Jim Rogers: ‘Conceivably, The World Economy Is Going To Collapse Sometime In The Next Decade’

A number of “crash prophets” have been somewhat quiet since Election Day. Probably positioning themselves for the coming years now they know who is sitting in the White House, right? Anyway, I happened to spot an article on IndexUniverse (an investing website that focuses on ETFs, indexes, and index funds) this morning in which managing editor Olivier Ludwig recently spoke to legendary investor Jim Rogers. While the discussion revolved around a number of finance and investing topics, it was what the hard assets expert said about where he sees the global economy and the commodities bull market heading that really grabbed my attention. From the December 3 piece:

Ludwig: When might this commodity boom that you first wrote about in your book, “Hot Commodities,” run its course? How far is this along? Is there some kind of an end in sight?

Rogers: Well, I don’t see the end in sight—yet. Conceivably, the world economy is going to collapse sometime in the next decade. And if that happens, needless to say, then central banks are going to print even more money. It’s the wrong thing to do, but commodities will benefit and be a better place to invest than stocks, or certainly better than bonds if that happens.

On a historic basis, we’re maybe two-thirds of the way through the commodity bull market. Normally, eight, nine, 10 years into any bull market in anything, you start to see more supply come in. But what happened in 2008 and 2009 means there is a lot of potential capacity or supply that’s been deferred or delayed. So we don’t have as much supply coming as we normally would in this stage of the bull market.

So this bull market might last longer than most. But again, there’s no reason for me to determine that yet. The bull market is still intact. I hope I’ll be smart enough to recognize that a lot of capacity and a lot of supply is coming in, because that will be the end of the bull market. But that’s still years away.

The rest of the exchange between Ludwig and Rogers is incredibly informative. You can read the entire article on the InvestorResource website here.

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