저자: MarcFaber · 외국인
요약 보기
미국 경제의 K자형 양극화로 중하위층 소비가 위축되고 있으며, 사모신용·사모펀드가 큰 위험에 처했다고 주장. AI 투자 붐은 버블 징후(과열 기대, 막대한 자본지출, 대중 투기, 외국 자본 유입)를 보인다고 진단. 금 추가 하락 시 비중 확대 의향을 밝히고, 현금·단기 국채 선호와 경기침체 가능성을 언급. 중장기적으로 지정학적 갈등 위험도 경고.
다듬은 글
Markets behave very strangely. Anomalies arise that are extremely unusual. Consumer confidence indices are at record lows, while the stock market is at record highs. This has never happened before. Why is this happening? Because we have two economies. The economy of the 1%—the rich. And I'm not complaining.
I also benefited from the inflation of financial assets. But 80% of Americans are people who live ordinary lives, they are middle- and low-income households. They have very few assets , and if they do have assets, they are forced to borrow money to purchase them. These people essentially have an accessibility problem.
They can't afford to buy what they want because they don't have money. And the super-rich—they already have everything. So the economy is very heterogeneous. The economy of the super-rich, who own yachts that they will later sell at a loss— huge losses—and the economy of ordinary people are in a state of recession.
You can be sure: the purchasing power of ordinary people has decreased, as has their real spending. They go to the supermarket, buy, but they have to pay much more, so they buy less. And what do companies do as their costs also increase? They reduce portion sizes. So we have this "shrinkflation". Poor people, as always, remain deceived.
Point. Especially under the Trump administration . In my opinion, private equity and private lending are a major disaster that is about to happen. And it's not just Blackstone that limits share buybacks. There is a large private equity firm in Switzerland that has also restricted buybacks, and its shares have more than halved.
Blackstone shares also fell more than half. The market tells you that private equity and private lending are in deep trouble. The mood during the " bubble" is the desire to get rich quickly. People are obsessed, and there's a very good book on this topic by Gustave Le Bon—"The Crowd." This is a very interesting book that I recommend to your viewers and readers, because it also discusses manias that happened before: for example, witchcraft, when people suddenly believed in witches, or the Crusades, when people suddenly believed that they could liberate Jerusalem from the Muslims and so on, or alchemists.
They thought they could invent gold, how to make gold— manias happen all the time. I saw this as a child at my school. One year they played with beads, the next with other games, etc., then with collectibles and stamps, it caught everyone's attention, everyone was fascinated, and then it disappeared again.
I think in the next report I want to write about the symptoms of a large bubble. First of all, you need hype around an industry, sector, or product, and right now there is such hype around AI. Second, one must deal with the boom in capital spending in this sector, which attracts a lot of money and “freezes” it, making it illiquid.
And the AI boom, in terms of size as a percentage of the economy, is not as big as the railroad boom of the 19th century, but it is the largest capital spending boom since World War II, and it is mobilizing capital. Third, public participation is needed . We are seeing massive public participation in options trading, futures, day trading, and more.
I mean, the speculative atmosphere is gigantic, and you need foreign capital flowing into the sector, that is, into the object of the boom, and we didn't have that in 2008 or in 1999-2000. But now we have it; The whole world is speculating on Nvidia and MU, i.e. Micron Technology, and until recently, on Tesla.
It has cooled down now, but capital continues to be attracted. The US stock market now accounts for about 60% of the global stock market capitalization. This is 70% of the MSCI World index, which is a huge number. I hope gold falls another $500-$1,000 per ounce, because then I would increase my gold holdings quite significantly again.
I already have a significant portion, larger than most people, except for “gold bugs” like Eric Sprott, who has most of his assets in gold, or some other people I know. But most people I know in the investment world , most fund managers, don't have more than 1% in gold, and even 5% invested in gold—that's a lot.
I know rich people in Switzerland. Most of their assets are real estate, stocks, bonds, private equity, and maybe gold—you know, a few ounces inherited from their grandmother who bought it during World War II. For a commodity that has performed as well as gold—and it has performed very well over the last 18 months— there is no excessive speculation.
ETF inflows recently increased, but then they started selling again due to a correction. I mean, given the performance of gold, silver and platinum over the last 18 months, there has been surprisingly little speculation. They are all active in Bitcoin and Solana. I'll tell you, of all the people I know, only five work with precious metals.
I'm not very active because I just hold gold, period. I sold some of my gold stocks because they had gone up a lot and now I'm having second thoughts about them. I think you can make good money on gold stocks if you buy them at the right time. But I think mining stocks are pretty cheap compared to everything else.
I have South African gold mines, Canadian ones, I still have a fairly large stake in Ivanho, and I prefer platinum as a commodity because it is very cheap relative to gold and silver, and silver is relatively cheap relative to gold. But wheat, corn, soybeans are still cheaper relative to gold and everything else, and oil is low relative to gold.
And I can say that your labor cost is relatively low compared to gold . And what is relatively low compared to gold is the prices of products. I mean wheat, corn, soybeans, sugar, and rubber. I also have a bond portfolio. And as you say, it hasn't been doing very well over the last few years, but not as bad as, say, 30- year bonds.
If you look at 30-year bonds, their price has almost halved since their 2020 peak. But you get interest payments every year. So the overall income wasn't that bad. And over the last two years, I just checked, the yield hasn't been negative because the 30- year has come down a little bit, but you've gotten 4% interest.
Listen, as an investor and a large asset owner, I believe that everything is at risk. When I was growing up in the 50s, my grandparents said that you should save 10% of your income and put it on deposit in the bank. This advice eventually proved disastrous due to the depreciation of the currency and the loss of purchasing power of paper money.
They should have said, " Mark, you stupid boy, buy some stocks every day or some gold and stuff like that , and don't put the money on deposit in the bank." But it's interesting that today, if I look at people's asset allocation, investors' cash position is at one of the lowest levels in history. And the asset that nobody needs is Treasury bonds, long-term Treasury securities.
This suggests that if we enter a recession, and the recessionary forces are much stronger than people expect, because if asset prices fall, it could have a significant impact on consumption. And if that happens, maybe cash and bonds aren't such a stupid investment for the next 6 months or a year. This is not a long-term offer.
This is just a strategic opportunity, and I am cautious about increasing my stake in the stock. I have a large portfolio of stocks in Thailand because the Thai stock market is one of the few that has fallen in the last 5 years. We economists have theories of business cycles. Schumpeter wrote a book called " Business Cycles".
I mean, he also wrote "Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy," which is a very interesting book. Be that as it may , we have business cycles, some of them are called Kondratiev, Kuznets, Zhuglyar, Kitchin cycles, and so on. And historians also have theories of war cycles. According to the cycles of war, I want to tell you that the conditions for war have never been better than they are now after the First World War, because the First World War happened mainly because Germany overtook England as an industrial power.
They became a larger economy than Britain in 1910 because they grew rapidly between 1870 and 1910 under Bismarck. And today you know that there is a superpower, the United States, which was an absolute superpower after World War II, but in the last 20 years, China has gone from insignificant to very significant.
They produce more steel than the rest of the world combined , they have a population of 1.3 billion, their industrial output is much larger than that of the US, and their automotive industry is now the largest in the world, and they have gone from 2% of global consumption of manufactured goods in 1970 to about 50 % now.
And this creates tension between the superpower of the US and the arrogant West, which still lives in the era of neo-colonialism, and the developing BRICS countries, including China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, etc. And I tell you, the conditions for war are ideal. And that's why I don't think they'll sign a peace treaty, because Trump wants to win the midterm elections and stuff.
And he essentially made a huge mistake by getting involved in something as complex as fighting in the Middle East. But he grossly overestimated himself. He thought he could step in and solve the problem in a week, but now he's stuck. And Netanyahu doesn't play by his rules. I do n't like this character at all, but he's smart. Trump is stupid.
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