Mary Bono R-45
Marc Faber Predicts Dirty War
Blythe CA - Ehrenburg AZ
Dateline 3-2-2010
Investment Adviser Marc Faber has predicted a Dirty War scenario for the United States. My cellphone has blown up, I have already complained to the FBI that the Colorado River is despoiled. I have also criticized Barack Obama winning the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.
Leo Lewis, Asia Business Correspondent
The world’s most powerful investors have been advised to buy farmland, stock up on gold and prepare for a “dirty war” by Marc Faber, the notoriously bearish market pundit, who predicted the 1987 stock market crash.
The bleak warning of social and financial meltdown was delivered today in Tokyo at a gathering of 700 pension and sovereign wealth fund managers.
Dr Faber, who advised his audience to pull out of American stocks one week before the 1987 crash and was among a handful who predicted the more recent financial crisis, vies with the Nouriel Roubini, the economist, as a rival claimant for the nickname Dr Doom.
Speaking today, Dr Faber said that investors, who control billions of dollars of assets, should start considering the effects of more disruptive events than mere market volatility.
“The next war will be a dirty war,” he told fund managers: "What are you going to do when your mobile phone gets shut down or the internet stops working or the city water supplies get poisoned?”
His investment advice, which was the first keynote speech of CLSA’s annual investment forum in Tokyo, included a suggestion that fund managers buy houses in the countryside because it was more likely that violence, biological attack and other acts of a “dirty war” would happen in cities.
He also said that they should consider holding part of their wealth in the form of precious metals “because they can be carried”.
One London-based hedge fund manager described Mr Faber’s address as “excellent, chilling stuff: good at putting you off lunch, but not something I can tell clients asking me about quarterly returns at the end of March”.
Dr Faber did offer a few more traditional investment tips, although their theme fitted his general mode of pessimism.
In Asia, particularly, he said, stock pickers should play on future food and water shortages by buying into companies with exposure to agriculture and water treatment technologies.
