Marc Faber, an influential Swiss investor and guest commentator on markets for decades, is known as “Dr. Doom” for his bearish forecasts on stocks.
Faber’s recent racist pontifications on the colonization of the United States, the intelligence of Africans and the far-right movement, just to name a few, has resulted inBloomberg Television, CNBC and even Fox Business Network stating on Tuesday that they will no longer book him.
In the Oct. 3 installment of “The Gloom, Boom & Doom Report,” a 15-page investor letter, he wrote:
“And thank God white people populated America, and not the Blacks. Otherwise, the U.S. would look like Zimbabwe, which it might look like one day anyway, but at least America enjoyed 200 years in the economic and political sun under white majority.
“I am not a racist, but the reality no matter how politically incorrect needs to be spelled out as well. (And let’s not forget that the African tribal heads were more than happy to sell their own slaves to white, Black and Arab slave dealers.)”
Subscribers to Faber’s investor letter scanned his comments and posted them on social media.
In defense of his statements, he toldMarketWatchon Tuesday, “I am not saying it would be better. I am just saying that progress would not have been the same.”
When asked why “progress” would be worse, Faber said: “Europeans brought science to America. They brought technical skills. I am not sure the Africans would have done that.”
In regard to technology and Africa, research by Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, an associate professor of science, technology, and society at MIT, offers important information. Mavhunga edited the anthology“What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa”which explains that science and technology inAfrica is not product of “technology transfer” from elsewhere but as the working of African knowledge.
Science Magazine recently published an article on the book,stating: “Eurocentric assumptions about the history of science and technology, entrepreneurship, epistemology, and scientific methodology are directly challenged in this scholarly collection of essays that masterfully document the historical and contemporary scientific contributions of Africans.”
According toBloomberg, also in Faber’s racist investor letter, “in between quotes from George Orwell and historian Edward Gibbon and his opinions on universal basic income,” he addressed far-right movements.
“Far-right movements are gaining traction across Europe and the U.S. On Sunday, Austrian voters paved the way for a nationalist party to enter government in an election upset. Last month, Alternative for Germany won enough seats in parliament to become the legislature’s third-largest party. After protesters met white supremacists with torches at a march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, President Donald Trump faced criticism for saying there were ‘very fine people on both sides.'”
Faber included President Donald Trump’s response to the deadly white supremacist rally on Aug. 12 with the status of several far-right movements in Europe.While campaigning for the U.S. presidency,Trump praised the success of the 2016 Brexit referendum the vote for the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union that was heavily embraced by the far-right movement. World renowned British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking said in March the majority vote by Britons for the referendum was a “short-sighted,” knee-jerk reaction to increased Eastern European migration.
Hawking also described Trump voters as “people who felt disenfranchised by the governing elite in a revolt against globalization.” He said Trump’s priority “will be to satisfy his electorate, who are neither liberal nor that well-informed.”
And that under the new administration, “I fear that I may not be welcome in the [United States],”Hawking said.
In addition,Faber also argued against the removal of confederate statues in the U.S., stating they are “statues of honorable people whose only crime was to defend what all societies had done for more than 5,000 years.”
Faber said he should be able to express his views without “immediately being condemned.”
“If you have to live in a society where you cannot express your views and your views are immediately condemned without further analysis and analysis of the context in which [they’re written] if you can’t live with that, then it is a sad state of where freedom of the press and freedom of expression have come,” he told MarketWatch.
Not only have TV networks shunned the investor, he no longer sits on at least two boards Sprott Inc., and NovaGold Resources Inc.
Sprott Inc., a Toronto-based investment management firm, sent Faber an email on Tuesday asking for his resignation.
“The recent comments by Dr. Faber are deeply disappointing and are completely contradictory with the views of Sprott and its employees,” Sprott Chief Executive Peter Grosskopf said in a statement. “We pride ourselves on being a diverse organization and comments of this sort will not be tolerated.”
Late Tuesday, NovaGold Resources announced the departure of Faber from its board of directors, effective immediately.
“If stating some historical facts makes me a racist, then I suppose that I am a racist,” Faber toldThe Financial Times. “For years, Japanese were condemned because they denied the Nanking massacre.”
