Saturday, September 22, 2007

No easy bounce back this time, says Marc Faber

Marc Faber, quoted in The Daily Reckoning Australia on Thursday but writing in late August, anticipated the Fed's strategy of interest rate cutting, and thinks it won't work.

Unlike all the Wall Street strategists who compare the current credit crisis to the credit crisis of 1998 (Long Term Capital Management), I believe that the ongoing credit problems will be far worse and of a longer-term nature. This will make it difficult for the market to reach new highs in the near future. Moreover, even if the 1998 comparison were to hold, we would still be looking at a much deeper stock market correction than the 22% sell-off we saw in 1998....

...even if the Fed were to cut rates massively now, it is unlikely that it would stimulate credit growth, which, as I have explained repeatedly in the past, must continuously expand at an accelerating rate in a credit- and asset-driven economy in order to keep the economic plane from losing altitude. Accelerating credit growth is most unlikely now, because I cannot see how financial intermediaries will ease lending standards any time soon after the losses they have recently endured and following their dismal stock performance...

The crises that build up in international financial structures always ricochet from country to country….

...For the last several years, investors have enjoyed a massive global boom. But they should not rule out a massive global panic.

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