Moonwalking with Faber
The markets are reviving, and by the analysis of investor and commentator Marc Faber, speaking in Korea at the AsianInvestor Institutional Investment Conference this week, we saw the bottom when the S&P500 Index hit 666.
The terror on the screens may be over, but it comes at a price, and that price is paid in the debasement of the currency.
Markets may continue to soar, says Faber, but if the dollar in your pocket is going to depreciate, it's a scant consolation. In real terms, investment values may move backwards.
Faber feels our central bankers are moonlighting as money printers, and any man in the Fed who tries to halt the presses, and put up interest rates to mop up the voluminous liquidity, is going to find himself jobless.
"The Fed's monetary policy has made things more volatile," he observes. "Had they not cut rates, financial institutions would have started deleveraging earlier, instead of continuing to build their balance sheets, prompted by the cheaper rates."
US debt to GDP is now at 37% and that doesn't include all its future promises and obligations, which could see it balloon to 600%. With $8 trillion in government debt, Faber believes it is an impossibility that monetary policy will be relaxed.
The private sector is in no shape to take up the slack, so the government money printing has to continue and he predicts that interest rates will be kept below inflation and GDP growth for a very long time.
However, the dollar has performed well in the last year, just as Faber predicted back in autumn 2008, The dollar may have once been weak when there was excess liquidity and rising asset prices, but recently, whenever confidence has fallen in general, people have returned to the dollar.
As people fluctuate between fear and relief, Faber expects that we will witness large sentiment-driven volatility, as markets rise and fall sharply according to the prevailing mood.
"Stocks will do better in the next decade, especially in Asia, given dividend yields, but not in real terms against currencies," he says. "If you borrow, then do it in US dollars."
And where should that money be invested, assuming that you don't want to see the cash in your piggy bank being inflated away to oblivion?
Marc Faber thinks there are opportunities in Asian healthcare, in banks in countries like Thailand (where the Lehman structured note salesmen found the people too unsophisticated to buy their product), tourism, and naturally gold. On the property side, he recommends avoiding condos in financial centres and buying farmland.