Faber’s interviews with Jim Puplava are the absolute best, in my opinion. A few minutes is far too constraining for a mind like Faber’s – give the man some room to run!
And Puplava does, with a 50+ minute interview that absolutely flies by. Faber tells all in this one, sharing his thoughts on QE3, freedom in the Western world, and even Southern California women.
Jim Puplava: Just as an aside, by the way, what did you find most alluring about Southern California from your travels here?
Marc Faber: [laugh] It’s a gold mine. The girls are very friendly. In general, people are very friendly. I mean, everybody talks to each other. And I have to say, this is still a great quality of the US. If you go to the Midwest or you go to the South or you go to Southern California, people talk to each other in a pub and they enjoy each other’s company and it’s a very nice atmosphere. And that you don’t find in many other countries to the same extent.
Jim Puplava: Oh, I thought you might’ve said it was our picturesque landscape.
Marc Faber: Well, the landscape is particularly picturesque in terms of females.
His take on Ben Bernanke is also a fantastic backhanded combination of sympathy and disdain:
Marc Faber: Yeah, this is a very good point. And I’d just like to mention that I frequently criticize Mr. Bernanke, but the true reason I really criticize him is that he has maybe some knowledge about economic expansion and contraction and booms and busts in a closed system. But he has no clue whatsoever about international economics. Because if you look at the last ten years of economic development in the world, the US went into a boom that created the NASDAQ boom, money printing following the bailout of LTCM, money printing ahead of Y2K and then the NASDAQ bubble burst and then more money printing that then produced the credit bubble and the housing bubble and so forth. But where the money really went to in terms of investments and production and wage gain and the increased consumption was actually in Asia, where as a result of the US trade deficit, countries have a huge trade surplus which boosted the economic activity. And so what you said is absolutely correct. We can drop as many dollar bills onto the United States, but we don’t know where the money will flow to. It flowed into the NASDAQ until March, 2000. Then it flowed into the housing market until 2006, 2007. But basically, where economic activity was occurring and boosted was outside the US. And the more the US will print money, the more, in my opinion, the dollar will depreciate against some currencies — maybe not all because the Euro, it’s certainly not more desirable than the US dollar — but it will continue to depreciate against strong currencies like gold and silver, platinum and, probably, palladium. I mean, I feel sorry for Mr. Bernanke because he really doesn’t get it. He doesn’t understand. He’s a typical academic. You know, a typical academic is a professor of medicine that knows everything about how a patient becomes sick but doesn’t know how to cut something like a butcher and therefore, can’t operate on a patient. Mr. Bernanke academically knows everything, but has no clue about the real world. No clue whatsoever.
Here’s the link to the full Faber interview (with transcript) on FinancialSense.com.
Recent Comments