Monday, June 30, 2014

Not easy to make loads of money in you are studying History or English

In a bubble environment everybody wants to essentially gamble and nobody wants to do a serious job. So what you are lacking is skilled labor, people who can handle and look after machines. Today a machine is very sophisticated, much more sophisticated than a derivative product. So there is a lack of labor in that segment of economy manufacturing and highly specialized manufacturing. And there is a surplus of people who went to college and studied English, philosophy or geography, or social science, that are in today's world are not terribly useful. I'm not saying history and geography is not useful, I'm just saying if you expect to make a lot of money out of History or Geography, you have to be top of your class. In other words, you have to be the best historian or geographer, otherwise you are going to be in the surplus product.

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Central banks worldwide biased to inflationary monetary policies

I think to be fair the Federal Reserve after its foundation in 1913 has essentially always pursued relatively expansionary monetary policies with one exception that stands out and that was the period Paul Volcker 1979-1980 when he pushed the discount rate to over 20%. A very courageous move I may add; but in general if you look at the price level in the U.S. in 1900 compared to 1800 and you look at real per capita increases between 1800 and 1900, then I have to say that the economic expansion under a gold standard essentially in the 19th century was stronger than in the 20th century when the Fed was in existence. 

And what happened is in the 20th century the price level as you well know and as everybody knows has gone up dramatically in terms of how much it costs you to fill the tank of your car. 

How much a movie ticket costs, how much a pound of bread costs, and so forth and so on. And so really the policies of the Federal Reserve have always been inflationary. 

And I would say every central bank that essentially has the control of over the quantity of money will in the long-run ensue inflationary policies. Maybe temporary, occasionally, they tighten the monetary policies, but actually in the U.S. we didn't have tight monetary policies now for 10-20 years.

Monday, June 23, 2014

Marc Faber to continue investing in Vietnam despite tensions

Vietnamese work hard and they have ambitions. Investors like countries with highly ambitious people.
Marc Faber in Vietnam 
Vietnam has an attractive investment environment. Vietnam’s economy has been affected by the tensions with China in the East Sea. But I believe Vietnamese and Chinese diplomats will find a way to ease the tensions. I will continue investing in Vietnam.

Thursday, June 19, 2014

Marc Faber: Capitalism vs Government Intervention

The worst part of government intervention is that they don’t let their own failures appear and instead of letting big companies go bust and clean the system, they go and support them and this is unfair to the strong competitors because capitalism is all about the survival of the fittest and about people who make or take wrong decisions being punished through losses.

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