Tapering won’t end this year and housing is not recovering | Bedford Hills Real Estate

Billionaire Investor Sam Zell says he doesn’t believe the Federal Reserve will be done tapering quantitative easing by the October, as most on the Fed and most observers seem to think.

“I just do not know whether the Fed has the guts to really complete the taper,” said Tuesday on FOX Business Network’s Opening Bell with Maria Bartiromo. “I’m worried about whether I’m young enough to be around when QE3 ends.”

In a wide-ranging interview Zell talked about the Federal Reserve, the stock market and growth sectors in the economy.

“I think the stock market is over exuberant” and “I think that the stock market reflects the fact that there’s very little other options” for investors.

“I think that, first of all, I am skeptical about, ‘the tapering process,’” Zell said. “I am encouraging by Stanley Fischer’s presence, who I think is a terrific, terrific addition to the Fed. But I do not think that the Fed will be able to end tapering as quickly as they thought.

“And I think the potential for inflation in a QE2 environment like this is very high,” Zell continued. “And as far as interest rates are concerned, it is pretty easy to say they are going up when they’re at zero today. But it is hard for me to imagine that you are going to have a scenario like this without it having a very negative impact on our country.”

Zell also talked about real estate and housing.

“I think that the single family market is, I don’t know, benign would be a good way to describe it. The traffic is relatively slow, certainly at the first homebuyer level,” he said on FBN. “As a matter of fact, most of the traffic between the top and between the very top and down is down.”