01/18/2015 - GMO’s James Montier: Capital Preservation in the Age of Financial Repression
A couple years old but still relevant .. Montier explains the challenges of investing & preserving capital & purchasing power in our current environment of financial repression .. defines financial repression as: “Financial repression can be defined (somewhat loosely, admittedly) as a policy that results in consistent negative real interest rates. Keynes poetically called this the ‘euthanasia of the rentier.’ .. The tools available to engineer this outcome are many and varied, ranging from explicit (or implicit) caps on interest rates to directed lending to the government by captive domestic audiences (think the postal saving system in Japan over the last two decades) to capital controls (favoured by emerging markets in days gone by).” .. sees a battle between Scylla and Charybdis when investing in financial repression, facing either the likely but limited erosion of purchasing power from holding cash, or the uncertain but potentially disastrous loss of capital that arises from owning overvalued stocks .. “There are no easy answers to the problem of capital preservation in an age of financial repression, only difficult choices.” .. link to www.gmo.comto register for free & get the PDF or
