“You have to give credit to [Ben] Bernanke and [Alan] Greenspan. They have achieved something no central bankers have achieved in history. They created a bubble in everything…The only asset that went down from 2002 to 2007 was the U.S. dollar.” There was one place he said that didn’t grow in the final years of the latest bubble. That was Zimbabwe, which suffered hyperinflation and economic collapse at the hands of dictator Robert Mugabe. The African country was “run by a money printer, Mr. Mugabe, a mentor of Mr. Bernanke,” Mr. Faber said. The crowd chuckled.
Mr. Faber told the audience to put money in Asian equities and commodities. He said gold is important, but buy real gold, not derivatives, and keep the gold outside the U.S. The U.S. confiscated gold during the Great Depression, he noted. He, like Warren Buffett, Nouriel Roubini and others, thinks the dollar is destined to erode, though Mr. Faber said it could rebound over the next few months as signs of deflation stick around. “The dollar in the long run is a doomed currency,” he said. “This is the short of the century…The government’s policy is to make it worthless.”