Jim Rogers on youth, experience and bubbles

… that is what happens in bubbles.  The price goes up because the price is going up. In one sense, what you want in a bull market is a kid who is too young to know that what he is doing is foolish.  You want a kid who will race into a bubble and leverage it higher and higher.  Guys like me will not make nearly so much money because we see what is going on.  The kid does not know why he is making money, which is why he is making so much money.  The rest of us are experienced enough or smart enough to know that this is going to end badly.  What you want is a kid with very little experience and just enough brains to be very dangerous.  But you need to be smart enough to know when to pull out, to save yourself from his lack of knowledge and experience, and that, of course, can be hard to do.  When things go bad, you certainly do not want that kid around— and the kid is probably not going to be around by then anyway.

~ Jim Rogers, Street Smarts: Adventures on the Road and in the Markets

Jim Rogers on apprenticeship

I often explain to young people, I benefited from being an assistant.  I learned by watching others closely.  There is nothing like on-the-job training.  Many people coming into the job market think that they have done well for themselves if they manage to leapfrog an apprenticeship.  The wise course is to start by working for someone else, and to keep one’s eyes and ears open.

~ Jim Rogers, Street Smarts: Adventures on the Road and in the Markets

Jim Rogers on Russian stocks

I am not sure why Putin is keeping this up...  I'm not sure why Washington hasn't said, why Ukraine hasn't said, "Ok, we're not going to join NATO.  We'll sign a treaty that we will not join NATO."  What do we care if Ukraine is part of NATO or not?  That would solve the problem and if that happens - no, of course for a while people are going to be angry at Russia, rightly or wrongly, it doesn't matter... - but that would mean that Russian stocks are very, very, very cheap.  Eventually, I presume, that people would be drinking tea with the Russians again and drinking vodka and having a good time with the Russians again.  I doubt if it [the war] will last forever.  We had a horrible war with the Germans and the Japanese...  Now they're our great friends.  So times change.  Peoples' attitudes change.  And if you buy something cheap you usually - if you have staying power - usually make money.

~ Jim Rogers, interview with Daniela Cambone, Stansberry Research, 17:00 mark, March 8, 2022

Jim Rogers on the death of the U.S. dollar

But what is happening now with the U.S. dollar now is the end of the U.S. dollar because an international currency is supposed to be neutral, but in Washington they are now changing the rules.  Now if Washington does not like you, they put sanctions on you and you cannot use U.S. dollars.

~ Jim Rogers

(As quotes by Daniela Cambone in her interview with Jim Rogers, Stansberry Research, 4:00 mark, March 8, 2022.)

Confucius on planning

If a man takes no thought about what is distant, he will find sorrow near at hand.

~ Confucius

(Quoted by Jim Rogers in A Bull in China, p. 12.)

Jim Rogers on cryptocurrencies

My view is that if [the cryptocurrencies] do become currencies - and the crypto people all say "we're going to be the new currency, we're going to replace government money" - if that ever starts happening, I'm sure that the governments will say, "no."  They will outlaw it or ban it or tax it.  They'll do something.  Because governments do not like to lose their control.  They do not like to lose their power.  

I can't ever imagine if the U.S. said, "ok, this is money, this is the U.S. dollar and if you want to spend money this is how you do it."  And I can't imagine the U.S. government saying, "if you want to use something else, use something else."  That's not the way governments think.  That's not the way they work.  So I suspect that if they become real currencies, governments will take action.

~ Jim Rogers, "'This Will Happen No Matter What' - Jim Rogers Interview," YouTube.com, July 26, 2021

Jim Rogers on potential conflict with China

Throughout history, when you had a dominant power who is flat and or declining and another rising power, it has often led to war.  I'm not the first person to figure this out, especially in times when raw materials become scarce; it has nearly always led to war... shooting war.  It's absurd.  Nobody's ever won any of those shooting wars in the end, but that has usually been the way history has usually played itself out.  And I sit here and I say to myself, "This is totally absurd... In fifteen years, everybody's going to be telling 20-year old kids you've got to kill those 20-year old kids because they're evil and vicious." And it's all because guys were making mistakes in 2020, 2021. It's always led to this... It doesn't do any good for anybody in the end, but... I can sit here and say this all day long; it doesn't do any good. I know history. And the problem with history is - the main lesson of history is, nobody's learned the lesson of history.   You and I can sit here and say, "Guys, it's very clear how this ends."  They say, "We're smarter than history."  You go to Washington now, Mr. Trump says, "Who cares about history?  I'm smarter than history.  I don't need history."  Well, maybe he's right, but very few people have been smarter than history and nobody learns the lessons of history.

~ Jim Rogers, "The End Game Ep. 11 - Jim Rogers," The Grant Williams Podcast, 24:30 mark, November 14, 2020

Jim Rogers on remembering the context of earnings season comparisons

I think some of it is expectation management as you put it out, but remember what the comparisons were, we are talking about the second quarter of 2009, when the world essentially was coming to an end. Remember, at the end of 2008, beginning of 2009 we all thought the world had ended. The markets hit bottom in March 2009, well those were the comparisons we were up against. So things are actually better then people were expecting, but they should have looked back to see what the comparisons were and remember, the governments were spending huge amounts of money and that money has been flowing into the system in the last couple of quarters. Worry about next year, don`t worry about the second quarter now, that's history.

~ Jim Rogers, investor, CNBC interview, July 27th, 2010

Shaun Rein on the non-bubble Chinese economy

Betting against China in 2010 is a bad mistake for investors and companies alike... The Chinese government also has no qualms about overseeing the market and has not been run by Ayn-Rand-loving free marketers like Alan Greenspan, who seemed to believe that no government intervention at all was best.... China is not in imminent threat of collapse, and investors and companies are wise to stay involved with it, as [Jim] Rogers argues.

~Shaun Rein, Harvard graduate and founder and managing director of China Market Research Group, "Jim Chanos Is Wrong: There Is No China Bubble," Forbes.com, January 11, 2010

Nouriel Roubini: Jim Rogers's $2,000 gold is "utter nonsense"

[Today's forecast by investor Jim Rogers that gold will double to at least $2,000 an ounce is] utter nonsense. [There is no inflation or] “near-depression” [to drive gold prices that high. If a severe depression came to pass, with investors buying canned goods and hiding out in log cabins,] maybe you want some gold in that scenario. Maybe it will reach $1,100 or so but $1,500 or $2,000 is nonsense.

~ Nouriel Roubini, speech at the Inside Commodities Conference in New York, reported by Bloomberg TV, "Rogers's $2,000 gold 'utter nonsense'," November 5, 2009

(Gold rose to a record $1,098.50 today.)

Jim Rogers on socialism in the U.S.

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.

~ Jim Rogers, "'Printing money will lead to serious problems down the road,' says Jim Rogers," Business Intelligence Middle East, July 17, 2009

Jim Rogers on the government's ability to fix the economic crisis

[T]he government can't fix the crisis. Everything the government's tried for the past two years has been wrong. That's why the crisis continues. The idea that you can solve a problem of too much debt and too much consumption with more debt and more consumption is ludicrous on its face. What they should have done is just let everybody go bankrupt, let the bankruptcy courts reorganize everything. The Japanese tried this approach of propping up zombie banks and zombie companies; it did not work. And it's not going to work in America either.

~ Jim Rogers, "Q&A: Investment Guru Jim Rogers," Time, April 28, 2009, by Tim Morrison

Jim Rogers on how the financial system needs to allow failure

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

Jim Rogers on the credit bubble

We had the worst credit bubble ever in American history, perhaps world history. I can't remember anytime in history when people were able to buy a house with no money down -- sometimes with no income. You don't clean out a bubble like that in six months to a year.

~ Jim Rogers, "Light-Years Ahead of the Crowd," Barron's, April 14, 2008

Jim Rogers on bailing out the financial system

Q: You have been quoted as saying you don't think bailouts of troubled companies are a good idea. Is that still your view?

A: Yes, it is. If the government had not bailed out the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, I don't think we would have some of the problems we have now. Investment banks have been going bankrupt for hundreds of years. It is not the first time something like Bear Stearns has happened and the world has always survived.

If you had a few investment bankers go broke in 1998 or after the dot-com bust -- or if they lost hundreds of millions of dollars -- they probably would have had a different approach to their balance sheets. But since relatively few people got hurt with Long-Term Capital Management, in a few months everybody had forgotten the lessons that should have been learned about leverage or crazy products or crazy approaches. The government has been intervening to save all its friends for a decade or so rather than letting the market work properly.

Q: But isn't it so that a Bear Stearns bankruptcy would have devastated the financial system?

A: If the system is so fragile that the fifth-largest investment bank can bring it all down, then you better go ahead and have the problems now. What if three or five years from now it is the largest investment bank that fails or the largest five or six banks that fail? Then there will be a disaster.

Q: As an investor, you often allude to the importance of understanding history.

A: History will teach you that, first, we have seen all of this before, whether it's bubbles or panics or collapses. And yet, somehow, the world adapts.

~ Jim Rogers, "Light-Years Ahead of the Crowd," Barron's, April 14, 2008

Jim Rogers: Still short Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

I'm still short those companies, they both have a long way to go as far as I'm concerned. Neither one has a clue what's on their balance sheets.

~ Jim Rogers, chairman, Beeland Interests, "Freddie, Fannie Shares Will Continue to Slide, Jim Rogers Says," Bloomberg.com, November 20, 2007

(Freddie Mac, the second-largest U.S. mortgage company, warned of a possible cut in the dividend and the need for additional capital. The worst housing slump in 16 years caused "significant deterioration'' in the third quarter that will continue through year-end, Freddie Mac said after reporting a net loss of $2.02 billion, or $3.29 a share, three times what some analysts estimated. )

Jim Rogers on the credit crisis and commodities

There are always corrections in every bull and bear market. If you think this will change the secular bull market, you have no clue what is going on.

~ Jim Rogers, "Is Jim Rogers Crazy?," HardAssetsInvestor.com, September 06, 2007, by Matt Hougan

Jim Rogers on Ben Bernanke

If I were Bernanke I would abolish the Fed and resign.

~ Jim Rogers, as interviewed on Bloomberg Video, November 2, 2007

Jim Rogers: Sell U.S. dollars, buy Chinese yuan

I'm in the process of -- I hope in the next few months -- getting all of my assets out of U.S. dollars. I'm that pessimistic about what's happening in the U.S.

It's the official policy of the central bank and the U.S. to debase the currency.

The U.S. dollar is and has been the world's reserve currency, the world's medium of exchange. That's in the process of changing. The pound sterling, which used to be the world's reserve currency, lost 80 percent of its value, top to bottom, as it went through the whole period of losing its status as the world's reserve currency.

[The Chinese renminbi is] the best currency to buy right now. I don't see how one can really lose on the renminbi in the next decade or so. It's gotta go. It's gotta triple. It's gotta quadruple. [China is] going to be the most important country in the 21st century.

[The carry trades in yen and francs will] unwind someday, [which will send the currencies] straight up. I'm buying the yen.

[The bull markets in bonds and stocks are] over. Bonds will be a terrible place to be for many years and will in fact be going down for many years.

Jim Rogers, "Jim Rogers Shifts Assets Out of Dollar to Buy Chinese Currency," Bloomberg.com, October 23, 2007