Thursday, August 19, 2010I will only sell my gold when there's panic and stocks are bargains, says Doug Casey
INTERNATIONAL. As the world sinks deeper into what he calls the Greater Depression, Casey Research Chairman Doug Casey sees default on the US national debt as inevitable—albeit probably in the guise of currency destruction.
He anticipates further contraction in real estate, particularly on the commercial front. As long as stocks remain overpriced, he'll shy away from equities—except perhaps in favored sectors such as gold. In fact, in this exclusive interview with The Gold Report, Doug posits that gold juniors might "go up by an order of magnitude or more, even while most other stocks are going down."
The Gold Report: Doug, at a recent conference you said that the U.S. ought to default on its national debt now. Why that rather than letting it play out?
Doug Casey: Several other things almost equally radical should be done besides defaulting on the debt. I recognize that an outright default is most unlikely, but the national debt should be defaulted on for several reasons.
To start with, once the U.S. government defaults on its debt, people will think twice before lending it any more money; giving politicians the ability to borrow is like giving a teenager a bottle of whisky and the keys to a Corvette. A second reason is that the debt is an albatross around the necks of the next several generations; it's criminal to make indentured servants out of people who aren't even born yet. A third reason would be to overtly punish those who have been lending money to the government, enabling it to do all the stupid and destructive things that the government does with that money.
The debt will be defaulted on one way or another. The trouble is they're almost certainly going to default on it through inflation, by destroying the currency, which is much worse than defaulting on it overtly. That's because inflation will wipe out the relatively few people who are prudent in this country, those who are actually saving money. Because they generally save in the form of dollars, they're going to wipe them out financially.
It's just horrible. Runaway inflation will reward the profligates who are in debt—people who've been living above their means. And punish the producers who've been saving and trying to build capital. That's in addition to the fact it will destroy millions of productive enterprises. A runaway inflation is the worst thing that can happen to a society, short of a major war. They just should default on it honestly, as it were.
TGR: But your belief is we'll try to inflate our way out of it to pay for it.
DC: Don't say "we." Say the U.S. government. I don't consider myself part of the problem. Americans have to learn that the government isn't "us." It's an entity that has its own interests, its own life, its own agenda. It views citizens as milk cows—or perhaps even beef cows—strictly as a means to its ends.
TGR: Whether it's overt or by default, doesn't that end up in the same place down the line?
DC: There are two ways they can default—one by saying, "We don't have the money and we're not going to pay you," and the other by continuing to print up money and giving people the number of dollars that they're owed, except the dollars are worthless. The first alternative is by far better, for many reasons we can't fully explore now. But it's going to be traumatic either way.
TGR: But the assumption that we could actually just print more dollars and pay off the debt implies that somewhere the debt will stabilize.
DC: Oh no. It doesn't have to stabilize. To pay interest on the national debt, and to pay for additional spending, all the Federal Reserve has to do is buy bonds from the U.S. government. It doesn't have to stabilize at all. The government is most unlikely to cut back on its spending, most of which has become part of the social fabric—Medicare, Social Security, unemployment benefits, food stamps, corporate bailouts, continuing foreign wars, domestic "security"…These people are crazy enough that it could get like Germany in the '20s or Zimbabwe a few years ago.
TGR: At what point do we tip over and turn into a situation such as Zimbabwe or the Weimar Republic?
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