Marc Faber: Real Estate Investing and Renting Out Rooms To Concubines
Listen to this whole interview or start listening at 2:45
Marc Faber: “I was in Phoenix the other day, and then the taxi driver took me to a nice hotel, The Fairmont, and then he told me about how the person he drove right before me told him that he just bought a 5 bedroom house for $120,000. Where in the world can you buy a 5 bedroom house for $120,000 (good question?).
I would buy it, live in one bedroom and rent out 4 bedrooms to concubines!”
Faber is a straight old-school G.
Here is Faber talking about La Jolla, Newport Beach and Laguna Beach. Neighborhoods I am not all unfamiliar with.
And here is Faber talking about Facebook. But more importantly he spits Game at the Asian interview girl.
With his usual holiday cheer Marc Faber’s most recent interview had him slamming the derivative markets. In an interview with Reuters he went over his predictions for 2012 which calls for more monetary easing, QE 3 etc. He also continues to worry about the growing EU sovereign debt crisis and the lack of real solutions. This was confirmed today after the ECB announced more banks than previously known tapped liquidity lines to the tune of $600 billion.
Of course his long-term views are decidedly bearish. He thinks people in 5 years time will have maybe 50% of their money. This wealth loss will be due to either equity collapses or inflationary pressures due to monetary easing. Obviously political solutions are out of the question at this point. One can look at the US government and see utter dysfunction. The GOP led house has refused to extend a tax cut due to lobbyist pressures on certain pet projects. Then in the EU you have France and the UK with increasingly cold diplomatic relations.
“I am convinced the whole derivatives market will cease to exit. Will become zero. And when it happens I don’t know: you can postpone the problems with monetary measures for a long time but you can’t solve them… Greece should have defaulted – it would have sent a message that not all derivatives are equal because it depends on the counterparty.”
Looks like 2012 is shaping up to be another interesting year. The Mayans may be wrong about the end of the world, but if Marc Faber is right we won’t be able to tell the difference.
Jim Rogers thinks Marc Faber has got it wrong about China, when he says the country is possibly headed for a hard landing, which would lead to a devastating impact on commodities around the world.
“Marc still does not understand China. There are going to be several hard landings in the next few years, but China’s will be less hard overall than others such as Greece, U.S., et al,” Rogers told CNBC in an email.
Rogers says some parts of China’s economy will have a “hard landing” but other parts will continue to boom. He says the commodity market will have a correction, but rebutted Faber’s view that it would be devastating.
“Yes, there will be consolidations in the commodity bull market just as all markets have consolidations,” he said. “In 1987, stocks declined 40-80 percent worldwide, but it was not the end of the secular bull market in stocks.”
Rogers said he was still long commodities, adding that gold went up 600 percent in the 1970s and then corrected by 50 percent scaring a lot of people. “It then continued its secular bull market and rose 850 percent. Corrections are the normal way of all markets.”
According to Faber, Rogers’ bullish call on commodities is misplaced. “If I was always bullish about commodities and completely missed out on the crash in 2008, then obviously, having tied essentially my reputation to commodities, I’d continue to be bullish,” Faber said.
But Rogers said Faber had got it wrong when it came to his call in 2008. “I proclaimed repeatedly far and wide that one should not buy commodities in the run up phase. I also explained that I was not selling mine since we were [and are] in a secular bull market,” Rogers said.
“I explained that my shorts of Citibank, Fannie Mae, all the investment banks and homebuilders, plus my long position in the Japanese yen would protect me in any sell-offs. When one’s shorts decline 90-100 percent, it is a good year even when one’s longs decline,” Rogers added.
According to Rogers, Faber is the one who has made many wrong calls, arguing that he “totally missed” the secular bull market in commodities that began in early 1999.
“Also back in those days, he and his friends proclaimed often that China was a mess and would continue to be so,” Rogers said. “They all were wildly excited about Russia. Some of his friends even left China to start operations in Russia. We all know how that resulted.”
Marc Faber: On Cashflow, Montreal, Girlfriends and The Economy
Marc Faber breaks it down on Montreal and The Economy (interestingly enough, I was just in Montreal chopping it up. I am completely sold on the place, definitely going to spend a month or two there next summer. Montreal Data Sheets coming soon.):
Jim Rogers Is Bullish On All Commodities, But There’s Only One Sector He Would Buy Right NowBBC Speechless As Trader Tells Truth: “The Collapse Is Coming…And Goldman Rules The World”
Ingrid Casares & Chris Paciello Back in Biz with The Light Group at the Delano?
If you believe the rumors, South Beach is about to go retro, back to the days when people actually danced at clubs, when real celebrities came to party because they wanted to and not for a carefully orchestrated, trite tabloid photo op, and when the words South Beach and hip together in the same sentence was anything but oxymoronic. That’s right, we have excellent sources telling us that the Captain and Tennille of 90s Miami nightlife, Chris Paciello and Ingrid Casares, are teaming up again, this time as partners in the food and beverage operations at the Delano left recently vacant by Jeffrey Chodorow, who was bought out by the hotel’s owners, Morgans Hotel Group, for $20 million.
Chris Paciello back on South Beach scene at Delano
For the first time since he was released from federal prison five years ago, Miami Beach’s fallen nightscape overlord has returned to where it all started.
Chris Paciello, now 40 and described by some who have run into him as “subdued and humbled,” is settling down at the Delano Hotel.
He’ll be living there for the next few months as he works to give back to the legendary beachside resort its No. 1 ranking among hipsters and celebrities.
Deja view: Mixed reviews on the return of Chris Paciello
Ever since we broke the news that old school South Beach club guy Chris Paciello was returning to his old stomping grounds and possibly reuniting with his former partner Ingrid Casares in the nightlife biz, the reactions have been as polarizing as the Tea Party vs. the Democrats only, instead of tea, it would be vodka. On one side you have the champions, cheerleaders and aging club kids who can overlook his past and subscribe to the Nostalgia Party (there’s already a Chris Paciello Fan Club and “Chris Paciello, The King Is Back” page on Facebook), while on the other side you have those who say it’s just wrong to glorify the return of someone with a criminal past—we’ll call them the Concerned Party. Both sides will argue back and forth over this until the lights come on in the new Light Group-sanctioned Delano hot spot, so there’s really no end to the debate.
Some say people are jealous or nervous that the reunion of the team some say made South Beach the nightlife capital it once was will ruin their own businesses, and others say that people are downright nervous in general, not for business purposes, but for reasons involving personal safety. It’s no secret Paciello had a violent past, for which he has served time in prison. It’s no secret that he had enemies, some who still live and work on South Beach. We spoke to nightlife veteran Gerry Kelly, currently serving as marketing and nightlife operator at Trio On the Bay, who worked with Paciello and wasn’t exactly BFF with the guy back in the day. “I was surprised to hear he was returning to Miami,” Kelly admitted. “I do believe we all learn from our experiences in life. Miami’s nightlife and entertainment culture has changed so much since the late 90s that we all have to adapt and change to keep up with the never ending new trends. The city is definitely big enough for everyone and I wish him the best.”
‘Limelight’: The Rise And Fall Of The Church Of Rave
On Friday, a documentary ostensibly about the rise and fall of a one time club king named Peter Gatien opened in New York (it opens around the country next month). In the early to mid-1990s – the height of rave culture in the U.S. – Gatien owned the biggest clubs in New York City, including Limelight, which lived in a deconsecrated Episcopal Church in the Chelsea neighborhood. Today Gatien lives in Toronto, where he was deported in 2003 after pleading guilty to tax evasion. And Limelight has become a mall. It calls itself a “Festival of Shops.”
Much of the story told in Limelight will be familiar to readers of Clubland, a book chronicling mid-’90s nightlife written by Frank Owen, who covered Limelight at its height and followed its scandalous end in the pages of local alternative weekly the Village Voice. It certainly was to the documentary’s director, Billy Corben, who read the book as he was pursuing another documentary about the man who ran the biggest club in Miami in the mid-’90s. Owen appears frequently as a kind of expert witness in Limelight.
“I had read Clubland because of our interest in Chris Paciello and Liquid in South Beach, and the Miami angle,” says Corben, best known for 2006’s Cocaine Cowboys. Corben and producing partner Albert Spellman still intend to make a movie about Paciello. But first, they’ve made Limelight, which focuses on Gatien, the eye-patched Canadian nightclub impresario who owned Limelight, Palladium, Tunnel and Club U.S.A., who was brought to trial by the City of New York under mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s mid-’90s crime crackdown, alleging that Gatien was overseeing a massive drug ring in his clubs.
Yesterday Marc Faber first made a guest appearance at the Ira Sohn conference, warning his audience to prepare for war, then promptly shifted to Bloomberg’s offices where he discussed his outlook primarily on China, but also on the US, with Carol Massar, once again warning about war. As usual, he did not mince his words, warning of a “recession”, and predicting that China is simply not growing fast enough in real terms. Nothing new. He did however branch out into the topic of class divergence in both emerging and developed economies: “in front of far too many luxury hotels there are far too many Ferraris, Maseratis, Bentleys… I see a boom everywhere, except for the working class, except for the lower, middle class. But among the well to do people the wealth that is floating around and the prices you pay for high end properties is incredible, and I think that will come to an end, and a lot of people will lose a lot of money… I was in La Jolla, Laguna Beach, Newport Beach, I was in front of a restaurant smoking and I’ve never seen so many Ferraris, Maseratis, Bentleys and fancy cars anywhere in the world, and this is in America. I am not saying this is wrong, but there is an opulence among a small group of people that is huge when there are lots of people that are struggling. This gives me a bad feeling because I’ve seen so many emerging economies when they were booming, that was the time to get out.” As for the US economy, Faber agrees that the only thing that can help is a massive crisis (or “conflagration” as David Stockman calls it) that jars America out of its hypnotic state. And, sure enough, it will come.
