저자: MarcFaber · 외국인
요약 보기
Faber는 실질적으로 통화정책은 완화적이며, 주식·금·은·암호화폐 강세가 돈이 긴축되지 않았다는 증거라고 주장한다. 연준이 금리를 인하할 수 있으나 채권시장은 우호적으로 반응하지 않을 것이라 본다. 장기 금리 사이클은 상승 쪽이며 재정적자는 개선되지 않고, 결국 정부는 화폐를 찍어 부채를 해결할 것이라는 견해다. 이에 따라 금·은·백금을 가치저장 수단으로 선호하며, 특히 백금이 금·은 대비 저평가되어 3배 상승 가능성을 언급한다. 자산 인플레이션과 부의 불평등 심화도 지적한다.
다듬은 글
Monetary policies have not been tight. You can increase interest rates and monetary policies can still remain expansionary. The absolute level of interest doesn't tell you is money tight or not. What tells you when money gets tight is that asset prices go down meaningfully. In other words, if money were tight, you wouldn't have booming stock markets.
You wouldn't have the expansion of margin loans. You wouldn't have the speculation that we have in everything that moves. People will find ways to speculate on that or Wall Street will invent instruments where people can speculate. And the US the monetary conditions have become more expensive. Say if you have a credit outstanding and interest rates went from zero to essentially 4 and a half 5%.
Yes, that's become more expensive. But look at the wealthy people say look at my case. My case is very simple. I'm running a business and I have liquidity at all times in the brokerage business in the investment advisory business. So my liquidity has actually improved over the last 5 years because on my liquidity I used to get zero interest rates or say half a percent and now I'm getting more than 4% in some cases up to 6% interest.
So I think when I look at cryptocurrencies I look at gold I look at silver and so forth and I look at stocks and everything is booming then nobody can tell me that money is really tight. This is the point I want to make. The Fed and Wall Street is misleading the public. They're telling them, "Look, we tighten monetary policies when in fact money supply M2 is at the record high.
It picked up since the last summer. And with the kind of speculation we have, in my opinion, they shouldn't cut interest rates. And it would not surprise me that they will cut short-term rates, but the bond market may not react very favorably. I mean, in theory, if you went and told me as a bond, I I own bonds also in my portfolio.
I have a diversified assets like real estate, bonds, stocks, and precious metals. If you told me that interest rates are going down, I would be convinced to be long bonds, treasury bonds, but I'm not convinced it will work because the interest rates on the Treasury market is still relatively low. You know, considering the inflation, I don't know what your inflation is in your household, but for most people, the cost of living increases at the present time between 6 and 12% depending where they live and whether they have children and what sort of insurance premiums they have to pay.
But nobody can tell me that the cost of living is increasing by only two 3% per. I give you another example. Zurich, Geneva, Burn, Basel in Switzerland are always among the top most expensive cities in the world and the Swiss government says we have no inflation and the bond yield in Switzerland on the government bonds is half a percent or so is a joke.
I want to tell you what I make of it. Already in the 80s I thought that debts were growing exponentially and that it would lead to a collapse. And now 40 years later, we're still happily expanding the credit, the government debt. And that can be done for a very long time because you can print money.
The central bank can simply accumulate these bonds or they can make money available to insurance companies and so forth at the banks that they can accumulate these treasury securities or they can make it available to foreigners. So the foreigners through their current account surpluses accumulate dollar reserves then they buy stocks and bonds in the US or real estate.
So it can go on for a very long time. I mean you go to Istanbul or 5 years ago to Argentina inflation was around 100% and you walk around and everything functions at 100% money is easy. I'm not sure that it will be used by the system by central bankers and by governments but it may be used by individuals.
You understand you and me we have money and maybe we have a tendency to speculate but part of us is also to have money as a store of value that it doesn't depreciate consistently. Its purchasing power is maintained. That is say if you have savings you want to maintain the purchasing power of your savings.
Disregarding making money here and making money there. But to maintain the purchasing power individuals are gradually shifting funds from cash that yields say in American dollars still 4% or so on 10-year bonds. They're shifting it into gold and silver and platinum. At the present time, I think that platinum looks inexpensive relative to gold and silver because it hasn't moved much in the last few years.
And there are times when platinum actually sells at the premium to gold. Today, gold is over 3,000. So, I think platinum could go up three times. Actually, if I were Putin, the South African government, I would squeeze the platinum market. It wouldn't take a lot of money because it's a small market.
The US government with its gigantic debt, they can do a few things. In theory, they could increase taxes to pay say the interest on the debt. But no politician would get elected if he went to the public and said, "Look, you all have to tighten your belts and I'm going to increase taxation." That is not going to fly.
Trump has increased taxation. A tariff is a tax on the consumer in America, but he's a great promoter. He tells the people, "Oh, we have to protect our interest in America, the economic interest. That's why we're living the tariff." You understand? He doesn't go to the public and says is a tax. No, but it is a tax and that is a possibility.
The other possibility is to go to all the people in America and say, "Look, we have this problem. We have to solve it. And we can solve it by cutting government expenditures." The problem is in a democracy. People like that the government spends money on subsidies. The corporate sector loves subsidies and government contracts.
They will never oppose the government because they get money from the government. And the cutting of social security and retirement benefits would be unacceptable in a democracy. I mean, you think the veterans would take a 30% pay cut on their pension incomes? No. The third possibility, and every government has done it throughout the recorded history of over 5,000 years, and that is to print money.
The Romans did it, the Spanish did it, the British did it, and the Americans are going to do it. And especially Trump, he has no respect for people that lend him the money. Look, I don't know what they will have to print. The only thing I can say is once you embark on money printing and on fiscal deficits, it's very difficult to stop it but practically impossible to stop it without causing a major crisis, a depressionlike crisis.
So the printing for a president that is elected for 4 years is the easiest option. And believe me, under Mr. Trump, the deficit will go up. substantially. It won't go down. He's a money printer, an interventionist. He's also an ignorant person concerning international affairs. He has no clue. The default is very complex because the treasury market is owned by state pension funds.
You know, the firemen and the police and by insurance companies like AIG and pension funds of operations. And then then now Trump he could of course say well what we'll do is we default on foreigners or we don't pay the interest to foreigners. But a lot of hedge funds they own treasury bonds through say panamanian companies or through all kinds of Caribbean companies and that would also be very messy.
is easier to postpone the problem to the next president to allow actually make as much debt as possible to then embarrass the next president and the next president will then have to deal with it but he will say okay I'm here for 4 years and want to be reelected let's continue what all the others have done and he will continue to print that's why if you look at long-term cycles I'm not talking for next 6 months interest rates may go down somewhat and So worse, but long cycles.
The last interest rate peak was in 1981 when the 10 years treasury was over 15%. And then we went down for essentially 40 years until August 2020 when the 10 years was around 0.5%. And since then we have an accelerating rate of cost of living increases and we have increase in interest rates. Now can they come down by say I don't know 200 basis points yes but the trend in my view is up given the president and given this fiscal situation in the US the deficit is not going to improve.
It may get worse by a significant amount. If the US goes into recession, in my view, most people in America and in the western world have been in recession for a long time. Their standards of living are going down, not up. And the problem is that their salaries are going up less than the cost of living.
The BLS has shown that they make mistakes in the calculation of everything. You know, it's wrong to say they have no clue, but the way they calculate things are not relevant. I have to point this out. In America, the word inflation refers to a department store or to a grocery shop or to a supermarket where prices go up and then the housewife complains prices are going up and then they say is inflation.
But there's an other inflation and that is the inflation of assets. When say property prices go up, stock prices go up, bond prices go up, collectibles go up, cryptocurrencies go up, just think of it. Five years ago, maybe the crypto market is $200 billion and now it's more than $4 trillion. That is called liquidity.
$4 trillion are floating around somewhere. It would be interesting when cryptos crash if the Fed will intervene and buy them up that day. I'm waiting for housing affordability is at a record low is not my invention. This is by statistics produced by Goldman Sachs by comparing the median price of a house to the typical salary in America.
The median compensation record low. This is the problem the Fed has created. And the other thing is they create of course a class of people that are immensely rich. I mean you have today a concentration of wealths such as we had maybe prior to the crash in 29 huge amount of money in the hands of very few people because money printing doesn't flow evenly into the world but it benefits this corner or that corner of the world we have since money printing began from the US government I mean the fed list is a branch of the government we of a huge expansion in wealth inequality.
I'm not complaining about I couldn't care less whether Bezos has a trillion dollars or $5 trillion. You understand? That is not a concern to me. But I'm just saying the system as it is nowadays is actually sucking money from the population from the broad group of people say from 80% of the people into the hands of say 0.1% of the people and that then creates not a very healthy society.
We could have civil problems. I mean a lot of domestic problems in terms of political trends where poor people they lean more to the left socialism, rich people may lean more into the direction of Elen Musk or AFD in Germany and so that may create an unhealthy environment.
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