The man who blew the whistle on Lehman Brothers' financial house of cards sees the position of the U.S. economy as similarly untenable if zero interest rates persist.
Hedge fund manager David Einhorn warns the Fed's interest rate policy "increases the chance that governments will over-borrow and fall into a debt trap." That would set the stage for a second financial crisis, Einhorn told London's Sunday Telegraph in a Dec. 26 interview.
Einhorn has a long track record of successfully penetrating the window dressing that masked deteriorating finances of respected institutions. Most famously, in a public address in April 2008, the hedge fund manager detailed why he was shorting Lehman Brothers, calculating the firm was leveraged 44 to 1 — at a time when publicly traded Carlyle Capital, levered 30 to 1, had just spectacularly failed and Bear Stearns had to be bailed out.
Einhorn has also bet heavily on gold, now in its tenth straight year of price increases, and also famously shorted Allied Capital, a bank whose fraudulent accounting he detailed in a book published in 2008.
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