Marc Faber, aka Dr. Doom, says there’s nowhere to hide from Bubblegeddon, not even gold

The world is filling up with bubbles, and there’s nowhere to hide, not even in gold, said high-profile market bear Marc Faber, editor and publisher of The Gloom, Boom and Doom Report, on Bloomberg “Surveillance” on Wednesday. The latest bubble is U.S. stocks, which have been testing record highs lately.

“I was relatively positive about U.S. stocks since March 2009,” Faber said. “I haven’t any short positions. I haven’t been shorting any stocks since 2009. But the U.S. marches up , consumer confidence marches down, and emerging markets are performing badly relative to the U.S. The dollar is strong indicating a tightening of international liquidity. And so I don’t think that the U.S. market will go up a lot from here I rather think that there’s now considerable downside risk.”

But what about gold? Why isn’t that holding up as a safe haven? Faber was asked.  He argued that the money central banks are printing  isn’t flowing evenly into the economies they are trying to help. Instead, it’s  just causing more bubbles like the tech bubble in 2000, housing prices up to 2007, commodities in 2008, and most recently select emerging market stocks indexes and the U.S. Read more >>

More Bank Job Cuts on Way as "Game's Up"

Credit Suisse is rumored to be the latest major bank set to announce large job cuts, and it is unlikely to be the last, Peter Toogood, head of investment at Old Broad Street Research, told CNBC Tuesday. “The game’s up. There’s no transactions, M&A isn’t happening, this is what deleveraging looks like. It’s a decade of austerity and that makes people feel more unlucky,” he said.

“Investment banks are going to struggle. There’s not going to be mass lending going on. The leverage game is over and people can’t accept it. Volumes are declining en masse and their headcounts are too high.” Trading volumes have declined overall since March 2009, with falls in U.S. stock trading volumes in each month this year. In April, there were 6.5 billion trades on average per day, compared with 12.1 billion at the market’s height in 2008. Both the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq reported that trading fell in the first quarter of 2012.

Lending has also shrunk, both because of worries about bank capitalization and because of reluctance to borrow money on the part of companies. When acquisitions happen, they are often based on cash rather than leverage, which means that banks have a smaller size of the pie. Moody’s mass downgrade of the world’s biggest investment banks last week showed the increasing worries about the sector. Read more >>

Dow, Nasdaq: May Worst Month in Two Years

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"May is always a difficult month for the market, and this month has lived up to that reputation," said Fred Dickson, chief market strategist at D.A. Davidson, noting that the market has suffered declines in May for three out of the last four years.

The Dow and S&P 500 dropped more than 6% in May. In fact, the Dow only booked five positive days this month. The last time this occurred was in January 1968. Meanwhile, the Nasdaq has declined more 7%.

The Dow and Nasdaq logged the worst monthly performance since May 2010, when investors were spooked by the Flash Crash, while the S&P 500 posted its biggest monthly loss since September 2011. As stocks have tumbled, investors have rushed toward the safety of U.S. Treasuries, pushing the 10-year yield to record lows. Read more >>