저자: MarcFaber · 외국인
요약 보기
미국 노동통계국(BLS) 물가 통계는 과소집계되었으며 실질 생활비 상승률은 연 6~12%로 추정. 관세는 결국 소비자 세금으로 전가됨. 중앙은행의 자산가격 상승 무시가 문제이며, 주식 고평가·신용스프레드 최저·VIX 저하·마진부채 1조달러 등 버블 징후가 뚜렷하므로 금리 인하보다 긴축이 필요. 통화가 아닌 귀금속(금·은)을 자산 보존 수단으로 권고하며, 특히 백금이 금 대비 과도하게 저평가되어 매수 권고. 미국 주식이 약세로 전환하면 자금이 non-US 자산으로 유출될 가능성 언급.
다듬은 글
I think that nobody should seriously believe the statistics that are published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the US. I think that over the last 30, 40 years, they grossly understated the rate of inflation and they continue to do so. The inflation around the world is much higher than what governments are telling you that it is.
Inflation is essentially an expansion in the quantity of money. And when prices go up, whether it's for stocks or for homes or for bonds or for commodities or for consumer goods, it's a symptom of the increased quantity of money that has been created by central banks around the world, notably of course by the Federal Reserve in the United States.
So we have statistics by private economist among others John Williams of Shadow Stats who shows that the rate of price increases for consumer goods and services is much higher than what the government is publishing. So I think you shouldn't pay much attention to what the government is publishing except that Wall Street and the portfolio managers they like to believe in these figures because it's good for their business to say to the clients look the inflation is coming down.
is great to attract new money into funds and so forth because if interest rates go up obviously the valuation of equities as it is at the moment is problematic because stocks are highly priced in the US. The tariffs of course will increase prices. There's no question about it. Corporations are waiting to increase prices and they will be hit with these tariffs and so they will try to pass it on to the consumer.
Say Nike gets hit for importing shoes from Vietnam, China, India and wherever and then they add some to the price at which they sell the shoes to the dealers and to the shops and so forth. So it's passed on to the American consumer. At the end, the majority of the tariffs will be paid by the American consumer.
And when I finished my studies, I took a PhD. I wrote about the financial reform of Robert Peele, which involved essentially bringing the United Kingdom from a system of protectionism through the navigation acts and the corn laws into free trade. So, I'm quite familiar with this subject. what it the tariffs are.
They are a consumer tax, like a sales tax, and it hits usually the consumer the hardest. We should make no mistake when Trump says that he's cutting taxes and so forth. The tariffs are a tax and they will increase the price the consumer pays in the supermarkets. Every household has a different rate of cost of living increases.
Say you have children that go to universities, your rate of consumer price and service inflation is much higher than a couple who has no children or if you're younger, you don't have very high health care expenditures. And so each household has a different profile. But my view would be that the typical household around the world and certainly in western countries his cost of living are increasing by between about 6% peranom to 12% peranom at the present time.
You just have to look at say insurance premiums. what you pay for your insurance. What you pay for electricity, it's not 2% as the government claims. Exactly how much it is depends. Are you in this city or that city? Are you in this state or that state? In this country or that country, but it's between 6 and 12%.
All my life I've been critical of the Federal Reserve and of central banks. I don't think something as important as money in society in the system should be left to a bunch of academics in a glass building somewhere in Washington or in Paris or in London and so I think the power of central bank should be reduced meaningfully.
Now the central bank and I have been critical about their position because they base their assumptions on the view that asset markets when they go up has nothing to do with inflation. When you drop money from helicopters onto the earth, the money can go anywhere. It can go into stocks. It can go into commodities.
It can go into real estate. And it can go into consumer prices. So the Fed and other central banks, they only call inflation when the money flows into consumer prices. But in fact, you look at the real estate market around the world, particularly in the US, affordability is at the lowest level ever.
You understand the problem? You print money and the prices of properties go up a lot. It enriches people. It creates delusion of wealth. But people that don't have a house, they suffer because they can't afford to buy the house. Young people can't afford to buy a house or a condo and so forth. So this is a big problem.
Now, as I said, I've been critical about central banks all my life. But now I have to be ashamed that for the first time I sort of agree with Powell. I think it'd be crazy to cut rates with the stock market at an all-time high, with bond spreads between high quality and low quality at the record low, and with the VIX index so low, and with the existing speculation, margin debt just hit a trillion dollar.
You have speculation in everything. What the Fed should do is tighten monetary condition. But as I said, you take my case, my liquidity has improved over the last few years because 5 years ago, I didn't get any cash flow on my cash, but now I get 4 and a2% in some cases 5% and so forth. So my liquidity is much better than ever before.
And I don't know exactly how the Fed calculates the liquidity. Say 5 years ago, the market capitalization of say cryptocurrencies was maybe a few hundred billion. Now it's $4 trillion. That creates liquidity in the system. And I'm not sure people's know what money is. In my view, in this condition that we have at the present time, the best is probably to own like gold and silver because they are monies that cannot be printed.
They cannot be increased the quantity of these precious metals meaningfully. They can be increased a little bit through mining and so you know how what the cost of mining is and the difficulty of mining. But in general, if your objective is to preserve wells and not to speculate, I would advise people to have at least owned some of their assets in gold and silver and platinum.
I started to work in 1970 on Wall Street. And throughout the 70s, the Dow Jones was never above a thousand. And you know when Robert Prector at the time predicted that the DA would go to 1700, people look at him like a lunatic and never thought it would be possible. And in the 80s there was a group of people at Maril Lynch the strategies.
They produced beautiful reports and they predicted a debt collapse that would shortly happen. And now 40 years later it still hasn't happened. The issue is you can keep on printing but the important issue here is when you embark on money printing and this has been discussed by mises formes and hayek when you embark on money printing and fiscal deficit essentially you have to continue and you have to continue at an accelerating rate so that's why I think if you look at the last 50 years we have a peak in interest rates in 1981 and the peak of inflation in 1980.
Thereafter, we have this inflation with price still going up but not at the same rate as in the '7s. And we have an interest rate structure that is trending down until August 2020 when the 10 years note was around 0.5% in the US and after that we have a rising rate of inflation and a rising rate of interest.
Now if you look at the interest rate movement in the 70s they've fluctuated widely but the trend was upwards. I think the same will happen now. Maybe for the next 6 months interest rates will go down somewhat because the economy is much weaker than what the government is saying. But since the government is lying and Wall Street likes to listen to the lies because they have to lie to their clients that everything is good.
So the clients give them more money for investments. So that the whole system is kind of a phony system is an illusion but the illusion can last for a long time. You know in Turkey in Argentina and so forth interest rates were sometimes 100% but there was plenty of liquidity. You go you walk around Istanbul the inflation is high but you wouldn't notice a boom town.
The traffic is so heavy actually you can't even walk around. But you understand how long it will last, we don't know. But right now, I have to say the symptoms of a major bubble are all in place. Excessive speculation, excessive optimism, complacency, margin debt that has expanded a lot and so forth.
But the breast of the market is not very good. So I've been cautious all my life. But I would be careful in particular now. And I think what can happen and this is important. You take for instance 1973 the US market went down and everything went down or 198082 US market went down and everything went down.
But you take 1989 in Japan. Japan was more than 50% of global stock market capitalization and it went down and the money flowed out of Japan into other markets notably the NASDAQ in the US that had a huge run between 1990 and to be precise March 2000. So you understand is possible that the US market starts to weaken and Europe, Latin America and Asia picks up and the money flows out of the US into non US assets.
I'm not saying it will happen but is a possibility that I'm let's say towing around with because this year Brazil has outperformed the US by a wide margin. European markets have outperformed the US by a wide margin and China, Hong Kong have done very well. If you go around the world and you ask people, you know, what do you own?
Most people will own some real estate, let's say, because they don't know anything else. So they own real estate and they may have a life insurance policy or health insurance policy because they have children and they're worried that if something happens to them then nobody looks after the children and so forth and so on.
And then you go around and you ask people about gold and most people will tell you yeah they we own gold and so forth. You go to a New York cocktail party and they will say yes we have gold and so and then you dig in and you ask well how much? I tell you the world doesn't own gold at all. The fund management industry maybe they have 1% in gold or 2% and individuals they own a gold coin which they inherited from their grandmother or whatn not.
But someone who has say $100 million and puts $30 million into gold is very very seldom. You know that there are some gold bugs like Eric Spr and Tom Kaplan and so forth. They have a significant portion of their wealth in precious metals and mining stocks. But the majority of investors as the prices went up they sold the ETFs.
The net assets of the ETFs called ETFs went down. As the price went up is very unusual. Now in the last say 6 weeks 2 months some money came into the gold ETFs but not that much and I think compared to the liquidity that exists in the world as we discussed before gold ownership and silver ownership is very small right now I've been saying this for the last 12 months platinum is unusually cheap because it sells at a huge discount to gold when occasionally not all the time, but occasionally it sells at the premium to gold. So, I would buy platinum at the moment.
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