Mining’s old guard needs strong medicine
A new report details subpar investor returns in the mining industry over the last decade, particularly big cap diversified companies which have not adapted to new realities.
Veteran investor Michael Pento says the global “debt jubilee” which has been recently proposed as a one-shot panacea for the world’s economic woes would have “unbelievably painful consequences” and lead to a collapse in asset prices.
The UK’s Daily Telegraph reported over the weekend that the IMF had issued a revolutionary new paper claiming that debt forgiveness via legislative mandate could resolve the current travails of developed economies. The idea has already stirred up widespread attention as well as impassioned support in some circles.
In an interview with King World News Pento, a regular contributor to Bloomberg and the Huffington Post on investment and financial matters, says that a so-called “debt jubliee” is only applicable to the monetary system of the Biblical era in which it first originated, when there was no fractional reserve system and money was based on a bimetallic standard employing both gold and silver.
Under such an arrangement it was impossible for ancient economies to accrue the immense debt levels that now burden developed economies equipped with modern banking and monetary systems.
Pento says that modern economic systems have amassed far too much debt for Biblical fiscal measures to effective, and that “any forgiveness of that debt would wipe out the economy overnight”:
You would have massive insolvency across the entire planet overnight. So this is never going to happen voluntarily. I wish it would have happened every 50 years as the writers of the Bible envisioned. I also wish we were still on a 100% fractional gold reserve system, but we aren’t.
Comments
anon
Ha, didn’t think of it that way…