What the Obama administration's policies have really been oriented towards have always been towards providing benefits continuing consumption. What this country needs really is a policy which stresses investments.
It's going to be difficult to stimulate the real economy in the U.S. at a faster rate than 2 percent and perhaps even less if we have that fiscal cliff in December or January 2013.
Whether a tops-down or bottoms-up investor in bonds, stocks, or private equity, the standard analysis tends to judge an investor or his firm on the basis of how the bullish or bearish aspects of the cycle were managed.
Well, I, you know, I think at PIMCO we always try and be open with the press and the public. I mean, isn't that what voters want from their politicians? Mohamed El-Erian, our CEO, writes several op-eds a week.
The U.K. and almost all of Europe have erred in terms of believing that austerity, fiscal austerity in the short term, is the way to produce real growth. It is not. You've got to spend money.
The real boss in the family is my wife. She didn't want me hanging around the house all day and said, 'You don't want to retire; you'll regret it.' So I listened to her.
Obama/Romney, Romney/Obama - the most important election of our lifetime? Fact is they're all the same - bought and paid for with the same money. Ours is a country of the SuperPAC, by the SuperPAC, and for the SuperPAC.
Americans now know that housing prices can go down and they can go down by 10, 20, 30, and in some cases, 40 or 50 percent. We know they can go down. But five years ago, we thought they could only go up.
Accountants, machinists, medical technicians, even software writers that write the software for 'machines' are being displaced without upscaled replacement jobs. Retrain, rehire into higher paying and value-added jobs? That may be the political myth of the modern era. There aren't enough of those jobs.
When does money run out of time? The countdown begins when investable assets pose too much risk for too little return; when lenders desert credit markets for other alternatives such as cash or real assets.
Bernanke and company are trying to reflate the economy with almost stated objective of inflation at 2 percent and higher in order to provide some type of safety margin for a future recession. That's where they want to go.
In questioning initially whether I am a great investor, I open the door to question whether other similarly esteemed public icons like Bill Miller are as well. It seems, perhaps, that the longer and longer you keep at it in this business the more and more time you have to expose your Achilles heel - wherever and whatever that might be.
