Asia is the wave of the future. Moving to Britain in 1807 was brilliant. Moving to the United States in 1907 was brilliant, and it would be brilliant now to move to Asia, which is where Jim Rogers daughters are going to grow up. Jim Rogers daughters can already speak Mandarin, and by moving they will be able to continue to speak it. Historically, all the action moves to where the creditor nations lie rather than to the debtor nations. There has never been a country in greater debt to the rest of the world than the United States is now. It has never worked in the past and it won’t work now. The Japanese spent a lot of money in the 1990s, and they had the lost decade. Bridges and highways were built to nowhere, and they never let the system clean itself out.
The consensus in Washington DC is that spending and borrowing will solve the problems of borrowing and spending. But there are other people who think that saving and investing is the way to go. Governments take the money from the competent and give it to the incompetent so that the incompetent can keep competing with the competent with the competents’ money.
The United States is already talking about taxing capital. They are talking about protectionism. These are the same mistakes that led to the Great Depression. It is happening again. The mistakes that Gordon Brown is making could lead to a worldwide depression.
The sterling is finished, and the British press went crazy with it. It was only an offhand comment. There is nothing that the UK has to sell enough of to pull themselves out of this mess. The UK already has huge trade deficits, and it is only going to get worse.
The rules of economics are always the same. In the short term, people think that the rules don’t apply because they are in a bubble. But then everyone finds out that the emperor has no clothes. The UK has got to adapt, and a lot of people have got to go bankrupt, but the government keeps bailing out their friends. Mentions of Jim Rogers daughters don’t often pop up in his interviews, but when they do it is always interesting to see what he is going to teach them. He already wrote the book A Gift to My Children for them, which is filled with great aphorisms, investment advice, and general wisdom on life. Jim Rogers daughters are certainly lucky to have a great father.
Earth base to Jim… Singapore has English an official language… Sure, they also speak Mandarin, other Chinese dialects, Tamil or Malay. They probably speak better English than we do.. Westerners are so ignorant. Most Asians dread the idea of learning Mandarin, which is a very difficult language to learn. If you get the tone wrong, the word has a different meaning. Most Chinese are learning English from 3rd grade on. Given how long it took the world to learn English, it will take centuries for people to develop a similar proficiency in Mandarin.