Bill Gross on Staying Rich as US Fortunes Decline
The latest monthly letter from PIMCO’s Bill Gross, makes for depressing reading, especially for those who make their living off other people’s money.
Of one thing you can be sure however: over the next several decades, the ability to make a fortune by using other people’s money will be a lot harder.
Gross writes that it ” is probable that trillion-dollar deficits are here to stay because any recovery is likely to reflect “new normal” GDP growth rates of 1%-2% not 3%+ as we used to have. Staying rich in this future world will require strategies that reflect this altered vision of global economic growth and delevered financial markets. Bond investors should therefore confine maturities to the front end of yield curves where continuing low yields and downside price protection is more probable. Holders of dollars should diversify their own baskets before central banks and sovereign wealth funds ultimately do the same. ”
All investors should expect considerably lower rates of return than what they grew accustomed to only a few years ago. Staying rich in the “new normal” may not require investors to resemble Balzac as much as Will Rogers, who opined in the early 30s that he wasn’t as much concerned about the return on his money as the return of his money.
Ed Harrison at CreditWritedowns offers a good analysis of Gross’s analysis:
In the end, one can only conclude that the U.S. is indeed likely to deficit spend for a considerable period and that this is going to have negative effects on its credit rating and relative standing in the global economy. A diminished future for America is an inevitability of having lived beyond its means for far too long. Accepting this fact is likely to provide a better outcome than resisting it as the U.K. did when its tenure as king of the hill came to an end.
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