Tuesday, March 4, 2003 4:15 p.m. EST
Bill Gross: U.S. Will Lose Its Soul
Bill Gross is bashing America again.
He has a few things to say about a possible war with Iraq and, even though it is not his field of expertise, he decided, "No more Peter Lynch of bonds, I wanted to be the Sean Penn of bonds," he said in an interview.
Last month at this time, the chief of the world's biggest bond fund (PIMCO - which, as we pointed out, is owned by our erstwhile ally anti-war Germany) intimated that The U.S. was finished as the world's superpower.
Now he has decided that, no matter how patriotic and persuaded he sometimes feels, he thinks that if we go past defending ourselves from our enemies to seeking them out and destroying them before they do the same to us, we "may be crossing a thin line" over which absolute power corrupts absolutely.
He does not explain the dichotomy of how we can both lose our position as the world's most formidable nation and still have absolute power.
Nonetheless, he does offer a little philosophy: "I suspect that by invading 'evil doer' nations, we may lessen our vulnerability but lose a piece of our soul in the process."
Others in the financial industry are not sympathetic, but write off Gross's comments. "He has a right to speak out, even though he's wrong," Stan Jonas, managing director at Fimat USA, told the Wall Street Journal. "It's a feel-good piece from someone who lives in California, which isn't a particularly risky place."
"He's always a bit out of step and unconventional," says Tim Medley, a Jackson, Miss., money manager who supports military action against Iraq. "This just makes him more human."
And considering his status with regard to the markets, Paul Goldstein, who runs Goldstein Capital in New York, said, "He's got the soapbox now. The world wants to hear what he has to say." ...
<http://www.newsmax.com/showinsidecover.shtml?a=2003/3/4/162842>
Carl
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