Jim Rogers dis­cusses his out­look for the econ­omy, stocks, and commodities.

Call Notes:

Jim Rogers: I'm not opti­mistic about 2012, and maybe even not 2013."

JR: "I don't see much rea­son to own stocks, when one can own com­modi­ties. If the world gets bet­ter, i'm going to make a lot of money in com­modi­ties because of the short­ages, and if the world doesn't get bet­ter, gov­ern­ments will print money. When­ever gov­ern­ments have printed money, the only way to pro­tect one's self is to own real assets."

China: Hard or Soft Landing?

JR: "Some parts of the Chi­nese econ­omy will have a very hard land­ing; the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment has been try­ing to kill the real estate boom for 2 1/2 years. They've raised inter­est rates 6 times, raised reserve require­ments a dozen times; they're gonna pop the real estate bub­ble, but that's not the whole China story. There's gonna be parts of the Chi­nese econ­omy that are gonna boom no mat­ter what hap­pens to real estate in Shang­hai and Beijing."

How about beaten down stocks like Potash and Mosaic?

JR: "I'm not famil­iar enough to give you a good com­ment; I just remem­ber in the 70s, stocks went down and did noth­ing, and economies did noth­ing, and yet com­modi­ties them­selves went through the roof. Some com­modi­ties stocks did well in the 70s; A recent Yale study showed that you would have made 300% more invest­ing in com­modi­ties them­selves rather than com­modi­ties stocks, unless you were a very good stock picker. So I'm stick­ing with the real com­modi­ties."

Com­ment: Jim Rogers trav­els every­where in the world with his fam­ily, and he eats his own cooking.

What about the other BRIC nations? What about Brazil and its depen­dency on China? Would you short Brazil?

JR: "I'm short India, I'm short Rus­sia. Brazil is a huge nat­ural resource based econ­omy, and in com­mod­ity bull mar­kets they do well. For­tu­nately, I'm not long, I don't have any posi­tions — Unfor­tu­nately, the new Brazil­ian gov­ern­ment is start­ing to do some pretty fool­ish things which I think will not make them par­tic­i­pate as much as they could."

Jim Rogers is long gold, long sil­ver, expects cor­rec­tion to con­tinue down to the $1300/oz. level.

JR: "I'm a ter­ri­ble mar­ket timer, I'm a ter­ri­ble trader. It would not sur­prise me if gold went down to $1,300-$1,200. If it goes that low, I'm going to buy a lot more. I'm not sell­ing any ofo my gold or sil­ver, but I'm not a good mar­ket timer. I'm just say­ing that gold has been up 11 years in a row, it deserves a sub­stan­tial cor­rec­tion. Sub­stan­tial cor­rec­tions are not unusual in bull mar­kets. If it goes that low, I'll buy a lot more."

Source: CNBC, Decem­ber 28, 2011.

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