My Loans Consolidated

Marc Faber gave an interesting closing speech in the Agora Financial Symposium in Vancouver, which was held July 19-23, 2010. The symposium was the 11th annual anniversary of Agora Financial and the topic was “Assault on Enterprise – How to Invest in the Age of Rising Taxes, Wall Street Crooks and Government Boondoggles”.

In his speech, Faber said:

We’ve had a trend for most of the past 200 years: GDP of countries like China and India went down while the West surged. That’s now changed. Emerging economies will go up, and your children in the West will have a lower standard of living than you did. Absolutely. We won’t sink to the bottom of the sea. But other countries will grow much faster than us. The world is very competitive, and the odds are stacked against us. Americans, with their inborn arrogance, will not let it go that easily, so there will be lots of tension going forward.

Marc Faber also explains the delusions that Americans currently have regarding consumer market and knowledge. The US think that they are the largest consumer market in the whole world. In his speech he explains why this is a delusion. Another delusion that the US has is that they think they have all the knowledge in the world. Regarding this, Faber said,

We also think that we have all the knowledge of the world. We think that’s our edge. But knowledge in countries with much larger populations have the edge. Research now is being done in Asia because it’s cheaper there. Companies like Intel, IBM, and Microsoft are researching in Asia. It’s just so much cheaper there. And they are smarter than the U.S. in many ways, too.

Read the whole review of his speech here.

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