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Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Marc Faber : The difficulty for the investor is to navigate between today and the time of collapse that I think is inevitable
Marc Faber : I’ve learned that what I know I obviously learned from someone. I didn’t invent it. So I worked at White Weld with Gary Schilling and he’s a friend of mine; I see him occasionally at the conferences and so forth. And I disagree with him about that we have deflation. He lives in New Jersey. I went to New York airport the other and day and then I drove to New York City and the Lincoln Tunnel fee has just increased from $8 to $14. Well, I’m sorry, that is a 50 percent increase. And so there is no deflation in the system today. But if you say there is deflation in the housing market, yeah, there has been deflation in the housing market and if you ask me will there be one day a deflationary collapse, yes, one day there will be a deflationary collapse, but you understand, as an investor it’s nice to say there will be a deflationary collapse, but it could happen from Dow Jones 100,000 or gold price 20,000 or from home prices that are much higher than today and from a dollar that has depreciated much more than is the case today.
So the difficulty for the investor is actually to navigate between today and the time of collapse that I think is inevitable. But how do you protect your wealth in the meantime and in the time of collapse? Investors, and I think they have to begin to think about this already today and say, okay, what does it mean if there is a global kind of deflationary collapse.
In a deflationary collapse, everything essentially goes down in value, but obviously, like in an inflationary boom, in an inflationary boom you have different assets that go up at different times with different intensity. So let’s say if you look at 2000 to today, you were better off in gold and commodities than in equities. Now, in a deflationary collapse, the key is to say, okay, I’m only going to lose 50 percent when everybody else will lose 90 percent. So relatively speaking, I will be much better off. And that is the strategy that investors should consider: How to position themselves to lose less in the deflationary collapse in the final crisis than the majority of people. Then relatively to other people, their position will improve. - in the Financial Sense Newshour