Bill Gates openly stated he is pulling out of the dollar and is instead investing in euros. Microsoft’s co-founder has made many mistakes in the past (I write this on an Apple computer, so I may be biased), but this is a wise move, indeed. He’s probably not the last one to pull out of the U.S. currency.
Bill Gates, whose net worth of $46.6 billion makes him the world’s richest person, is betting against the U.S. dollar.
“I’m short the dollar,” Gates, chairman of Microsoft Corp., told Charlie Rose in an interview late yesterday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “The ol’ dollar, it’s gonna go down.”
Gates’s concern that widening U.S. budget and trade deficits are undermining the dollar was echoed in Davos by policymakers including European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
The dollar fell 21 percent against a basket of six major currencies from the start of 2002 to the end of last year. The trade deficit swelled to a record $609.3 billion last year and total U.S. government debt rose 8.7 percent to $7.62 trillion in the past 12 months.
“It is a bit scary,” Gates said. “We’re in uncharted territory when the world’s reserve currency has so much outstanding debt.” Bloomberg
Update:This particular post generated so many links from other sites that a lot of spam was hitting the comments, crashing the comments on all other posts. I had no other choice but to disable comment posting on this entry.
