Senior Executive At $700B Fund Manager Compares West to Zimbabwe
The Head of Investment Specialists at Aberdeen Standard Investments, a fund manager with over $700 billion under management, says the West is verging on catastrophe and the markets are only just beginning to wake up to what's happening.
“We are at the end of the game" and the West “has to take its medicine.” When it does “it's going to be a pretty scary ride,” says Singapore-based Donald Amstad in an interview posted on Livewire last week that's gone viral.
“It’s the West that is running unorthodox economic and monetary policy. And it’s the West, ironically, that is now on the cliff edge," declares Amstad. "There is a crisis in the West which is financial, that is becoming economic, and it’s becoming social, and it’s becoming political.”
In the wide-ranging discussion Amstad describes why China is in a better position than Western governments to navigate another financial crisis. He also hammers the United States for its 'Zimbabwe school of economics' path.
"If you think about what Western central banks have done over the last decade, since the global financial crisis; they’ve been playing whack-a-mole with volatility. Every time volatility has spiked up they’ve managed to hit it on the head by some combination of cutting interest rates and/or printing money,” explains Amstad. “If we have another spike up in volatility, can the (central) banks still play whack-a-mole? And I worry that they can’t because I think we’re at the end of the game.”
Interestingly, in 2016 this writer and @tommy ate dinner with the chief architect of Zimbabwe's disastrous economic policies.
Dr. Gideon Gono, the Governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe during the country's record hyperinflation in the 2000's, invited us (along with Doug Casey and Casey Research's Nick Giambruno) to his Harare home to discuss what had transpired on his watch.
As the plates were being cleared for dessert, Dr. Gono brought out a laptop and began playing Stansberry Research's famous End of America video. It played for 10 minutes before the former central banker stopped it and solemnly declared the U.S. was now following the same economic playbook he executed in Zimbabwe.
According to Donald Amstad, it appears Dr. Gono was right.
