Jim Rogers Extremely Bullish on Commodities

Legendary investor Jim Rogers was Larry Kudlow’s guest on last night’s The Kudlow Report. Jim Rogers started with predicting $150 per barrel oil.

“It’s not going to $150 this week or this month, but the surprise is going to be how high the price of oil stays,” said Rogers. “We are running out of known reserves of oil. These are simple facts. We have not had a major elephant oil field discovery over 40 years,” he added. He doesn’t agree with T. Boone Pickens that natural gas will replace oil anytime soon.

Jim Rogers also talked about inflation. He said everywhere in the world, including Europe and Australia, there’s inflation.

“The Americans lie about it and the British lie about it,” said Rogers. He added that inflation is supply driven and he gave the decline in oil reserves as an example.

Rogers thinks that the recent decline in gold and copper is nothing more than corrections in a major bull market, and it still has years to go. Rogers argued that massive money printing will make investors put some of their money in the stock market, but that more money will go into commodities. Whenever paper money is debased, people will want to own real assets. Nevertheless, Rogers isn’t terribly bullish about stock markets anywhere in the world.

Rogers said:

If the world economy gets better, commodities are gonna make a fortune. If the world economy does not get better, commodities are the place to be because they’re gonna print more money, and that’s how you protect yourself. This is time when you should own real assets, not stock and bonds.

Rogers doesn’t think stocks provide protection against inflation because stocks weren’t a good place to be when America had inflation during the 70′s. Rogers doesn’t trust the Obama administration and other politicians. He thinks the deficit and debt problems will be solved only when we have a crisis or a semi-crisis, because in that circumstance they would be forced to be solved.

Rogers’ bearish view about the stock market is in stark contrast to Glenview’s Larry Robbins’. Larry Robbins expects the Dow Jones Index to approach 20,000 in three years.

Disclosure: I have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours.