Jim Rogers on Gold, Silver & the Coming US Crisis

[The Machine]

 

 

Investment legend is hedging gold, not silver. Will buy more if prices fall further...

 

"I OWN GOLD and I own silver," said investor, fund manager and best-selling author Jim Rogers to me last night, interviewed by phone from his Singapore home, writes Miguel Perez-Santalla at BullionVault.

 

"I've owned it for decades," he told listeners to my New York Markets Live radio show online.

 

"But I'm not buying," Jim Rogers went on, stressing the point throughout our 30-minute interview.

 

"In fact, I've hedged some of my gold at the moment."

 

Here's how Jim Rogers sees the gold and silver markets as 2014 draws near:

"If or when it goes down I plan to buy more. Because gold is going to go to huge numbers before this is all over.

 

"But I'm not buying now, and I do think there's another opportunity to buy gold in the future [at lower prices] for a couple of reasons.

 

"One, gold went up 12 years in a row Miguel, and I have never seen any asset in history go up 12 years without a down year. There may be some, I just don't know about them. So gold had a peculiar rise, and I would suspect that the correction which we're in now and have been for many months will be an anomaly as well because of the previous rise.

 

"Perhaps more important is the fact that India, which is the largest buyer of gold in the world, has a gigantic balance of trade problem and the Indian politicians are blaming it on gold. Gold is their second largest import after oil, and they cannot do anything about oil, so they're attacking gold. They've already put on lots of restrictions to limit people buying gold. And now the Indian politicians are trying to figure out a way to make the Indians sell gold.

 

"Now, I don't know what's going to happen obviously. But the fact that India, which has been the largest buyer, has reduced its buying a lot, whenever you have the largest buyer of anything cut back and cut back a lot, it has an effect, and that's one of the main factors that's causing gold to go down. And if, if the Indian politicians somehow get their people to sell gold, whoo! Who knows how low it could go?

 

"But I hope that if and when something like that happens, I'm smart enough to buy more gold. Because with all this staggering amount of currency debasement going on in the world, gold has got to be a good place to be down the road once we get through this correction."

Just how much longer might this correction in gold and silver prices run? Jim Rogers told me that:

"This correction could last another few months. I don't know, I'm not a market timer. I'm terrible at short-term trading. But if it goes down more I hope I'm smart enough to buy more. I'm certainly not selling."

And why not? Because "History would indicate we're in some kind of decline, either relative or actual and we're gonna have a crisis or semi-crisis," Jim Rogers believes.