22 March 2014
Singapore Frangipani-1=

Jim Rogers on Asia, Singapore and life

"Jim Rogers makes my head hurt", said Nobel Prize winning economist, Paul Krugman. Mine too. But his heretical thoughts in "Street Smarts" make for great reading.


Jim Rogers is one of the world's very most successful investors. With George Soros, he created the wildly successful Quantum Fund, made his fortune, and retired over 30 years ago, at the age of 37.

Rogers has always been on the road. Raised in Demopolis, Alabama, he received scholarships which took him to Yale and Oxford. Upon retirement, he hit the road again, with a 3-year trip around the world on motorbike, and then a 2-year world journey by car. These gave him two of his three Guiness World Records.

He firmly believes that you have to get out on the road to see what is really happening.

Visting Egypt in the year 2000, Rogers wrote: "We learned why the government of Hosni Mubarak is hated in the streets. The government has spies everywhere and strangles any initiative or dissent ... Mubarak remains in power only because of the United States, and the anger at him is so widespread that whether he is overthrown or just dies, there will eventually be turmoil in the largest country in the Middle East ... If you fly to Cairo, get taxied to the pyramids, and the take a bus down to Luxor, you see none of this."

Rogers was thus not at all surprised that Mubarak was ousted in the popular uprising that swept Egypt in 2011. And he is strongly dismissive of all the pundits who never get out of their 5-star hotels to see local realities.

"Street Smarts", Rogers' rollicking memoir/autobiography, is full of insights and unconventional wisdom which he has also shared with his students at Columbia University, on television programs, and conferences.


However, his arrogant tone and simplistic analysis is often immensely irritating.

"Of course, he had no idea what he was talking about", he said of Jim O'Neill, former chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, who coined BRIC, the acronym that stands for Brazil, Russia, India, and China. "He was not alone in being clueless", he also said in extending his derision to Stephen Roach, Morgan Stanley's former chairman for Asia.

Rogers accuses Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve System, of being "a mediocre Wall Street economist who was perpetually seeking government employment". And of Tim Geithner, the former US Treasury Secretary, Rogers says "the New York banking community, ... appreciated Geithner as the simple, little wimp sitting at the New York Fed who did whatever they asked".

But between a whole lot of ranting, Rogers does have a lot of healthly criticism for the US politics and Wall Street. Looking ahead, Rogers claims that the age of Wall Street, when the finance industry drove 25% of America’s growth, is over. Tomorrow’s economy will be driven by those who make things – food, energy, goods and consumables.

Rogers biggest investment is betting on Asia to be the dominant economic force in the twenty-first century. America is in decline. It is now the largest debtor nation in the world, the largest debtor nation in the history of the world. The world’s largest creditor nations are in Asia.

"The Chinese are among the best capitalists in the world. California is more communist than China. Massachusetts is more socialist than China." And so Rogers goes on.

Rogers believes that the best thing that he can bequeath his two young daughters is an Asian education and the ability to speak Mandarin. So he in 2007, he and his family packed up and moved to Singapore.

The choice is interesting. Rogers decided against going to the real China because of the poisonous air pollution -- the result of the unbridled capitalism that he applauds!

His decision to move to Singapore is also admirable because the Mandarin language will likely be a great asset for his children. But his unnuanced views on the rise of Asia and the decline of the US and the West are excessive.

It is relevant that while Rogers has shipped his family to Singapore, much of Singapore's elite (and that of China, including incoming President Xi Jingping) have shipped their children to the US to study for the simple reason that "declining America" still has the world's best universities.

And it is more than that. Asian elites, especially from China, are migrating is massive numbers to countries of selective migration, like Australia, Canada and the US, and capital flight is also running at record levels. These Asians fear for their security at home, and long for the freedom, and rule of law that the West still offers.

Rogers is the classic case of the filthy rich Western capitalist who is enraptured with the authoritarian capitalism of the East. For such people, the complexity and messiness of democracy and open societies are a nuisance which deserve to be sacrificed in the interests of business efficiency. And places like Singapore offers many advantages in terms of financial non-transparency and tx evasion.

Whatever you do, don't fall for it!


John West
Executive Director
Asian Century Institute
Tags: asean, Singapore, Jim Rogers, America

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