This is too good. It'd be funny if it wasn't so serious. The following is from a Resource Investor interview with legendary investor Jim Rogers, published on January 28, 2008.
Make sure you take the time to click over and read the whole thing. I just wanted to focus on what he says about Ben Bernanke, because he speaks the truth!
Jim Rogers Interview: Where to Put Your Money (emphasis added)
RESOURCE INVESTOR: Yeah, let’s do. But briefly, before we leave the subject, do you think that Bernanke is just going to become another Greenspan?
JIM ROGERS: He’s worse. All he knows is to print money. His whole intellectual career has been spent studying the printing of money. America’s now given him the printing presses and all he knows to do it to run them. He doesn’t know about markets. He doesn’t know about foreign currencies. We know now he doesn’t even know about economics. I mean, he’s got a PhD in economics and he was a professor of economics, but he doesn’t have a clue about economics.
I will quote you – I hate to quote you, but one more time - I was watching him testify before congress and I almost fell out of my chair. He said under oath, so we presume he wasn’t lying, that he was just a fool, he said if an American only buys American products, it does not matter to him if the value of the U.S. dollar goes down. He will not be affected. I was looking at the man to see if he was lying, giving government propaganda, but then I could see he didn’t even really understand.
He didn’t understand if, you know, even if say I’m an American, Lindsay, and I only buy American tires. Well if the price of foreign tires goes up, obviously the price of American tires are going to go up too. Plus, if the dollar goes down, the price of rubber’s going to go higher, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
So the man doesn’t even understand economics. He’s going to print money. He’s going to throw money out the window. The dollar’s going to go down further and further and further. Inflation’s going to get worse and worse and worse throughout the world – the world, not just America - and we’re going to have a worse recession in the end.
RESOURCE INVESTOR: He says that the inflation problem is a lesser problem than a slow-growth cycle. What would be your comment on that analysis?
JIM ROGERS: Well, no. You know better than that. Inflation damages everything. It distorts all economic planning, all economic decision making. A slow economic profile or whatever he called it – we get over recessions. They end. But once you start embedding inflation into the entire nation’s economy, that’s one thing. Then it changes everything. It changes currencies. It changes foreigners’ perceptions of their own economy, their own currency, their own cost of doing business.
You know, what he’s doing is going to – he’s trying to save a few guys on Wall Street, a few friends on Wall Street, but what he’s really going to do is damage 300 million – well not just 300 million Americans - he’s going to damage the whole world. But he doesn’t care. He’s just looking to save his friends on Wall Street, and he thinks he’ll go down in history as a smart guy. Going to go down in history as one of the two gigantic failures of central banking.
