Monday, September 13, 2010

Bill Fleckenstein Latest Views

The market is back to stupid mode and matching any bears worst fears I mentioned was possible a couple of weeks ago. I don't feel like talking about it, at least this second. In the interim: The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader had a good interview with Bill Fleckenstein which can be found here.

I have always liked Fleckenstein and enjoy his thoughts. He covers his thoughts on gold, the bond market, emerging markets and other odds and ends. I tend to have deflationary thoughts when I look at the world and Bill tends to be more inflationist. I feel like if you are going to make the inflationist argument he has the right one. That is an eventual collapse in confidence and not just money printing. If you have a collapse in confidence in the currency the end result leads to massive hyperinflation. Why deflation leads to inflation. Not surprisingly he hates government bonds and loves gold. When talking about gold he mentioned that he has to stay long gold until there is some legitimate other alternative which he does not see. He seems fairly agnostic about the economy and the stock market. I wished he would have talked a little bit more about his views here.

Good interview. There are few inflationist who make logical argument that make alot of sense but he is one of them. Eventually it is a loss of trust in the currency that will start the inflationary parade. I just tend to think it is farther off than some.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The problem with gold though is that it's hard to knnow how much of gold's current value already reflects expectations of massive inflation.

What is gold really worth? It's impossible to say.