Basically that massive amounts of debt will bring the decline of Western Civilization, but that in the meantime, before that happens, policy makers would pull every trick they could in order to stave off a catastrophic event.
Byron Wien
Blackstone’s Byron Wien is up with a new blog post, wherein he relays a conversation he had with someone he only refers to as The Smartest Man In Europe.
Wien doesn’t say who The Smartest Man In Europe is, but describes him as basically an incredibly brilliant, wordly, rich businessman.
Many of you remember The Smartest Man from earlier essays; I have been writing about him annually for more than a decade. He has been a friend for thirty years, and during that period he has shown an almost uncanny ability to see major events affecting the financial markets before other observers. Among these were the fall of Japan as an economic power in the 1980s, the economic changes in China and their significance the early 1990s, and the serious consequences of excessive borrowing in the developed world in the last decade.
His DNA endowed him with a certain amount of business acumen. His ancestors operated canteens along the Silk Road, selling food, weather protection and supplies to travelers to India and China. He apprenticed in finance in New York, but returned to Europe to take advantage of opportunities created during the post-war recovery there. Along the way he has acquired the ABC’s of European wealth – an airplane, a Bentley and a house on a Cap in the French Riviera. The depth and breadth of his art collection is impressive, but material things are not what gives him a high. He gets his thrills from identifying a problem, thinking it through and being right in determining how it gets resolved. In his ninth decade, he is an inspiration to me.
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