Marc Faber on the FED Not Tapering

"My view was that they would taper by about $10 billion to $15 billion, but I'm not surprised that they don't do it for the simple reason that I think we are in QE unlimited.The people at the Fed are professors, academics. They never worked a single life in the business of ordinary people. And they don't understand that if you print money, it benefits basically a handful of people maybe--not even 5% of the population, 3% of the population. And when you look today at the market action, ok, stocks are up 1%. Silver is up more than 6%, gold up more than 4%, copper 2.9%, crude oil 2.68%, and so forth. Crude oil, gasoline are things people need, ordinary people buy everyday. Thank you very much, the Fed boosts these items that people need to go to their work, to heat their homes, and so forth and at the same time, asset prices go up, but the majority of people do not own stocks. Only 11% of Americans own directly shares." - via Bloomberg News

Contrarian Investor Dr.Marc Faber is an international investor known for his uncanny predictions of the stock market and futures markets around the world.

I like Bonds from Russia, Kazakhstan, India with yields of 5-6 per cent

On corporate bonds, I like issues from Russia, Kazakhstan and India with yields of 5-6 per cent, but they are not 100 per cent safe unless they are triple-A. Corporate bonds have an equity character. They don't move much when stock markets crash. When things go bad, government bonds on the other hand tend to go up in value because of flight to safe havens.

Contrarian Investor Dr.Marc Faber is an international investor known for his uncanny predictions of the stock market and futures markets around the world.

Higher Education is Almost Always Useless

If you look to hire anybody today you will find thousands of people with MBAs and they all want to work for you. The question is, how much can they produce for you. I do not know the answer. If on the other hand, I look for a reliable electrician, carpenter, or plumber, it is very difficult to find. So I think that the generation that grew up say during the depression and in the 1950s, when a worker in America had a very high social standing and could travel to Europe, and with the prevailing exchange rate spend a lot of money in Europe. The view then became, whether it came from the government, the media, or from the workers themselves, was that a workman’s job is a lower class job. We want our children to be academics. A lot of people are not suited to be academics or they do not know how to apply the knowledge they acquired in universities, if anything is acquired, and that is a very big question. So you now have an army of people that came out of universities, and I tell you, a lot of these people I would not dream of hiring. They are completely useless. I am not saying that everybody is useless, some have a very good education and a very good personality. But the ones that I would hire I would hire them with or without a university degree. I would look at them and say, “Can they do something? Are they effective? Can they accomplish something or not?” I would not even ask them if they have a university degree, I am not interested in that.

In general, if you want to be a medical doctor, I can understand that you need to go to medical school. If you want to be an engineer or an architect, I can understand you need to go to a technical college. If you want to be a teacher, then maybe it is useful to know something and go to a university. But for most people, I do not think that education is that important. It is probably important in that, at least when I studied, you were given a job to do or a paper to do, maybe on a subject that you had no idea about. Then you had to go and study and learn about this subject. Through this you may learn how to learn and how to talk about things about which you have no clue, which is very important in business.

- in The Prospect Group


Contrarian Investor Dr.Marc Faber is an international investor known for his uncanny predictions of the stock market and futures markets around the world.