If you want to be scared, truly terrified, listen to Mark J. Grant. He might be right.
For the last two years, Mr. Grant, a managing director based in Florida at a regional investment bank, has been predicting the bankruptcy of Greece and a cascade of chaos across the global economy, attracting quite a following on Wall Street in the process.
“Greece will be forced to return to the drachma and devalue, and the default will cause bank runs and money flowing into Germany and the United States as the only viable safe haven bets,” he declared the day before Sunday’s Greek elections,borse gucci prezzi,louis vuitton Energy Security, irrespective of which party would win. “Greece will default because there is no other choice regardless of anyone’s politics.”
He then walked through the falling dominoes: “It will hit the (), the banks on the other side of the derivatives contracts, all of the Greek banks who are really in default at present and being carried by Europe as well as the nation, and the Greek default will spread the infection in many places that we cannot imagine because so much is hidden and tucked away in the European financial system.”
Welcome to Doomsday, brought to you by Mr. Grant. He says he doesn’t think of it as such; he calls it “reality.” He told me on Monday, almost hopelessly, “There’s only so much money to go around.”
In a Jan. 13, 2010, report,outlet gucci louis vuitton sito ufficiale How Citigroup CEO, Mr. Grant forecast that Greece would default on its government debts, one of the first to publish such a prognostication.
Mr. Grant could be the Nouriel Roubini (Dr. Doom) of the European crisis. Mr. Roubini, the economist,ralph lauren pas cher Trail Mix - NYTimes.com, said the subprime-debt sky was falling for a long time before it fell. Few people listened, in part,ralph lauren pas cher ralph lauren pas cher Investment MacroScope, because nobody had ever heard of him. Then, of course,polo homme, the sky fell. Now everybody has heard of him. Time will tell, but soon everybody could know Mr. Grant.
The January 2010 report,polo homme, written two years before Greece did indeed default,polo ralph lauren pas cher,polo ralph lauren, has made him the go-to forecaster of Europe’s collapse for some of the world’s largest investors. Nicknamed the Wizard, Mr. Grant,polo homme, who works for Southwest Securities, sends out a daily report, often frightening in its detail and matter-of-factness,polo femme, by e-mail to a who’s who of the world’s biggest institutions,polo ralph lauren pas cher, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds. Subscribers like , a founder of Pimco, the world’s largest bond fund, pay thousands of dollars a year to receive Mr. Grant’s views in their in-boxes.
Never one to sugarcoat his views, his success is partly a function of his plain-spoken way of making complex ideas simple.
“There is only one way out of this mess and that is if Europe keeps handing Greece money like one does to some aged aunt that cannot support herself, but that is a family decision,borse chanel,” he wrote. But, he argues,ralph lauren pas cher,ralph lauren, “Greece requires 16 other family members to support her jointly and the politics in many of these nations, including Germany, is making it difficult for the charade to continue.”
His view of European officials’ effort to “fire-wall” the problem countries is equally simple: “This whole subject is a ruse in my opinion. Think of horses in a corral. The rancher keeps trying to build a higher and higher fence around his horses but for what purpose? For the rancher it is to keep the wolves out.”
Mr. Grant, who loves to mix metaphors, takes his rancher metaphor further: “The real problem is that the horses are sick, infected and that the disease of fiscal mismanagement has spread to virtually every horse in the corral except one and do not expect that one,polo lacoste pas cher The Get Louis Vuitton, Germany, to remain disease-free much longer.”
Layering on another metaphor, he adds: “You can call cancer a cold if you like but it changes nothing; not one thing.”
Sadly, Mr. Grant is not predicting the default of just Greece,borse gucci, he’s already on to Spain (he reached that conclusion before many others,ralph lauren, too).
“The country cannot afford to pay off their regional debt,polo femme,polo femme, their bank debt,” he wrote on Monday,ralph lauren, “and various schemes to avoid the Men in Black from taking over will not work nor will the pleas for ‘more Europe’ as the words mouthed by Germany are meant for placation only and will not find implementation in any kind of timeline that will make any difference.”
He has convinced himself that Germany,ralph lauren home, the only country in a position to help,ralph lauren, will not come to the rescue. “You can bank on one thing if nothing else; the Germans will not allow their cost of funding to rise or their standard of living to decline to help the nations that have gotten themselves in trouble. You can count on this!” he wrote.
As we were talking on Monday, he said he wanted to make clear that he did not believe Armageddon was upon us. And it’s not as if Mr. Grant is wishing this to happen,polo ralph lauren pas cher, despite his boat in Fort Lauderdale, named “Wishes Granted.”
“I don’t think the world is going to hell,” he said. “It’s very negative. What’s going on is serious. It will have a whole slew of negative consequences.” But he insisted, “I don’t think it’s going to get to the 1930s.”
More likely, he said, we are headed for a bad recession with lots “of shocks to the system.” He says this will likely happen in the next four months unless “there is debt forgiveness or Europe keeps handing them money like they are a ward of the state.”
“Or,polo lacoste pas cher Future Shock Bryan Singer Di,ralph lauren femme,” he warned, “it could come sooner.”