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His [JIM ROGERS] bearishness on the US dollar is predicated on economic fundamentals, notably the balance of payments. Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve and Rogers' bogeyman-in-chief, has been printing money on an unprecedented scale and President George Bush has been spending it just as rapidly.
"The US owes the world $8 trillion," he argues. "We are the world's largest debtor nation by a factor of many times and our foreign debts are increasing by $1 trillion every 21 months. That's terrifying.
Dollar demise
"People need to understand about this major change in the world and about the demise of the US dollar. The US dollar is going the way that sterling went as it lost its place as the world's reserve currency. I suspect there will be exchange controls in the US in the foreseeable future. It will be a complicated and difficult currency."
Not that Rogers is a fan of many currencies. He says he has stakes in a dozen but has "no confidence in any of them". He expects the euro to fail eventually but holds some anyway because he judges it to be less flawed than the dollar. For the record, his daughter's assets are held in Swiss francs and gold, silver and platinum coins.
Unlike his old partner, Soros, who has devoted part of his vast fortune to opposing Bush's election campaign, Rogers stands wholly outside the political fray. He calls the US-led invasion of Iraq a "horrible, horrendous, unbelievable mistake", but thinks the Democratic candidate, John Kerry, would make his own mistakes. "They wouldn't be politicians if they knew what they were doing," he says, far from flippantly.
The balance of payments, and the looming dollar crisis, make the election result irrelevant, he argues: "Whoever is elected president is going to have serious problems in 2005-06. We Americans are going to suffer."
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