Fed “consistently and repeatedly messes up everything,” says Faber

Article written by Prieur du Plessis, editor of the Investment Postcards from Cape Town blog.

Chris Martenson, is an economic researcher and futurist, and creator of the widely-viewed video seminar, The Crash Course, has just conducted a wide-ranging interview with famed investor Marc Faber, author of the Gloom Boom & Doom Report, as reported by Business Insider – Clusterstock.

“If there’s one institution in the US that consistently and repeatedly messes up everything, the Federal Reserve is that institution,” said Faber.

Click here to listen to the interview. (The transcript is here.)

In this podcast Marc explains his views on why:

Government intervention into the free markets has been increasing since the early 1980s (S&Ls, Mexico, LTCM, etc) and is the root cause of our issues, as each intervention brings the system further off track.
The principal vehicle for this intervention, the Fed, has a near-perfect track record of creating unsustainable asset bubbles (to which it is largely blind) when it intervenes.
Since its founding, the Fed has been dedicated to expansionary monetary policy. When looking at history, there’s an argument to be made that per capita price management in the US was better under the gold standard we had before the Fed.
We’re on a direct path to higher inflation, despite the Fed’s preference for raising the deflation spectre and citing the low (and ridiculously-calculated) CPI.
While the Fed is printing money with abandon right now (e.g. buying all new Treasury issuances for the next six months), doing so is raising the risk of a hyperinflationary currency collapse.
US government bonds are a disasterous investment going forward (even if the deflationists are right).
The revolving door between Wall Street and Washington motivates our leadership to preserve the status quo, which is corrosive to markets because smaller investors are waking up to the fact that the rules are stacked in favor of the big players. Investing as we have historically thought of it is dead.

Fed “consistently and repeatedly messes up everything,” says Faber was first posted on January 19, 2011 at 10:05 am.
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