저자: Beast Finance · 외국인
다듬은 글
In a poor country, people have as assets the the main asset is a house because when they get some money, they know something about the house price because the neighbor has sold his house or you [clears throat] understand? It's something that is near to their daily lives. They have in poor countries, where it's Indonesia, Bangladesh, India or here, they have no clue what a stock is.
They don't know. They don't know what bonds are. So, they buy properties. And what they also buy is when they get into some monetary conditions that are favorable, they buy a motorcycle because then they can go to work further away and they become mobile. They can go into the city and earn a higher salary, which they couldn't do before.
And then they buy, if they do well, then they become they become more affluent, they buy a car. And then they buy life insurance for the children and so on. But stocks is very moved. But most people around the world, they know what a coin is of gold and silver. That everybody knows. And so, when the prices of gold and silver go up, they store some money in gold and silver.
But also they store it there because they've seen how the purchasing power of money has diminished. You understand? 20 years ago, a soup on the street or some street food would cost say 20 cents and now it costs a dollar. So, they know that gold keeps its value. But when there is a crisis, an economic crisis, what do they sell?
They have children, they have wives, they have obligations. They don't want to sell the house because then they have to move into more unfavorable social conditions, and that is embarrassing for the children and the wives, and they don't want to sell the car, which is mortgaged and they they have installment credit, because they need the car to go to work.
And so uh when they have a liquidity issue for themselves in the household, it can also be someone is sick and or the or someone needs urgently money. The one thing they can always sell and nobody sees it is the gold they own. And so when prices go up and they are relatively high in the current crisis, they're selling it.
And then there are central banks. You understand? In the Middle East, the Middle Eastern uh countries have big surpluses and they have these large sovereign funds. And the sovereign funds, they are there to basically it's like a pension fund of the population of Saudi Arabia or of the population of the United Arab Emirates and so forth.
But now the cash flow of these countries is down because although the price of oil is up, they're selling less. And uh so there is some selling pressure among gold holders. But I want to reassure your viewers, since you told me that they're interested in precious metals. If you look at the ownership of gold and silver and platinum around the world, especially among financial institutions, it's tiny, tiny.
In other words, say if you look at portfolio managers in the US, most of them in their portfolios have next to zero exposure to gold. They also have very little exposure to oil. Say in 1980 at the last peak of the oil boom of the '70s when oil had gone from essentially a dollar in 1970 to close to $50 on the spot market.
At that at the time oil and oil-related stocks made up for 35% of the S&P 500. We're now down to around 5%. So I think oil stocks are reasonably good value. I mean, if you ask me, Mark, you must buy stocks today, which I don't really want to do, but I think I would also buy some mining companies, although I think that the mining stocks are not acting well, that they will go down first.
As I said, I personally I sleep very well with my gold holdings. And the bonds I have as a cash flow instrument that I consider reasonably safe. I mean, I think I lose less on my bond positions, which are different maturities. Every year some bonds mature, but I think I lose less money on bonds than on Nvidia and Tesla and the Fang Seven stocks and the Magnificent Seven stocks and all these popular investments.
I think that the concept of liquidity is frequently misunderstood and one looks at the M supply of central banks and the interest rates movements and people say when interest rates are going up that the Fed is tightening and when interest rates are going down that they're easing. But that is not entirely correct.
are many other factors that influence global liquidity and especially liquidity in individual markets. Say, if you look look at commercial properties in the United States and also elsewhere, they have declined significantly in price. So, if the Fed funds rate is I'd say 4% and commercial properties drop by 8% per annum, then the interest rate for the property owners, for the commercial property owners, I must specify, is incredibly high.
And the same will happen in say, the stock market if the margin debt, which is very large, is over a trillion dollars, if that margin debt is faced with asset prices that go down, liquidity becomes tight. And my point is that in because of the war in the Middle East, many businesses have slumped and many central banks have essentially less money than they had before the crisis occurred, the intervention in Iran.
And so, we have many different uh influences that have an impact on global liquidity. We have as I mentioned, the collapse in commercial property values has reduced the liquidity. We have stocks that basically haven't really gone up for the last 12 18 months. In fact, since 2021, many stocks have gone down.
If you look at say, the two most favorable uh favorite stocks at the beginning of 2025, year ago, when Nvidia and Tesla have gone up nowhere and these stocks are all down very substantially and then we have a illiquidity occurring in cryptos because many crypto traders, they came in late. They didn't buy Bitcoins below 10,000.
They bought Bitcoins around 100,000. They're all underwater now and they bought speculative meme stocks and token stocks and so forth. They're all underwater. And now we also have the illiquidity that occurs when prices go up and the salaries of people don't go up at the same rate. So they are squeezed.
So what people call in through inflation, what people call, but actually it's a monetary phenomenon that occurs because money when it's increased, when the quantity goes up, it doesn't flow evenly into the system, but it lifts asset prices somewhere or it lifts inflation or it inflates asset prices somewhere and occasionally it inflates the necessities of life.
In other words, the prices in supermarkets go up and this is happening right now. And then, as you know, in life, the psychology of people is very important. Do people feel good? Are you feeling happy? Are you willing to buy something or are you feeling somewhat restrained by conditions that occur around you?
And I think from my observation, because I go out a lot and so forth and meet a lot of people, my observation is that people are worried. They are concerned and they spend less and in my view the economic statistics that will be published will be very bad. Well, this is a very interesting subject and we need a few hours to discuss it in details.
But the essence of interest rates is that they move in long-term cycles. So, if I go back 200 years, I can say they went up until then and then down and so forth. And in this century they went up until 1921 and then [clears throat] they had a declining trend until the Second World War and after the Second World War they started to gradually increase and this increase in interest rates then accelerated in the late 60s and 70s with a peak in interest rates in 1981.
To be precise, September 21, 1981. And then after [clears throat] the September '81, we had a declining interest rate structure in the US and worldwide until say May to August 2020, when the 10-year note the 10-year Treasury bond, which had yielded more than 15% in 1981, in August 2020, it went down and had a yield of 0.57% 0.
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