Jim Rogers on the Economy and Bernanke

Speaking to CNBC earlier this week, Rogers said: “In America, Bernanke just says we'll print more money, we'll spend more money, even though the United States is now the largest debtor nation in the history of the world."

"The things that have worked in the past... will be you go bankrupt then you re-organize and you start over. You have a painful period for awhile, and then you start over. This has been done in the past 3-4 thousand years, and that's the way you do it," said Rogers.

"Trying to push the problem out to the future, and printing money, we just had another example here in the US, it didn't work and it's not going to work."

Rogers said that with central banks "flooding the world with money," the only place for investors right now is in real assets, to protect themselves from central banks debasing currencies.

"Paper money is not going to do it for you," he added.

Rogers said central banks are destroying the saving and investing class. “We’re going to have a lot more currency turmoil over the next 2-3 years because of the huge imbalances that exist in the world.”...

“Mr. Bernanke has never been right about anything,” said Rogers, adding that the Fed chairman "doesn’t understand economics, finance, or currencies and is merely pushing the problem to the future by printing more money," Rogers told CNBC...

While he doesn’t call this a double dip, as “we never got out of the first recession,” he does say that “the next time it’s going to be worse because we’ve shot all of our bullets.”

"With zero interest rates and huge government deficits all around, policy options are definitely more limited," Rogers said.

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Jim Rogers on the Fed and Bernanke

August 4, 2010

"We have Bernanke who is running the Federal Reserve who does not know what he is doing. We have a very serious problem on our hands and it's gotten much much worse. The man is taking $400 billion on to the Federal Reserve balance sheets -- of dicey loans, bad debt. I mean he is turning the Federal Reserve into a pawn shop. You have something bad that you cannot sell, take it to the Federal Reserve. He'll lend you treasury bonds against it. Some day somebody has to pay for this and you know who this somebody is -- my little girl, you, me. I mean it's gonna be the American taxpayer that's gonna have to pay for this. And it's gonna cause many many many more problems for the American economy for all of us."

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Jim Rogers: New Recession in 2012

Speaking in an interview with business television channel CNBC, the septuagenarian investor said that "since the beginning of time" there has been a recession every four-to-six years, and that's mean another one is due around 2012.

However, he said that due to the extraordinary measures already adopted by central banks and governments around the world, the arsenal of available tools to combat the next recession is somewhat lacking.

With reference to Ben Bernanke, chairman of the US Federal Reserve, he said: "Is Mr Bernanke going to print more money than he already has? No, the world would run out of trees."

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Jim Rogers on the Economy

Speaking to CNBC Wordwide Exchange today Rogers said "All the government officials and bureaucrats loved the fact Lehman failed, because they could all jump in and support banks."
"This whole problem was not caused by Lehman Brothers or Lehman Brothers failure. Lehman was an effect not a cause."

"The real problem over the past 10-15 years has been that regulators have not let people fail. Had they let people fail we would have solved this problem a long time ago. I don't know why they're not in jail," Rogers said.

Reiterating his view about US monetary policy and their effect on the Dollar, Rogers warned. "I would expect there to be a currency crisis or a semi-crisis this fall or next year. It's crony capitalism, Bernanke and Greenspan have brought crony capitalism to America … but that's not going to solve the world's problems."

"We're going to have zombie capitalism for the next 15-20 years. How long are you going to let the bureaucrats run the thing so we can't have a clean system?," he added.

"Banks have been going bankrupt for a few hundreds years. The way the system works is when somebody fails you let him fail. What we're doing now is we're taking the assets away from the competent people and giving them to incompetent people and telling them now you can compete with competent people with their money."

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Basics of Investing from Jim Rogers

1. Buying things that are cheap; and
2. Buying things that are about to see a dynamic change in their favor.

Put those principles together and you’ll succeed as an investor by buying assets that are out-of-favor -- just before they come back in favor.

read the article

Jim Rogers on the Economy

Legendary global investor and chairman of Singapore- based Rogers Holdings, Jim Rogers said on Wednesday the US government’s interventionist economic policy verges on communism.

In an interview with Moneynews's Dan Mangru, Rogers said: "America now owns the car industry. America owns the mortgage industry. America owns a lot of the insurance industry. Karl Marx must be somewhere standing up in his grave cheering. And why is that? America has become a socialist and maybe even communist nation in many ways,” Rogers said.

Addressing the various stimulus packages introduced by the US government, Rogers suggested that President Bush approved two packages, President Obama one, and now there’s talk of a fourth.

“The first stimulus didn’t work. The second stimulus didn’t work. The third stimulus hasn’t worked,” he said.

Rogers is clearly unhappy with the massive monetary easing the Fed has engineered under Chairman Ben Bernanke and he sees inflation and a currency crisis as a result of these policies

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Jim Rogers on the Economy

Legendary global investor and chairman of Singapore- based Rogers Holdings, Jim Rogers said on Wednesday the US government’s interventionist economic policy verges on communism.

In an interview with Moneynews's Dan Mangru, Rogers said: "America now owns the car industry. America owns the mortgage industry. America owns a lot of the insurance industry. Karl Marx must be somewhere standing up in his grave cheering. And why is that? America has become a socialist and maybe even communist nation in many ways,” Rogers said.

Addressing the various stimulus packages introduced by the US government, Rogers suggested that President Bush approved two packages, President Obama one, and now there’s talk of a fourth.

“The first stimulus didn’t work. The second stimulus didn’t work. The third stimulus hasn’t worked,” he said.

Rogers is clearly unhappy with the massive monetary easing the Fed has engineered under Chairman Ben Bernanke and he sees inflation and a currecy crisis as a result of these policies

Jim Rogers Interview

Ben Bernanke: Hero or villian?

He's an idiot.

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False Recovery?

Legendary investor Jim Rogers told CNBC on Wednesday he is not short or hedged in anything at the moment, but buying Japanese Yen. The next crisis in his eyes is in currencies which makes sense since sovereign states have taken much of the bad debt from the banks and piled them onto their own balance sheets.

The stock market may hit new lows this year or the next as the current rally has been largely caused by the money printed by central banks and fundamental problems remain unsolved, he said.

His views echo those of renowned bear Marc Faber, who told CNBC last week that the rises in share prices did not mean the world was embarking on a path of sustainable economic growth...

Governments have not solved the essential problems that caused the crisis but instead they "flooded the world with money," according to Rogers. Trying to solve the problem of too much consumption and too much debt with more consumption "defies belief" and will not work, he said.

The price of oil is also likely to remain high despite the fact that the recession is taking its toll on demand, he said.

"You know supplies worldwide are declining at the rate of anywhere from 4% to 6% a year, yes, demand is down at the moment but in longer term, unless somebody discovers a lot of oil very quickly, the surprise is going to be how high the price of oil stays, and how high it eventually goes," Rogers added.

The next financial meltdown will be in the currency markets, as central banks around the world have been printing money, giving the appearance of massive government intervention to weaken their currencies, legendary investor Jim Rogers, Chairman, Rogers Holdings, told CNBC on Wednesday.

"At the moment I have virtually no hedges, I suspect it is going to be the next problem, big crisis will be in the currency markets, I'm trying to figure out what to do there," Rogers said.

"If I am right, you're going to see a lot of currency problems in the next decade or two," Rogers said.

Governments around the world are doing their best to destroy currencies, many currencies in fact. And people need to understand that; if they don't understand it now, they're going to find out, they're going to find out the hard way," he added.

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My thoughts: We might achieve a recovery on paper, but true economic prosperity could be years down the road.

Jim Rogers on the US and World Economy

About 30 minutes long. Worth your time.

Jim Rogers Interview

Q: What do you think of the government's response to the economic crisis?

Rogers: Terrible. They're making it worse. It's pretty embarrassing for President Obama, who doesn't seem to have a clue what's going on—which would make sense from his background. And he has hired people who are part of the problem. [Treasury Secretary Tim] Geithner was head of the New York Fed, which was supposedly in charge of Wall Street and the banks more than anybody else. And as you remember, [Obama's chief economic adviser, Larry] Summers helped bail out Long-Term Capital Management years ago. These are people who think the only solution is to save their friends on Wall Street rather than to save 300 million Americans.

read the entire interview

Jim Rogers on the Economy

“America doesn’t have reserves and it doesn’t have anything except, so far, the ability to borrow,” Rogers said. “That’s not going to be good for the world economy. It’s just adding more debt, more consumption to a problem that’s caused by debt and consumption.”

“He caused the problem all last year,” Rogers said on Bloomberg Television. “He came up with TARP, and he came up with all these absurd bailouts. Mr. Geithner has never known what he is doing. He doesn’t know what he is doing now and pretty soon everybody is going to find out, including Mr. Obama.”

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Jim Rogers on Timothy Geithner

But Rogers said Geithner, who was president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, "has been dead wrong about everything for 15 years in a row," and so was President Barack Obama's economic advisor Lawrence Summers, who acted as Treasury Secretary at the turn of the century.

"It is mind-boggling to me," Rogers told "Squawk Box Europe."

"If I were on your show 15 weeks in a row and was wrong, you'd probably never invite me back. These guys have been wrong year after year after year consistently and here they are making the same mistakes again. This is not going to solve the problem, it's going to make it worse."

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Jim Rogers interview here and here

Jim Rogers on Failure and Bailouts

Greenspan refused to let people fail. And so we've had no failure in the financial community and now we've spent trillions of dollars bailing out Wall Street for their mistakes and that's damaging the whole economy - 300 million Americans to bail out a million people and their failures. This is not good for America. We're damaging the system. We're weakening the system dramatically.

Why are we bailing out Citibank? Why are 300 million Americans having to pay for Citibank's mistakes? The way the system is supposed to work... people fail, and then the competent people take over the assets from the failed people and you start again from a new, stronger base. What we're doing this time is they're taking the assets from the competent people, giving them to the incompetent people, and saying, "Ok, now you can compete with the competent people." So everybody's weakened. The whole nation is weakened. The whole economy's weakened. That's not the way it's supposed to work.

There are many banks, many brokers, many homeowners, many citizens who've been sitting there, doing what they were supposed to do, minding their manners, not getting extended, waiting for this to happen, knowing that someday all of this foolishness is going to wind up as a disaster. Now, instead of being rewarded, they're being punished. All these homeowners who did nothing wrong are now having to pay for the people who did crazy things like buying four homes with no job. This is weakening America dramatically.

~ Jim Rogers, Bloomberg TV, November 24, 2008

My thoughts: Rogers once again proves to be one of the most insightful commentators on the current crisis. Capitalism is going to get another black eye when all the blame should be placed on government intervention in the economy.

Jim Rogers: Inflation Holocaust

Jim Rogers Interview (10/10)

"They are going to print money until they run out of trees" Jim Rogers 10/10/08

watch interview here

Jim Rogers: "Inflation Holocaust"

Markets do not trust the governments' plans to keep struggling banks alive and investors will only calm down when the companies with bad assets are allowed to go bankrupt, legendary investor Jim Rogers, CEO of Rogers Holdings, told CNBC on Friday.

"The way to solve this problem is to let people go bankrupt," Rogers said.

"Then you will hit bottom and then you start over. The people who are sound will take over the assets from the people who aren't sound and we will start over. This is the way the world has worked for a few thousand years."

The current rescue plans, which will force governments to issue more debt, print money and flood the markets with liquidity, will flare up inflation after the crisis is over and will create worse problems, Rogers warned.

"We're setting the stage for when we come out of this of a massive inflation holocaust," he said.

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My thoughts: Rogers is correct.

Jim Rogers on Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac

Don't Bail Them Out

Jim Rogers on the Economy

Click the picture for the link.

A great conversation with Jim Rogers on the economy, the Fed, "Helicopter Ben" Bernake, commodities, oil, etc.

Rogers on Bernanke: "He should go back and take Economics 101"

Jim Rogers on Bear Stearns

"They are really giving up on the dollar, they are driving the dollar down, they are printing money as fast as they can. Look, the Federal Reserve has just in the last week spent 230 billion dollars taking on loans, house loans, mortgages, out of the system. This man Bernanke was never elected by anybody, I don't know where he gets the audacity to spend 230 billion dollars of our money to bail out a few friends on Wall St. This is totally outrageous.

He is next going to be in his helicopter going around the world collecting rent payments from people. Who gave him the authority to do that? To destroy the dollar, to destroy our currency, to essentially destroy the American economy? And, no one ever voted for the man. It is just mind boggling to me.

And then he gives more money to Bears Stearns so these guys can continue to drive around in their Maserati's."