President-elect Trump's policies will help the U.S. economy, but they won't be enough to save stocks long term, said widely followed perm bear Marc Faber.

"Mr. Trump is pro-business, so it's natural that the mood has improved among the small-businessman, corporations and investors," Faber said Thursday on CNBC's "Futures Now."

But even as Faber expects equities to keep rising, he noted that stocks are only climbing to a "higher diving board" and it will "not be very friendly" to investors if things start to turn.

"I think Mr. Trump will have a better economy, but that doesn't necessarily mean that asset prices will go up, because they are already grossly inflated," he said. Still, Faber's rhetoric was less alarming than in previous interviews, where he called for a collapse worse than in the late '80s.

"If someone wants to be in the market, and I always have part of my assets in equities, then I think other markets than the U.S. are more attractive," said Faber. He noted that in 2017, Argentina, Brazil and the emerging markets ETF are already outpacing the . "Foreign markets will outperform the U.S., and if both go down then the U.S. will go down more," he added.

"The only space I like in the U.S. is essentially gold shares, silver and platinum. You have great gold mining companies in the U.S.," he explained. Gold prices are up 3 percent so far this year with the miners rising more than 8 percent in the same period. "I think that gold has performed fantastically well," he added.

Ultimately, Faber expects that the economy will stall out and deficits will rise, forcing Trump to go "begging the Fed to launch QE4," which will cause the dollar to weaken and "precious metals to go ballistic," he explained.