Marc Faber, the Swiss investor known as Dr Doom, was the star turn of RTHK's Money For Nothing finance programme yesterday morning. This was a special show in that it was a winning item from an auction for Operation Santa Claus, which raises money for charity. The wife of Nick Green, managing director of the executive search firm GreenGroup Executive, bid HK$8,000 for "breakfast with Marc Faber", as a present for her husband.
Faber was his usual mixture of engaging and bearish. He conceded: "We forecasters are terrible at forecasting anything," but added that his job was harder last year when he had to contend with unpredictable interventions by governments and central banks. The world was better off without central banks, he said. Noting that the Federal Reserve justified its actions in the interest of maintaining price stability, Faber said: "It has been empirically proved that there was much better price and economic stability in the 19th century, before the central bank, ie the Federal Reserve, was formed in 1913."
As for his investing style, he revealed an interesting opportunistic streak by buying Sun Hung Kai Properties after the stock had declined in the wake of its corruption scandal.
Stephen Roach, now at the Yale School of Management, has written an interesting article titled "China's Last Soft Landing?" In what is a surprisingly forthright piece, Roach, the former Morgan Stanley chief economist and chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, observes that Beijing appears to have defied the sceptics and pulled off another soft landing, the second in four years.