Greenlight Capital's David Einhorn was speaking today at the 5th Value Investing Congress in New York City.
Two years ago he appeared as a highlight lecture of the show, and laid out his reasons for shorting Lehman Brothers stock. Needless to say there was quite a bit of attention to what he had to say today.
Here are some highlights:
1. A very bleak outlook for the US economy
2. US has a lack of political will to adopt needed financial reforms.
3. Right now he would like to hold gold rather than cash because "gold benefits from poor fiscal policy."
4. Buying long dated options on much higher interest rates in the US and Japan
5. Singled out GE as thwarting financial reform due to their intense lobbying efforts.
Transcript of David Einhorn's presentation.
"The more power a government has the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, and the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects. Power will achieve its murderous potential. It simply waits for an excuse, an event of some sort, an assassination, a massacre in a neighboring country, an attempted coup, a famine, or a natural disaster, to justify the beginning of murder en masse."
R. J. Rummel, Mass Murder and Genocide, 1994