While our Agora Financial Reserve members were at the first Safety and Survival Summit, Chris Mayer and Byron King were visiting Baltimore news radio programs to tell local listeners where their money will be safe in these tumultuous markets.
On Thursday, Chris Mayer – editor of Capital & Crisis – spent an hour with WBAL’s Ron Smith to discuss recent market shifts, ruminate on the rise of gold, and speculate on doomed economies. Mayer reminded listeners that Greece is far from the only economy in jeopardy and points to why we shouldn’t be surprised by recent market turmoil. In one highlight, Chris posited: “If you think Greece is toast, look at California. They’re in a bad, bad way.”
Here are some excerpts from the interview:
Chris Mayer: We were talking a little about that off air that this is how we have bubbles. When people forget what happened before and we do the same thing over and over and over and over again. This time it’s different.
Ron Smith: They ignore any historical warnings because that was then and we’re really smarter now.
Mayer: Right, in 2000 it was internet stocks. They’re going to go up and then in 2007 it was housing prices, it’s going to go up.
…I think that if we look at the history of the dollar since what the Federal Reserve, it’s lost (over 90% of its value) and everybody knows you can look at your own life and think back 10 years ago what it cost you to get a haircut and there’s something like that and what it cost today. So that is a dead rock of investing. There would be no reason, you wouldn’t have to worry so much if you could just stick those dollars in your mattress and know that when you took them out again they would be worth something close. Which is what you can reasonably assume with gold at least in the long-haul.
Smith: What the powers that be have done is they’ve made it really impossible for the saver to make money, forcing them into speculation.
Mayer: Absolutely, this is the problem with all these policies, operation twists, and these things where they want to lower interest rates, they’re all aimed at helping debtors, and what they hurt is the savers. So all the older elderly people have saved their money and are trying to make a living with their CD’s their getting paid one and two percent so that we can help the borrowers out there who –
Smith: And what people have to understand is, this was all by design, this is not an accident.
Mayer: No they know what they’re doing. They know they have a debt problem and the easy way to fix it is to go ahead and print more money.
Smith: But like everything, like all games, there comes an end to it. If my cursory reading of history is correct –
Mayer: There you go again with the history again Ron.
The full audio is exclusively available here.
Then on Friday, Byron King – editor of Outstanding Investments – was welcomed back to WYPR’s Midday with Dan Rodricks to re-address the movement to green energies during the wrap-up of their annual telethon. King pointed to heavy long-term investment in traditional energy sources, and the likelihood that we will be waiting for true “green” energies for some time.
Excerpts:
Rodricks: You believe the carbon era is here to stay for awhile, but we are seeing the start, maybe, of a transition to green anyway, at least there’s a lot of talk about it, more than talk. There’s some funding going into it. I’d like to spend at least some time with you today talking about the investment potential in clean energy sources and technology. What can you tell folks who have that interest?
King: We are living in a carbon era. There’s lots of hydro carbon molecules out there. We’re going to be in a hydro carbon era for a long time but, yes, there is a growing green sector. The bad news is that it’s a very, very small miniscule energy sector in the totality of almost anything you want to name. Whether it’s the whole world’s energy budget, whether it’s theUSnational energy budget, whether it’s the state or the regional budget, I mean green is small. The good news is green is going to grow and so if you get into the right kind of energy place in the right kind of green companies you could leverage your funds and you could grow things a lot more. Bad side of that, though, is there’s a lot more risk. As we’ve seen with some of the solar power failures that are just in the news the last couple of months really, there are problems.
You are dealing with risky companies, risky technologies. Managements that are still trying to figure it out. People have been doing oil for 150 years. People know how to do oil, people know how to do coal. People don’t quite know how to do solar.
Rodricks: I remember what you said about coal in particular and oil, just face it, it’s going to be around for a long time until we make this transition and I don’t know, what accelerates that transition? Government investment, private capital, where’s the private capital?
King: There’s this thing called the tax code. It controls the whole world. People just say, “Oh, I want a free market.” There’s no free market, I mean you can’t turn a shovel anywhere, whether to build a wind turbine or dig a coal mine, without years worth of environment permitting. So there is a massive level of government control. That is why we see coal dominating at least many parts of the country. The electric power business, it’s why we’re going to see more and more natural gas. Now you can say, well natural gas, that still has carbon, it’s not clean. But it’s got half the carbon of coal, so you’re moving in the direction that you want to go. Don’t knock it.
Everybody jokes about the problem with solar is – one big problem – it’s called nighttime. Well nighttime unless you have sufficient storage to build it up during the day and then feed it out into the load system at night but then you need a whole new grid. We don’t have that grid, we have to rebuild that grid. Does anybody have a $100 billion to rebuild the grid with? I mean these are serious problems, serious policy problems and I know that a lot of my readers are extremely well versed in this.
You can listen to the full audio of this interview by clicking here.
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