Before the Jim Rogers Agriculture Fund, Jim Rogers started his investing career by selling peanuts, and now he is a billionaire. He recently sat down with BBC Hard Talk to talk about what investors should be doing now.
Everyone is talking about how China is the place to be, but that is all they are doing. No one is moving there, and the money from investment vehicles like the Jim Rogers Agriculture Fund is only now starting to flood in. There will be huge setbacks in Asia. In America, there was a civil war, massacres in the streets, corruption - but despite this, America did great in the 19th century.
Asia is probably the best place to invest your money. Just because there is a dip in the Asian markets, that is not a good reason to take your money out and invest it in bankrupt countries like the United States or the UK. Besides, you can always short equities if things are looking gloomy.
There is no question that there is a property bubble in urban coastal cities in China. But that is not the entire Chinese economy. That is a small part of their economy. Don’t listen to the rating agencies that have always got it wrong the past few years in the developed markets.
China may have civil wars, epidemics, panics, and many other terrible things. They can survive all these things. One thing that no society can outlast is a water problem. If China cannot solve its water problem, then they will not succeed, and neither will the Jim Rogers Agriculture Fund. But they are well aware of their water problem, and they are spending billions of dollars to try to solve it.
China is changing their one child policy. There is a lot of offshore Chinese who are starting to come back. There will be problems, but there are no other countries that are even close to being a contender for the strongest economy moving forward.
We have a shortage of agriculture of epidemic proportions. Farming has been a horrible business. More farmers commit suicide per capita than any other profession. This is one reason that the Jim Rogers Agriculture Fund sees so much opportunity there.
Farmers want the prices of commodities to go up. They need capital to flow into their industry so that it attracts capital and new talent. Food prices haven’t gone up nearly at all. Sugar is still 70% below what it was in 1974. The inventories of food is also well below what it has been on a historical basis. The Jim Rogers Agriculture Fund stands to benefit tremendously from these valuations.
There will always be new regulations. They will blame higher food prices on the evil speculators. They always want to blame their problems on somebody else.
