I was invited to the luncheon talk by Dr Marc Faber and Dr Anantha of Bank Julius Baer last Friday at the Ritz-Carlton. Both speakers spoke of doom but punctuated with humour!
Please see the report by Toh Paik Choo who gives her sense of humour , too!
Quote:
WHEN you are through reading this, go to the nearest money changer and convert some Singapore dollars – not all though – into Norwegian and Canadian currencies.
Put the cash into a gold cream cracker tin under your bed for the long-term.
Then check The Straits Times classifieds for a piece of property in some obscure corner of the globe and finally, learn to drive a tractor.
Extreme advice from some punch-drunk oracle for these extreme times? Hardly. Just a layman’s interpretation of where we are headed in the financial crisis.
 |
| DR DOOM: Dr Marc Faber was one of the two speakers at the dialogue. -File photo: ST |
The Business Times, in partnership with Bank Julius Baer, presented a dialogue with Dr Marc Faber, the broker/dealer better known to readers of his monthly newsletter as Dr Doom.
The event began with lunch for 200 top people in their respective trades – $150 a plate (pre-credit crunch, it could’ve been double that) in the Ritz-Carlton ballroom.
The two main speakers were Dr V Anantha-Nageswaran, chief investment officer of Asia Pacific BJB, and Dr Faber, editor and publisher of The Gloom Boom & Doom Report.
Between these two confident economists, a total of 65 graphs and two geopolitical maps were screened in support of their statistics.
Here’s a heartlander thought: What if we could put to musical notes the volatile rises and falls charted? Would it end on a primal scream note?
Certainly, moon, June and croon in anyone’s vocabulary have been replaced by gloom, boom and doom.
The Chennai-born Dr Anantha-Nageswaran, 46, got his doctorate from University of Massachusetts for his work on the empirical behaviour of exchange rates.
Which is perhaps why he recommends gold. ‘Kill two birds with one stone (ingot), buy gold for investment, gold jewellery will make your spouse happy. It is the neutral currency that has kept its value the last seven years.’
The currencies in good shape, according to the expert, are those from Norway, Canada and Singapore. The currency not to keep under your bed is ‘The British peso.’
He ended with, ‘Accumulate long-term, bet mid-term, protect short-term.’
Dr Doom droned on for 45 minutes (and 41 charts that would have challenged an ophthalmologist’s eye).
Born and schooled in Switzerland, Dr Faber is a regular speaker on the investment seminar circuit who is renowned for his ‘contrarian’ investment approach.
His accent made you think of a Henry Kissinger-Arnold Schwarzenegger by-product. You had to be there. Rather, you have to have majored in expansionary monetary policies to have followed his lecture.
He said: ‘Geopolitical tensions are on the rise, balance of power is shifting to China and rogue states, commodity shortages lead to increased international tensions and to resource nationalism.’
And while he’s thankful not to have known war in his lifetime, he was not so sure our children would not see one. ‘So you may be better off in the countryside, the middle of nowhere, and learn how to drive a tractor.’
February 21, 2009 at 6:03 pm Lovely quote. I can totally relate. The opposite is also true that when I use force, am focused on the ego looking good, or distracted flow doesn’t happen, I get discord. Part of my journey has been to trust and move with the flow.
February 23, 2009 at 10:32 pm In my lessons on good trading, I have been taught to watch out for not only the flow but the ebb.The market moves like the waves , ebbing and flowing, also cyclical, and fractal.