Mind Over Market

In an interview on Bloomberg TV's Market Makers with Stephanie Ruhle on November 16, 2012, Kyle Bass says that Milton Friedman was right when he said the currency union will fall apart when they hit a bump in the road. He thinks Germany will leave in 3 to 4 years to avoid ceding its national sovereignty and funding the wasteful spending of other nations. He would not invest in Europe right now but wait for things to deteriorate further.

"You can't understand the United States at all unless you understand what's going in Europe," Greenspan stated in an interview on CNBC's Squawk Box October 7, 2011. "I think we have been through a remarkably elaborate program to try to find out whether the single currencies work," he said. Like others, Greenspan thought it would work in the beginning because the markets bought into the idea it would work. This could be seen in the pricing of the currencies in countries like Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal as they moved toward currency union. As the date of currency union approached in each country, the spread in interest rates of local currencies above the German bund would narrow dramatically from a level of a hundreds of basis points. "I said and thought the markets are assuming that the Greeks and the Italians and the Spaniards and Portuguese are going to behave like Germans, and that's what [the markets] were telling us," ...