e-fundresearch.com: With regards to the new year 2015: How optimistic is your view into the future and what obstacles and challenges should investors be prepared to overcome in 2015?
Ronald Stöferle/Mark Valek: From our point of view, 2015 will be highly interesting from a macro perspective, as the monetary experiments currently underway resemble a walk on a knife's edge. A low rate of inflation can be driven up by brute force through decisive central bank action. Whether the flood of liquidity that is currently put at the banking system's disposal can really be removed in time is more than questionable. In a worst-case scenario, a loss of confidence in the currency may occur that can no longer be reversed. It was said in the 1920s that central bankers were like ships captains who not only refused to learn the basic rules of navigation, but even asserted that they were superfluous. At the moment the impression is that central bankers are attempting to cross the Pacific using a map of the Atlantic.
Hinweis: Ronald Stöferle & Mark Valek (Incrementum AG) sind Speaker
beim ARC Outlook 2015 am 21. Jänner in Wien
With their monetary interventions, central banks have entered terra incognita. Monetary policy doesn't work like a scalpel, but like a sledgehammer. Superficially, extreme monetary policy stimulus has calmed financial markets overall. The results, in terms of the real economy by contrast, continue to lag behind expectations. The often invoked 'self-sustaining recovery' is rather modest in many regions and is not 'self-sustaining' anywhere so far. It will probably still take months or years before the full extent of the collateral damage from these monetary measures will become visible. In our opinion, these will be predominantly negative. Interventions always result in keeping existing misallocations afloat, while new ones are added to them.
