A noted Swiss investor and business-television commentator Marc Faber faced backlash Tuesday for comments in a newsletter thanking God that “white people populated America, and not the blacks.” CNBC and Fox Business Network said they will no longer book Faber on their shows, and he has been asked to step down from at least one company board.
In response to the criticism, Faber decried what he saw as threats to the freedom of speech. “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.
In the Oct. 3 edition of his investor newsletter, “The Gloom, Boom & Doom Report,” Faber wrote that had the United States been colonized by blacks, it “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 a white majority.” Faber, who is based in Asia, is a prominent investor known as “Dr. Doom” for his bearish views on markets and the economy. As Bloomberg notes, he is also known for “what he calls contrarian views. He told investors to bail out of U.S. stocks a week before the 1987 Black Monday crash.” He served as the managing director of Drexel Burnham Lambert’s Hong Kong office until the investment firm’s collapse in 1990. According to the biography on his website, he then set up his own business, offering services as an investment adviser and fund manager.
Elaborating on his comments in the 15-page newsletter, Faber told MarketWatch that “progress would not have been the same” if the United States had been colonized by black people. “Europeans brought science to America,” Faber said. “They brought technical skills. … I am not sure the Africans would have done that.” Faber added that “Africans will always use the excuse of [oppression] to explain where they are economically, saying that it is ‘all the fault of the colonists.’ ” He said he believes they would be “much better under a system of Western colonialism.”
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2017/10/17/investor-and-…
