks worldwide would be “gone” if not for massive government support and easy money
- Still very bearish on U.S. economy long-term, due to banksters ruining economy (my slightly-biased take on what he said)
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Hugh Hendry Sees 1920′s Japan-Like Crash In China
by ilene - May 19th, 2010 2:17 pm
Hugh Hendry Sees 1920′s Japan-Like Crash In China
Courtesy of Tyler Durden
Hugh Hendry, whose previous appearances have been well-logged by Zero Hedge, and who is currently raking the money thanks to long Treasury bet and his EURUSD short from when the pair was 20% higher, has never been a fan of China, and almost got into a fight with Marc Faber recently discussing the country’s future prospects. In fact, Hendry uttered this memorable soundbite back in February, in which he mopped the floor with Goldman permabull Jim "BRIC" O’Neill: "I love Jim O’Neill. I love that Goldman Sachs guy. He says you either get it, or you don’t. I don’t get it. In the future there will be a Confucius saying: the wise man not invest in overcapacity. The flaw of the business model, at the center of it is a craving for power as opposed to profit." BusinessWeek reports that Hendry has now officially put his money where his mouth is and has bought puts on 20 companies that will profit from “a dramatic collapse” of China’s growth. With the Chinese stock market approaching 52 week lows, will Ecclectica soon become the next Paulson & Co. hedge fund iteration, even as the latter continues (allegedly) to bet on a US recovery, and thus stands to lose tens of billions if the thesis does not play out (although we are fairly confident Paulson’s long stock positions are matched by even longer CDS hedges… but without additional data, we can never be sure).
More from BusinessWeek:
“There are striking parallels with Japan in the 1920s, when ultimately the whole system collapsed,” said Hendry, 41, whose firm manages $420 million in assets. “China could precipitate a much greater crisis elsewhere in the world.”
Japan’s export boom collapsed after the war amid excess global capacity, slashing growth and sparking a stock-market crash and bank runs.
Hendry’s flagship Eclectica Fund, a global macro hedge fund with $180 million in assets, may gain almost $500 million from its options if China’s economy plunges into a recession, he said. The options cost the fund about 1.5 percent of its net asset value annually, Hendry said.
China’s vulnerability to a crash comes from the “inherent instability” created by a lending binge for infrastructure projects that’s “unprecedented in 400 years of economic history,” Hendry said. The country is also exposed to exports to
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When Will China’s Bubble Burst?
by ilene - May 12th, 2010 5:12 pm
When Will China’s Bubble Burst?
Courtesy of Washington’s Blog
As Bloomberg notes, Marc Faber thinks China may crash in 9 to 12 months, and hedge fund manager Jim Chanos and Harvard University’s Kenneth Rogoff are also warning of a crash.
Nouriel Roubini told Bloomberg:
In China, where property prices rose at a record pace in April and consumer prices climbed at the fastest rate in 18 months, the economy faces the risk of a “significant slowdown,” Roubini said.
“China should be tightening monetary policy, increasing interest rates and let its currency appreciate over time,” he said. “They are too slow, they are not doing it fast enough.”
On April 20th, BusinessWeek wrote:
China’s Shanghai Composite Index may drop as much as 6 percent after breaching the 250-day moving average for the first time in a year, Shenyin & Wanguo Securities Co. said.
The benchmark gauge plunged 4.8 percent to 2,980.3 yesterday, the most in eight months, on concern government measures to curb real estate speculation will slow economic growth. The index may extend losses until reaching the next support level of 2,803…
Yesterday, Calculated Risk noted that the Shanghai composite is continuing down:
Keep an eye on the Shanghai index (in red). It appears China’s economy is slowing.
This graph shows the Shanghai SSE Composite Index and the S&P 500 (in blue).
The SSE Composite Index is at 2,622.67 mid-day – down about 300 points from 2 weeks ago.
[Click here for full chart]
Vincent Fernando notes that Beijing property prices are starting to fall rapidly (and that Shanghai is next), as China clamps down on the property bubble.
As MarketWatch notes:
China’s economy is teetering on the edge of a major slowdown … according to a noted China strategist.
David Roche, an economic and political analyst who manages the Hong Kong-based hedge fund Independent Strategy, says the world’s third-largest economy is now on the brink, faced with the inevitable reckoning that follows an extended bank-lending binge.
"We’ve got the beginnings of a credit-bubble collapse in China," said Roche, predicting the economy will likely cool from its stellar double-digit growth rate to a 6% annual expansion as a result.
While that may not sound bad, Roche believes the collateral damage from the cooling will be anything but mild, as the banking sector comes under pressure from cumulative
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Marc Faber: “Symptoms of a bubble building in China”
by ilene - April 23rd, 2010 3:36 am
Marc Faber: "Symptoms of a bubble building in China"
Courtesy of Edward Harrison at Credit Writedowns
Marc Faber spoke with Bloomberg News recently and had some interesting things to say about China and what he sees a burgeoning bubble. His sentiments echo those from Ten ways to spot a bubble in China by Edward Chancellor, author of a well-regarded history of financial manias, Devil Take The Hindmost.
Let me say a few words about China. The clip of Faber is at the bottom (hat tip David).
I first saw a mention of this interview in Bloomberg News’ Business Week yesterday. The article says:
“There are some symptoms of a bubble building in China, with the increase in foreign exchange reserves, rapidly rising property prices,” Faber, the publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom report, said in a Bloomberg Television interview today. “From here on, the China economy will slow down regardless. Whether it will crash this year or later, I don’t know.”
The point being that, when asset markets rise, at some point (I use a divergence of two standard deviations from longer-term trend as a rule of thumb), psychology starts to dominate price activity. It is rational that people speculate in an asset class that has risen so far above trend. But, that’s the point at which anything could happen. Mark Buchanan has a good analogy about “fingers of instability” in his book Ubiquity. What he shows is that many different systems reach a critical state in which any minor change in dynamics can have a disproportionate impact on the entire system because of the fingers of instability that have built up. This is the critical state.
Buchanan uses a sand pile as an example where adding one grain of sand to the pile could cause one, ten, one thousand or ten thousand grains to avalanche down the sand pile. What he demonstrates is that systems reach a critical state in which standard distributions (the bell curve) wildly understate event probabilities.
The overall point – one that Jeremy Grantham seems to make in an FT interview as well - is that markets become very unstable as they become far advanced above the longer-term trendline. And while markets always revert to mean, they do so in a violent and unpredictable way once you reach that critical state. That’s what crises are…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the site