So one of the surprises at this conference was a presentation on the global near-term economic outlook by Theo Schwabacher of Morgan Stanley, famed for telling everybody to BUY GOLD! a couple years back at this same conference.
She’s urging caution on gold now, not merely because of the hype but also because of the potential for government restictions on ownership/confiscation (she used more cautious euphemisms, but the meaning was clear).
(BTW this is a conference for consumer-debt organizations, not a bunch of goldbugs or even permabear types. Pretty conservative group, actually — but with a keen interest in the macro outlook as it will affect consumers and their credit and ability to pay their debts.)
Most of her talk and accompanying graphs/charts would have been old hat to ZeroHedge readers (thus my surprise, given the audience). The two things I found most of interest were her firm assertion that China will have a soft landing, and her repeated emphasis on equities as a very opportune long-term strategy, especially consideribg the p/e ratios and continued strong profitability of a lot of publicly-traded entities — and dividend performance compared to Treasuries, of course.
Her reeated insistence that today’s fundamentals are not nearly as bad as 2008 I discounted, of course — as a prepper, I’m gonna prep for the possible bad scenario before considering what’s maybe more likely.
Anywho, an interesting talk.
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