Tuesday, February 12, 2008

More Jim Rogers

I almost did not post this because I have put alot of Jim Rogers thoughts on here but decided to let you make the decision rather to listen to it or not. That and I loved the interviewers British accents.

He is even more bearish than he was six months ago. Just like bankers can become tunneled vision that housing never will go down, Jim Rogers risks becoming tunneled vision on his negative views on the world. However, I agree with him much more than not.

http://www.resourceinvestor.com/pebble.asp?relid=39907

On propping up the U.S. economy

Japanese tried for 15 years to keep propping up, you know, zombie companies, etcetera, etcetera, and it took them 15 years and they’re still aren’t out of the woods. They should just go ahead – recessions are common. We’ve been having them every five or six years since the beginning of time. They’re good. They clean out the previous excesses. They let the system start over with a sound basis.

On Greenspan

Oh no, of course he is. I mean he’s laid the foundation for the demise of the Federal Reserve. Between Greenspan and Bernanke, we may see the Federal Reserve fail. We’ve had three central banks in America. The first two failed. This one’s going to fail too. I mean if you really – we could spend a whole program, a whole year of programs, reading quotes from Greenspan and you would realize what a fool he’s been.

On Bernanke

He’s worse. All he knows is to print money. His whole intellectual career has been spent studying the printing of money. America’s now given him the printing presses and all he knows to do it to run them. He doesn’t know about markets. He doesn’t know about foreign currencies. We know now he doesn’t even know about economics. I mean, he’s got a PhD in economics and he was a professor of economics, but he doesn’t have a clue about economics.

On Inflation

Inflation damages everything. It distorts all economic planning, all economic decision making. A slow economic profile or whatever he called it – we get over recessions. They end. But once you start embedding inflation into the entire nation’s economy, that’s one thing. Then it changes everything. It changes currencies. It changes foreigners’ perceptions of their own economy, their own currency, their own cost of doing business.

On Agriculture

Well, I’ve been buying them in the recent past, a few weeks ago. I bought more ags, yes. Agriculture is the best place – one of the few places - where I would put money in the investment markets right now. I’d buy agriculture. I’d buy the renminbi, the Swiss frank, the Japanese yen, but beyond that, there’s not much I see that I would be buying.

1 comment:

David Shvartsman said...

Good interview, and I know what you mean about posting so many from a single investor that you wonder if people find it repetitive.

I've often jokingly thought to myself, "hmm, maybe I should rename my blog 'Things Jim Rogers (or Marc Faber) said'".

Still, it's great to hear their views.