Faber says U.S. wouldn’t have made as much ‘progress’ if colonized by blacks

Swiss investor Marc Faber has doubled down on racially charged remarks he made in an October newsletter, suggesting that the U.S. would be in a qualitatively different state if it had been colonized by black people instead of whites.

“I am not saying it would be better,” Faber told MarketWatch in an interview on Tuesday. “I am just saying that progress would not have been the same.”

Asked why “progress” would be worse, Faber had this to say: “Europeans brought science to America. They brought technical skills. … I am not sure the Africans would have done that.”

Faber’s remarks to MarketWatch came after the famed investor early Tuesday sparked a backlash from Wall Street and its participants related to similar statements that surfaced in his popular newsletter The Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, dated Oct. 3.

In the newsletter, he wrote: “And thank God white people populated America, and not the blacks. Otherwise, the US 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 white majority.”

A frequent commentator on CNBC, Bloomberg and on this website, Faber said he expected to face repercussions from his remarks, saying that if “stating some historical facts makes me a racist, then I suppose that I am a racist,” reiterating statements he offered to other news outlets via email.

CNBC and Fox Business Network said Tuesday that they won’t book him on their shows any longer.

Faber said he also anticipated being kicked off a number of boards on which he serves.

During the phone interview with MarketWatch, the controversial investor, known for a bearish stance on the market — with notable negative forecasts for the S&P 500 index

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and the Dow Jones Industrial

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— said he had received an email on Tuesday from Sprott Inc., a Toronto-based investment management firm, asking him to step down.

Sprott released this statement, attributed to CEO Peter Grosskopf: “The recent comments by Dr. Faber are deeply disappointing and are completely contradictory with the views of Sprott and its employees.”

For his part, Faber said he was more concerned with the state of free speech in the world — and, in particular, in America. “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.”

Other market participants have expressed being stunned by Faber’s comments.

Ian Winer, director of equity trading at Wedbush Securities, tweeted that Faber, himself, had “Boom! Gloom and Doom Coming”

Faber told MarketWatch 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.’ ”

“They would be much better,” he continued, “under a system of Western colonialism.”