Gus Lubin | Nov. 4, 2010, 9:46 AM | 2,721 | comment 8
Bill Fleckenstein
Image: Bloomberg
Although Bill Fleckenstein is afraid to quit the Bernanke-fueled stock market, he says quantitative easing marks a long-term inflection point.
"If you debase the paper enough, no one's going to hold it and the markets are going to have to turn against the easing. The markets are going to have to finally become vigilantes and say we're not going to buy when you ease, now we're selling," he said on King World News.
"That's the funding crisis, the final leg to this pass we've been on for twenty years. First Greenspan printed too much money and we tried to speculate our way to prosperity, then in the housing boom we tried to borrow our way to prosperity and now we're trying to print our way to prosperity. This will end like those others did in disaster, but we can't take the printing press away from ourselves anymore then if the Greeks had a printing press they would have taken that away from themselves. The difference between the United States and Greece is essentially a printing press."
The trick is finding a way to short a market that keeps rising.
"Even if it is an inflection point, the machinations of the market convince you that you're wrong even if you're right, so yes I'm tempted [to short], and I may do something and we'll have to see."