Faber to Shiller: You Keep Dollars, I'll Buy Gold
WORLD-RENOWNED US academic Robert Shiller today questioned gloom-and-doom forecaster Marc Faber's call to Buy Gold, only to be invited to continue holding Dollars instead.
Meeting at a seminar in Helsinki hosted at the Finnish National Opera by Evli Bank Oyj, Faber and Shiller spoke on "What is the next asset bubble?"
"I'm prepared to make a bet," said Faber. "You keep your US Dollars and I'll keep my gold. We'll see which one goes to zero first."
Marc Faber admitted to being too gloomy, joking that "Sometimes I'm so concerned about the world I want to jump out of the window."
But "in the worst case scenario, in the systemic failure that I expect, [gold] would still have some value," the Swiss author and money manager, now based in Thailand, went on.
Responding to Marc Faber's comments, "I'm inclined to think gold prices after this crisis might return to a lower level," said Robert Shiller, a professor of both economics and finance at Yale, a recognized authority on the US housing market, and author of the best-selling study of investment bubbles, Irrational Exuberance.
"Given the low yields of the alternatives [ie, bonds], the valuation of the stock market doesn't look so bad," Shiller is quoted by Bloomberg.
"These are times when a reasonably normal application to the stock market is probably called for."
When the financial system "goes down" replied Faber, "and only plastic credit cards are left, maybe then people will realize and go back to some gold-based system or such."