It is terrible to listen to the kinds of things that Ben Bernanke says. It is amazing that people actually believe him after he has been wrong every single time. Getting rid of the Federal Reserve would be nice, but you certainly don’t want to listen to Bernanke.
The first time that they printed and spent so much money into the system, and here they are doing it again. A year ago, Bernanke was saying that he would be taking the excess money out of the economy. But here we are, putting more money into it.
The prices of everything is going up, especially Jim Rogers holdings. Bernanke says that there is no inflation. But he is using fraudulent numbers. They are a complete sham. A big percentage of the inflation calculation is based on real estate. But they sure wouldn’t use the real estate numbers back when the prices were going up.
Many people have tried to debase their currency to make things better, but it can only give some relief in the short term. It has never worked for the long-term or even the medium term.
The United States will default on its debt in the next 5 years. Everything that Bernanke is doing will hurt us in the long term. If you have children, then you probably have a much longer time horizon than a year or two. That is the time frame that the politicians and policy makers are using.
Whenever you raise taxes, it isn’t good. It is always better to have lower taxes from a Jim Rogers holdings point of view. Who is better qualified to spend the people’s money than the people themselves. The way to solve the deficit is to stop spending so much money. It is staggering how much money they manage to spend. They have troops in more than 100 countries around the world.
Why should poor Irish taxpayers be on the hook for mistakes that big banks made? That is horrible morality, and it is just bad economics. Those banks should go bankrupt and start over, just as Russia did. A 10 to 15 year period of prosperity typically follows this kind of restructuring.
Iceland is now having a wonderful time, but it wasn’t always been that way. They took the pain and started over. Japan didn’t want to do that, and that is why they have had two lost decades. That may also be a likely future of the United States.
In 10 or 15 years, the Euro probably won’t be around anymore. They will keep propping countries up. Greece, Portugal, Belgium and other countries have made major mistakes over the past few years. What will happen is a politician from one of the members will drop out. No currency union has ever worked in history, and the Euro will be no different. It could happen even sooner, depending on how to world evolves. But this doesn’t mean you should sell your Euros now. There will be some stability, and the countries will bail each other out and smooth everything over. But then all of the problems will come back to the forefront.
All the creditor nations in the world are located in Asia. Japan, China, Korea, Singapore – this is where all of the assets are in the world and in Jim Rogers holdings. There is a lot of ambition and eagerness to work over in Asia as well.
Bubbles are always something to worry about. There may be a bubble forming right now in Chinese coastal urban real estate. But it isn’t as bad as it was here. They simply have a price bubble, whereas we had a credit bubble. It was the largest in history. If speculators go bankrupt in China, it isn’t going to take down their economy.
When things go wrong, politicians always blame three groups of people. First it is the foreigners. They can’t vote. The second group is the bankers and financiers. Nobody likes these people when things go sour. The third group is the journalists. If the journalists woul stop writing and investigating the problems, the problems wouldn’t even be there.
China has opened up an enormous amount, particularly when it comes to their currency. It is becoming fully convertible in neighboring countries, and eventually it will be easily convertible all over the world. By 2013, the Chinese currency could be fully open. Jim Rogers holdings typically includes the Chinese currency.
Washington, DC cannot tell anyone how to run an economy. They have built the largest debt in the history of the world. Those men are not suitable for anything. For an economy to grow, you need savings and investment in order to improve productive capacity.
Look at the way America grew. They saved and invested a lot of money. They built railroads and canals and built a solid economy. If you stop saving and investing and start consuming, then that situation cannot last for very long. There will be more currency crises in the markets until all of this can get sorted out.
The UK right now is a disaster. They have had a terrible trade deficit for the past 20 years. They have relied heavily on London and the North Sea, but those sources of income appear to be drying up. Their new government has started to do some bold things, but it is unclear whether they can actually turn things around. The austerity measures that they have implemented need to be more. The Pound is another currency that will have major problems in the next 5 years.
The Pound will probably be worse than the Dollar.
Not everyone is in trouble. There are people who will have huge boom times in the near future. Anyone who produces commodities will do well. If the economy does well, there will be strong demand for commodities, which is why the Jim Rogers holdings will do well.
