India stocks doing reasonably well

I just looked at the statistics of the revenue per shares of companies and in India we have a situation where revenue per shares has been rising significantly more than in other emerging economies in the last few years. 

Now at the same time we have in India, pressure on corporate margins, profit margins, and if there is an environment where profit margins can improve, corporate profits could rebound very strongly. And so its conceivable that the stock markets in India, which have been one the best performing markets in the world year to date, that this performance continues for a while.

Size of government matters to economic growth

I have to say that in the US, no matter who is the president of the United States, to reform congress and the lobbyists and the lobbyists and the curropt system and the cronies is incredibly difficult. So you have essentially governments around the world and bureucrasies that are very difficult to reform. And I have to point out that the period between 1970 - 1910 in Europe and US was characterized by very strong growth certainly in real income terms and that was the period the government made up for maximum 15 % of the economy. So the larger the government becomes the lesser economic growth there is. 

If someone asked me how do you really stimulate growth in the global economy, I would say that Government spending has to be cut meaningfully and the economy has to be free from the chain of that he buerecracy the government imposes on them.

Best place to store gold is Asia- Marc Faber

I wouldn't store it[Gold] in the US. I would rather store it in Singapore or in Hong Kong or maybe you bury it somewhere. 

But as I mentioned earlier, I think the tendency is going to be for politicians that have completely failed and utterly failed to essentially blame rich people for wealth inequality and then they will go to the people, to the masses, and say, "You know what? What we have to do is take away their gold. These are the people who damaged your economy. Let's take away their gold." 

And in the US they may do that, and in the ECB in Europe. The horrible politicians in Brussels and the US government are one in the same. They will go to the Europeans and say, "If we do it, why don't you also do it?" and Draghi and all these characters will say, "Yeah, good idea." 

And then they'll knock on the door of the Swiss and the Swiss, who have no backbone anymore – except their soccer team, who consists of foreigners, not Swiss, all born overseas or children of foreigners in Switzerland – the politicians and the Greens and the Socialists will say, "Yeah, good idea. Take the gold from the rich people." So my view is it's probably best to hold gold in Asia and Singapore and Hong Kong where there is a culture of private property and a culture of gold. 

Younger households finding it harder to afford to buy homes

I think one of the problems of the current monetary policies is that asset prices have risen very rapidly, notably in stocks in US and bond prices. The bond market, credit market is inflated and the stock market is inflated, and because of the strong housing price recovery in the US younger people cant afford to buy homes. 

The monetary policies by boosting asset prices have lowered the affordability of assets. In future returns from all kinds of assets real estate, stocks, bond, even commodities will be relatively low.

US Dollar slowly losing its importance to rest of the world

The dollar is still going to be for some time the most important currency because I can travel with $1000 in cash or as I do, usually $10,000, and I can go into any shop, nightclub, bar, anywhere in the world, and pay with dollars. So it's still the accepted currency.

But increasingly, as world trade is more and more between emerging economies with each other. The world trade used to be, say 50 years ago, between the poor world, the emerging economies, the Europe and the US, and then it went up somewhere else. But nowadays more and more countries say – trade of China with Africa is now $200 billion. It's twice the size of trade between Africa and America. So over time, all this trade will be carried in other currencies than the US dollar. And the US policy makers and the incompetent people at the State Department managed to antagonize Mr. Putin with the Ukrainian uprising, which they supported. Now, this has backfired. Mr. Putin went and made a gas pipeline deal with China and the payments will not be settled in US dollars.

So gradually, yes, the importance of the US dollar is going to diminish as gradually the importance of the US economy – and I'm stressing this, relative to the rest of the world – is diminishing. In the '50s and the '60s the US was the dominant economy. It is still, according to their accounting methods, the largest economy but say car sales in China are as large as in the US and you have, of course, many more Internet users in China than in the US and there are many more computers in China than the US and so on. So in many sectors the US economy is no longer the largest. But all I'm saying is relative to the rest of the world, the US, in terms of military power and in terms of economic power, has lost out.