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Jim Rogers
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“ ‘It’s good to be old. Young people have a very bleak future ahead of them.’ ”
That’s Jim Rogers, the 78-year-old co-founder of George Soros’s Quantum Fund, once again hammering home the idea that the flood of money flowing from central banks are artificially keeping markets around the world afloat and will ultimately lead to disaster.
“If you look out the window, you’ll see printing presses everywhere,” Rogers explained in an interview with the Peak Prosperity blog. “You know what happened to all the other countries in history that have gotten themselves deep into debt… it hasn’t been pretty.”
To gird against such weakness, Rogers pointed out that commodities, as you can see from this chart highlighted in the blog post, are offering an historic bargain relative to equity valuations:
Watch the full interview:
In separate comments made at the 12th annual “Russia Calling” Investment Forum in Moscow last week, Rogers talked about how the actions of some of in positions of power have made the coronavirus pandemic even more devastating for global economies.
“This is probably the worst [crisis] that I have seen in my lifetime, because everything collapsed and you had politicians and media and everybody overreacting in my view, and everybody closed down,” he was quoted as saying by RT.com. “We’ve had many epidemics in history, but never before did they close McDonalds, never before did they close all the airlines.”
The U.S. death toll from COVID-19 just topped 230,000 and the total case number hit 9.1 million after more than 99,000 infections in a record one-day tally, according to Johns Hopkins University.
Rogers, not one to shy away from gloomy calls, told participants at the form that the next bear market is “going to be the worst in my lifetime.”
Last week may not have been “the worst,” but it surely wasn’t pretty. The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -0.59% closed 6.5% lower for the five-day stretch, while the S&P 500 SPX, -1.21% lost 5.6% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite COMP, -2.45% gave up 5.5%.
