What is your long-range view of the world?
"At some point, we will have had The Big One. It's out there. I don't know whether it's a financial asset depression or a real depression. The thing that I'm sure about is that financial assets can't keep doing what they're doing, or that so many people can be rewarded for being imprudent.
I have a friend who, unbelievably, actually puts away money every month to buy a house. She's getting squeezed because the $500 she puts away every month to save for her vacation house is getting 1 percent. All of our other friends who have gone out and bought houses all leveraged up when they really couldn't afford them are being rewarded. So the house that she's saving up for now costs 20 percent more, the person who borrowed the max has made multiples of 20 percent, depending on their elverage, but yet she's made 1 percent.
Over the long term, that's not sustainable.
Longer term, we'll have a problem with crude. I wouldn't be surprised if in three to five years it hits $100 a barrel. The pull from Asia is just gigantic. There are eight million nongovernmental cars in China versus 120 million in the United States and China has five times the population. I'm not one of these "China is the be-all and end-all" types--and again, it's like the Internet, I'm not sure if there's going to be any return--but it's definately going to change the world."
Scott Bessent, Bessent Capital
From the book of interviews by Steven Drobny, published in 2006, and no doubt researched prior to that date.
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