Bill Cara

How to position assets in the current debt crisis.

April 3, 2023

First, it’s prudent to stop listening to those who seek to maintain control over the financial system, such as the Fed, Treasury, Congress, US Money Center Banks, and CNBC.

In a crisis, I’d listen to smart people like “Dr. Doom” Nouriel Roubini. I’d do that in two ways: (1) study what he’s saying about the big picture because the long-term is more important than the short-term, and (2) delay listening to his argument for a few weeks following a market crisis event so that you can mitigate any bias you have in interpreting his carefully chosen words.

I’d be careful to select the interviewer because, as I say, CNBC has a vested interest in building on its narrative. They will frame their questions in ways they can subsequently react to any objective message from the interviewee.

I like the professionalism I see in Stansberry’s Daniela Carbone. She is looking for answers from people she respects, hoping to make her interviews valuable.

Her interview with Dr. Roubini about three weeks ago at the height of the Silicon Valley Bank crisis answers how you should consider managing your assets.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mz-384YntTc

I have given a lot of thought recently to how far the pendulum of my opinions of influencers has swung.

Humongous Bank & Broker (HB&B) has been the independent investor’s enemy for at least two decades. I have not been surprised that as the decades pass, these banks and their major clients, especially the hedge fund and private equity managers, have enriched themselves at the cost of the rest of us. Then in the past decade, as the Fed, Bank of England, and ECB pushed interest rates to zero and below while feeding capital to friends and associates, I turned further away from these central bankers. For twenty years, I watched the CNBC network in cahoots with the financial system managers, all making a mistake after mistake, while purposefully misleading the public.

In the background, I always put the Agora/Oxford Club/Stansberry newsletter writers’ network as the bottom-of-the-barrel excellent advice. It was a flat-out paid promotion. After I started this blog 19 years ago (this week), I wrote that I wanted the SEC to stop them. The SEC did sue and found Stansberry guilty of fraud in 2007.

However, the global financial system collapse in 2008 changed my opinion on where to go for advice. After I watched the heads of the SEC, Treasury, and the Fed sit at the same table in a Congressional hearing to get to the bottom of the bank crisis, nodding together at softball questions, I realized who was the worst enemy and the newsletter writers did not come close.

I always liked Rick Rule as straight-up but was concerned with his position with the Sprott promotional machine. I became a fan when he broke away to set up Rule Investment Media and Battle Bank. I also always liked Daniela Carbone as an interviewer, but her association with Kitco News always made me keep my opinions in check. Then after she joined Stansberry, I noted that Stansberry became less an umbrella publisher of dreadful newsletters and more the type of organization I was willing to listen to.

It’s funny how things come full circle. Investors will always have to do their thinking in planning their investments, but at this point, the best guidance comes from those I once considered the worst.

Dr. Roubini has always offered sound analysis. I think he shines in the interview with Daniela Carbone. He opines that the debt crisis now impacting regional banks is in the first inning, that the US economy will suffer a hard landing, that stocks are likely to fall another 20%, and that the best place to hold assets is in Treasury Bills, TIPS, Gold, green metals, Oil, and select real estate. I was even surprised when he said that Artificial Intelligence applications will now challenge Alphabet/Google and Microsoft. Generally, all that is very good advice.