Eric Sprott - US is Broke and By Far the Biggest Issue
Renowned money manager Eric Sprott is still very bullish on physical gold and silver. Why? Sprott proclaims, “The U.S. is broke. We know they’re broke. . . . About a thousand professors have signed up and told Congress you’ve got to deal with this issue, and it is immediately ignored, but it is by far the biggest issue. It’s not just government. It’s corporate pension plans, and state pension plans and all these unfunded obligations where everyone thinks they are going to receive something only to find out that they are not going to receive something. . . . The math is pretty simple. The U.S. is broke, and I don’t want to single out the U.S. Lots of countries are broke. I am sure Japan is broke, and I am sure there are European countries that are broke. We can’t keep extending and pretending and suggesting everything is great. Unfortunately, someone is going to pay the price, and I am not sure when the price is going to be paid. The analogy I use is we all knew ten years ago that Detroit was broke. . . . It was so mathematically certain that you knew what was going to happen. The same thing will happen to the United States.”
How has the economy stayed afloat even though the U.S. is broke? Sprott, who manages nearly $7.5 billion in total assets, contends, “I take it back to NASDAQ 2000 when we had our crash, and there really should have been a normal secular bear market. Along comes the government and their ‘cash for clunkers’ and ‘home buyer tax credit’ and HARPS and TALF and too-big-to fail and printing and ZIRP. This was an elongated process of trying to hold it together. All of this was supposed to have a huge impact on the economy, and yet, we have had negligible growth. In the meantime, all the debts have soared. You have student loan debt, and now students can’t afford to buy a home, so they are all living with their families. You have so many people on food stamps, and you have people taking advantage of the disability fund . . . in the latest statement, it goes broke in a year. . . . This is symptomatic of the problems.”
On The Fed’s constant indecision on whether or not to raise interest rates, Sprott says, “You’re getting a rope-a-dope. One minute you think one thing, and the next minute you think the other. I am having a tough time thinking rates are going to go up (in December). One of the things that all central banks are doing is losing credibility, that people really believe that they know what they are doing. We saw what has happened in Japan the last 25 years, and we see what’s happening in Europe which is what’s happening in the United States. Economic growth, if there is growth, is so anemic . . . and I believe it’s getting worse as this year progresses.”
On his physical gold and silver investments, Sprott says, “I don’t lose any sleep over the price of gold going down in the sense that I believe what I believe. I believe it’s been manipulated. It’s very much about currency and economics of the Keynesian scheme that we’re going to spend money, print money and it’s all going to work. It’s not working. I don’t want to wait and find out the day it falls apart because when it falls apart someday, then it will be too late. I want to be positioned beforehand. I can remember shorting stocks before March of 2000. It was a bit of a rough ride for three months, but my gosh, when it rolled over . . . you have to be a little bit early on things. I believe the last four years have been orderly and created to be difficult. I think gold would have gone up, but they could not stand for it to go up because they were printing money. If you are printing money and gold goes up, everybody figures it out. . . . I’ve been around for a while, and I have the patience to hang in there. I have been a buyer of gold stocks, and so I am hopeful this will end up being a very, very rewarding trade.”
Sprott predicts, “There has to be a collapse. It will be way bigger than 2008. We had a debt problem in ‘07 and ‘08 and the debt has exploded.”
