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Treasurys Are 'Disaster Waiting to Happen'

CNBC.com
Tuesday, March 17, 2009

The Federal Reserve has no option but to start buying Treasurys as the government's needs for financing are huge, but the government bond market is a disaster in the making, Marc Faber, editor and publisher of The Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, told CNBC.

Federal Reserve policymakers start a two-day meeting on Tuesday, weighing options on how to spur lending to help cash-strapped consumers kickstart the economy.

Economists expect them to leave rates at zero and look to other ways of boosting liquidity, such as buying government bonds – a measure which has already been taken by the Bank of England.

"Well I think other central banks have done it already around the world but basically what it amounts to is money printing and in fact I don't think that it will help the bond market at all in the long run," Faber told CNBC's Martin Soong.

The yield on the 30-year Treasurys touched a low of 2.51 percent last year in December but now it is back up at 3.77 percent, he said.

"Yields have already backed up pretty substantially and I tell you, I think the US government bond market is a disaster waiting to happen for the simple reason that the requirements of the government to cover its fiscal deficit will be very, very high," Faber said.

"The Federal Reserve will have to buy Treasurys, otherwise yields will go up substantially," he said, adding that as their reserves were dwindling, foreign investors were likely to scale down their purchases.

But there will be a time when the Federal Reserve will have to increase interest rates to fight inflation, and it will be reluctant to do so because the cost of servicing government debt will rise substantially.

"So we'll go into high inflation rates one day," Faber said.

The stock market is likely to continue its bounce at least for a while, but the outlook is bleak, he added.

"I think we may still have a rally (in the S&P) until about the end of April and probably then a total collapse in the second half of the year sometimes, when it becomes clear that the economy is a total disaster," Faber said.

SOURCE: http://www.cnbc.com/id/29720589