Today King World News interviewed Barron’s roundtable member Dr. Marc Faber. When asked to compare the 70‘s cycle to the current one Faber responded, “Well I think we have had in the 70’s rapidly escalating commodity prices, and in some cases they went up much more than what we’ve seen so far in the last ten years. Of course the financial position of the US is much worse than what we had in the 70’s. In the 70’s, total credit as a percent of the economy was just at 140%, we’re now at 379% and we have the unfunded liabilities which we didn’t have at that time. So I would say the financial position of the US has continuously worsened over the last 30 years.”
When asked about the proposed $5.8 trillion in cuts to the US budget Faber stated, “Well I think what they are discussing in terms of cutting the budget is far too little, and the problem is that you can’t actually cut a lot of expenditures because they have to be met. In other words social security, medicare, medicaid, that you can’t really cut. Also the military budget is really difficult to cut because the military complex in the Unites States, the lobbyists are very powerful.”
When asked about silver specifically Faber remarked, “Well my friend Eric Sprott he maintains that there is a genuine shortage of silver and that may be the case so silver may still move up...Now with the loss of purchasing power of the dollar and other currencies people are concerned if they have say a million or a billion dollars that the value of these dollars will one day be next to nothing.
So they have to invest in something and so they look for real estate, they look for equities and of course they come to realize slowly, I have to say very slowly that gold and silver are not commodities in the sense of industrial commodities, but that they are currencies. Precious metals are basically currencies that are honest because you can’t increase the supply indefinitely. You can’t have QE2, QE3, QE4 in the gold market.
...If you print money everything will go up...and now the money printing doesn’t go into housing because we have an oversupply of housing, but it goes into equities and for Mr. Bernanke unfortunately into commodities. And this is lifting the cost of living of the median household, of the typical household in the US...Mr. Bernanke is a murderer, he’s a murderer of the middle class and the working class.”
The destruction of the middle class will be a huge issue going forward for the United States. As the chasm between the rich and the poor widens, in all likelihood we will see civil unrest in the US. I suspect in the end Faber will be right, Bernanke will continue to be a murderer of the middle class. He will be the “great destroyer” of the standard of living for most Americans.
The KWN interview with Marc Faber is available now CLICK HERE to listen.
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