Marc Faber : We have a Credit addicted Economy

Marc Faber : Well, you could build a conspiracy theory. Basically the U.S. had a significant increase in the average household income in real terms from the late 1940s to essentially the mid-1960s. And, then inflation began to bite and real income growth slowed down. Then came the 1980s and in order not to disappoint the household income recipients you essentially printed money and had a huge debt expansion. So if you have an economic system and you suddenly grow your debt at a very high rate, it's like an injection of a stimulant of steroids. So the economy grew at the relatively fast pace but built on additional debt. And, this obviously cannot go on forever. It went on for much longer than I thought because I started to write about excessive debt growth already in the late 80s, I was very early about this. But when it comes to an end you have a problem. So the Fed had never paid any attention, the Fed is about the worse economic forecast you can imagine. They are academics. They never go to a local pub. They never go shopping or they lie but basically they are a bunch of people who never worked a single day in their lives. They’re not businessmen. They have to balance the books, earn some money by selling goods, and pay the expenditure, they get paid by the government. And, so these people have no clue about the economy. And, so what happens is they never paid any attention to excessive credit growth and let me remind you, between 2000 and 2007, credit growth was five times the growth of the economy in nominal terms. In other words, in order to create one dollar of GDP, you had to borrow another five dollars from the credit market. Now this came to an end in 2008. Now the Fed have never paid any attention to credit growth, they realized if we have a credit addicted economy and credit growth slows down we have to print money. So that’s what they did. But believe me it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that if you print money you don’t create prosperity. Otherwise, every country would be unbelievably rich because every country would print money and be happy thereafter. - in Chris Martenson interview
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