Marc Faber sees interest rates going up within three months

From ArabianMoney.net:

One of the wisest and most trusted investment advisors in the world, Dr Marc Faber says that interest rates will be going up within three months after the bond market passes ‘an important inflection point’.

This is exactly the opposite of what the US Federal Reserve is promising, and is bound to turn global financial markets upside down. Higher interest rates will strengthen the dollar rather than weaken it, while the value of bond holdings all over the globe will be decimated.

Stock market impact

Stocks look to be a winner until you consider the impact of higher interest rates on an already weakened global economy, particularly the US, Japan and Europe. For one thing real estate prices will fall sharply and bank balance sheets will be once again seriously impaired. Stock markets will therefore come down. Rising interest rates are not good news for equities.

A rise in the cost of money is the last thing that the US central bank wants to achieve right now. However, interest rates can only be artificially held at record lows for so long. Eventually the weight of new money entering the system becomes too much for it to bear any longer and there is a tipping point for bonds.

Professor Niall Ferguson, the celebrity historian is another leading financial pundit to take this view, and it is no surprise that Dr Marc Faber is also an ardent student of history. For this bond market reaction is nothing new. It has happened many, many times before.

Basically money creation will always eventually overwhelm the very instrument used to create it. The pattern that follows is first a very sharp deflation of real asset prices and then later a hyperinflation of asset prices which in extreme scenarios – like Weimar Germany – requires the issuing of a new currency.

Faber’s usually right

Dr Marc Faber’s track record for calling such major market moves has been outstanding in the decade that he has been known to ArabianMoney. Sometimes he is like the boy in the parable of the emperor with no clothes, and what he says should be blinding obvious but nobody will admit it.

Today the bond market is an obvious bubble. Interest rates are perilously low and this completely distorts the investment world leaving savers with little income. But this sort of financial conjuring trick only works for so long and the saucerer’s plates eventually all come tumbling down.

Then savers get their interest again. Real estate, stocks and bonds take a big hit from higher interest rates. The dollar at first will surge in value, probably depressing precious metal prices too in the process, although they are increasingly just another currency, albeit one that pays no interest.

Fed response

But the Fed response to this crisis will be to learn nothing and print even more money, and that will finally result in runaway inflation. Only then will you want to be invested in stocks to rise with this tide.

This looks like being a very tough phase to be invested in any major asset class so the main advice seems to be to stay liquid, ironically being long the dollar seems the best defense against Fed action specifically designed to weaken the greenback.

But you would want to convert that cash back into real assets like gold, silver, houses and stocks before the great inflation. In any case that is ArabianMoney’s interpretation of how rising interest rates will play out, assuming that Marc Faber is right again.

However, for the record Dr Marc Faber has stock markets correcting in October/November in his latest newsletter and does not see stocks as a good investment now as suggested in an inaccurate Bloomberg report yesterday.