People who invested recklessly being bailed out

What is happening right now is a historical anomaly. Never in the thousands of years of recorded history have we had interest rates at zero or negative. We are destroying the people who save and invest for the future. They are being wiped out at the expense of the people who bought four or five houses with no money down and no job. We are destroying the people that all societies throughout history have needed the most.

When you destroy the investing and saving group, your society, economy, and country has problems. That is what we have been doing. Think of all those people who were saving for the future. They look like fools now, and feel like fools. Their friends who borrowed money are being saved at their expense. 


VIA Marketwatch

Jim Rogers on China property City vs Rural

I would not buy Chinese property unless it was in the countryside. There are probably good places to buy houses in the countryside, but house prices in most of the cities are very expensive, and most of the cities have too many buildings. When I traveled around China, I also saw many empty houses in cities.

Jim Rogers is a smart investor who co-founded the Quantum Fund with George Soros in 1973. By 1983 the fund gained more than 4000 percent.

Jim Rogers continues to like Chinese Yuan currency

I have bought yuan for many years and I have never sold any of it. I will continue to buy and hold yuan. The yuan may depreciate and I hope it will as often happens in markets, because if the price goes down I can buy more of it.


Jim Rogers is a smart investor who co-founded the Quantum Fund with George Soros in 1973. By 1983 the fund gained more than 4000 percent.

China is the country to be in the 21st century

I don't pay much attention to short-term economic growth data in China, and it would not be easy to forecast the country's economic growth for the whole of 2015.

The world economy may experience some setbacks in the future, and that would affect China because the country is more international now. With its cooling economy, China needs to pay more attention to avoid building up debt. In the past few years China has built up more debt than it ever had in the previous 30 years.

There have already been some companies that have defaulted on their debts, and there may be more. But if China comes out of this cooling period, it is likely to see rapid growth in its economy.

Britain was dominant in the 19th century, and then it was replaced by the US in the 20th century. In my view, the 21st century will belong to China.

It's likely that more and more Chinese consumers will spend their money overseas as they become richer and some Chinese firms will speed up their process of overseas investment. The increased purchasing power from China will continue to change the world in the future, similar to the way that Britain and the US did when they were rising.

I encourage my daughters to speak Chinese and learn about Asia, because I want them to prepare for the 21st century. That is why I have moved my whole family from the US to live in Asia.

India may never become an economy as important or as strong as China. As for Japan, under its current economic policy the country has been printing money, but a depreciating currency will not support the sound development of the real economy in the long run.


Jim Rogers is a smart investor who co-founded the Quantum Fund with George Soros in 1973. By 1983 the fund gained more than 4000 percent.

China producing high quality products

In the 21st century, buying goods made in China will be almost unavoidable, as the country has become the major manufacturing force in the world.

Even 20 years ago, I had a refrigerator produced by Chinese home appliance maker Haier Group. I have never bought a Chinese car but I suspect eventually everybody will have Chinese cars. During my second trip around the world in 1999, I was driving across China and we had Changyu wine (Chinese wine). I was surprised by how good it was.

Some people have the impression that products made in China are cheap but of poor quality. In the 1950's, that was what people said about products made in Japan. Then people changed their mind about products made in Japan and realized they were of very high quality.

It's good that China has realized that the only way to nurture the market is to make high-quality goods. 




Jim Rogers is a smart investor who co-founded the Quantum Fund with George Soros in 1973. By 1983 the fund gained more than 4000 percent.

Water is very important for development of a society

Water is the single most important determination of civilization. I travelled around the world a couple of times and I have seen whole societies that disappeared because the water disappeared. People can survive recession and war, revolution and famine, plague, but they cannot survive without water. That ends the whole story, no matter how smart you think you are.

There is no question that we are facing constraints. They are already here in many parts of the world. Water, I presume, is going to get very expensive or else we are going to move to where the water is. This is how societies and civilizations have developed. Once upon a time there was a lot of farming in the Sahara desert that we now know of. It is now a desert and everybody moved away because there is no more water there.



Jim Rogers is a smart investor who co-founded the Quantum Fund with George Soros in 1973. By 1983 the fund gained more than 4000 percent.

Do your homework when it comes to investing

Once in 1980, when oil had been booming for a decade, I came to the conclusion the bull market was over, and I shorted oil. And that weekend Iran and Iraq went to war. Needless to say, I had to scramble in panic, and I covered like every other amateur. 

One could say that was bad luck. But no, no. Somebody knew that was coming. You don't move a lot of armies and start a war without some preparation. I just hadn't done enough homework. Nearly all the mistakes I've made have been from not doing enough homework. Whenever I get sloppy I nearly always lose.


Jim Rogers is a smart investor who co-founded the Quantum Fund with George Soros in 1973. By 1983 the fund gained more than 4000 percent.

Water problems in California, China, india, Middle East

The whole Southwest is facing a serious water problem. The aquifer, based on what I read, is drying up out there. And not just in California but all over the Southwest. And if that happens America will have to absorb a gigantic change. If you have water and productive land you will be very, very rich. Because whether we like it or not – now this is not going to happen next year, I don’t think California is going to become a desert any time soon – it is a process which is going on, from what I can read.

And from what I can see nobody in the government seems to know or care about it. The government of California is learning but they are not solving the problem, they are deliberating about the problem. But again it is just not the US, there many places in the world with problems – China, India, the Middle East, many places have big water problems.

Wars, Government failures coming in the future

Throughout history we have had economic slowdowns every four to seven years, every so often. Always have, and always will. Nobody has solved that problem, not even the central banks. We are going to have another one in the world. We are going to have more I should say, and they will get worse because the debt situation is higher and higher. We hear all this talk about austerity and cutting back but every country in the world has higher debt now than it had last year and will have higher debt next year.

The buildup of debt in the US alone is staggering; Japan is staggering, everywhere is staggering. So the next time we have an economic slowdown it is going to be much worse than the last time, and if the world survives that one, the one after that is going to be worse and worse.

Because as you point out, if interest rates go higher – and they will; this current level of interest rates is not only abnormal but absurd, it has never been so low anywhere in the world – with the gigantic amount of debt we are going to have gigantic problems worldwide: more turmoil, we will probably have wars, governments fail, countries fail. This is going to be a mess.

So buy yourself a farm. Be prepared! It’s going to be a serious mess. And hopefully your farm will be far away from the marauding hordes.

Jim Rogers is a smart investor who co-founded the Quantum Fund with George Soros in 1973. By 1983 the fund gained more than 4000 percent.