Billionaire Roundup

Today we want to sample some billionaires’ views.  But not just any billionaires. 

There is no reason to think billionaires are generally wiser or morally superior to other people.  Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg loom large among the billionaire class.  Their opinions about software marketing and social media respectively may be worthwhile.  But there is no reason to think either one has given any serious thought to the fiscal and monetary issues that are important to our clients.

So, for this roundup, we turn to billionaires who have paid attention professionally to these things.

First on our list is billionaire Mark Mobius. 

Mobius retired from Franklin Templeton Funds in 2018 after more than 30 years, where he was executive chairman of Templeton Emerging Markets Group.  He is the founder of Mobius Capital Partners.

Today Mobius recommends that investors buy gold now as protection from the currency devaluation next year that is the inevitable result of rampant central bank money printing.  He recommends one have 10 percent of his portfolio in gold.  He is specific in recommending ownership of physical gold in one’s possession and not gold shares or gold ETFs.

“It is going to be very, very good to have physical gold that you can access immediately without the danger of the government confiscating all the gold,” Mobius said in a recent Bloomberg News interview.

“Currency devaluation globally is going to be quite significant next year given the incredible amount of money supply that has been printed,” said Mobius.

Next is billionaire John Paulson. 

Paulson heads the investment management firm Paulson & Company and is noted for making one of the biggest fortunes in Wall Street history by spotting the housing and mortgage bubble.  He personally made $4 billion when the bubble popped.

Paulson believes now is the time to buy gold, which “does well in times of inflation.”

In times like these, says Paulson, as in the 1970s, there will be an enormous amount of financial assets hungry for a much smaller pool of gold.  “The reason why gold goes parabolic is that basically there’s a very limited amount of investable gold. It’s on the order of several trillion dollars, while the total amount of financial assets is closer to $200 trillion. So as inflation picks up, people try and get out of fixed income. They try and get out of cash. And the logical place to go is gold. But because the amount of money trying to move out of cash and fixed income dwarfs the amount of investable gold, the supply and demand imbalance causes gold to rise.”

And finally, billionaire Jeremy Grantham.

Grantham is co-founder and chief investment strategist of Grantham, Mayo, & van Otterloo (GMO), a Boston-based asset management firm. Wikipedia says that “Grantham has built much of his investing reputation over his long career by claiming to identify speculative market ‘bubbles’ as they were unfolding.”

Grantham says all the Fed liquidity and the Biden stimulus money are “violating a cardinal rule.”  They are “bubbling” stocks, bonds, and real estate all at the same time.

He told Reuters recently that “this bubble is the real thing, and everyone can see it. It’s as obvious as the nose on your face”

“A bust might take a few more months, and, in fact, I hope it does, because it will give us the opportunity to warn more people.”

We hope our friends and clients will take these warnings seriously and take steps to protect themselves and their families.  Big financial events are gathering.  Speak with a Republic Monetary Exchange gold and silver specialist today.