We Are In A QE “Doom Loop” And The Money Is Now Broken: Lawrence Lepard

Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance

This weekend I had the great pleasure of interviewing my friend, and fellow Central Bank skeptic, Larry Lepard.

Larry manages the EMA GARP Fund, a Boston based investment management firm. Their strategy is focused on providing “Monetary Debasement Insurance”. He has 38 years experience and an MBA from Harvard Business School. On Twitter he is @LawrenceLepard Managing Partner and, via email, he is llepard@ema2.com

 

First, I asked Larry about recent criticisms of us being Austrian economists and sometimes being referred to as “doomsday sayers” or “permabears”.

We explore the idea of running a gold fund in order to drum up panic and sell gold, versus people who just think the monetary system is screwed up to begin with and then wind up going into the gold industry.

“I obviously am self-interested in gold doing better. Having saving that, I’m an analyst and I call them like I see them, and I like with my mistakes. My strong belief is that I’m trying to communicate a need for why the money is broken, and why we need to fix the money to fix the system. To me, it’s even more than what my fund does,” he tells me.

“Fiat has ruined price discovery, and as a result of that we’re all going to suffer.”

From there we discussed the state of the global economy, including the precarious position that the United States finds itself in and the future of the inflationary crisis. That led to a discussion about the future of gold, silver and bitcoin – and what role each will play in the global economy going forward.

We also talked about what we both believe to be are profound failures in monetary policy. We discussed recent improprieties by Fed officials and members of Congress, as well as how the circle of government officials, Fed officials, bankers and high net worth individuals sustains itself.

“I don’t see anything that says we’re going to go back to a deflationary environment. We’ve been so underinvested in commodities for so long that we’re going to see an enormous inflationary boom in commodities the next ten years,” Larry said.

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Larry also opined about the “debt doom” that is taking place globally.

“Within 3 years a lot of our debt rolls. We’re at $1.2 trillion more in interest owned annually than we were. They need to issue bonds to finance that. You can’t sell more bonds in a market where yields are spiking. It’s a doom loop,” he says.

We also tried to gauge exactly how overvalued the stock market is now and discussed discussed what sectors we both think are still underpriced.

“There might be case for buying 1 or 2 year bonds. I wouldn’t buy a 30 year at 4%. The odds of continued debasement are high. I would argue for cash, gold coins, silver coins and bitcoin,” Larry says. “And for stocks that are in commodity related businesses.”

“I have high quality companies in my portfolio that are trading at 3-5x EBITDA that are yielding 4%,” he says of some of hold gold mining stocks. “[Gold mining stocks] have been thrown out for dead.”

We talked about the mining space and the energy space, specifically, and how undervalued we think some names in each sector still is.

Finally, we talked about Larry’s prediction that bitcoin could go to $2 million within five years. He laid out his short and long-term case for bitcoin and the role that he thinks it is going to play for money going forward.

“Lightning changes the entire game. It’s impossible to track and makes it completely anonymous,” he says arguing for bitcoin. “Gary Gensler admits that it’s a commodity. It’s too late to stop it. The horse is out of the barn now,” he says.

You can read this full interview here and listen to the entire podcast below:

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