Legendary investor and Chairman of Rogers Holdings, Jim Rogers, gave a recent interview with IGTV about the emerging Cannabis market, which he says is only “going to get bigger and bigger.”
Rogers also said he doesn’t have any public stocks yet in the sector, and that he’s “very, very optimistic” on the investment potential in North Korea. However, as an American citizen he can’t invest there and he doesn’t want to end up “rich and in jail.”
Rogers, who currently lives in Singapore, has said in the past that the next bear market will be the worst of his lifetime. So where, exactly, is Rogers keeping his money safely invested these days?
“I own U.S. dollars as my safe haven,” Rogers said. “You might say, ‘What are you talking about?’ The U.S. is the largest debtor nation in the history of the world, but I haven’t bought any serious gold since 2010. I own gold, I haven’t sold any. But at the moment, for historic reasons, the U.S. dollar is most likely to be the safe haven.
“What often happens is the dollar will go up, go up a lot; the dollar will go down and I will very cleverly sell my dollars at the top and buy gold at the bottom. You see how easy it is? I just got rich here in 30 seconds,” Rogers said with a laugh. “I’m more bullish on commodities than I am American stocks, for instance. What I like to do is find the commodities that are down the most and start looking there, rather than the ones that are up the most and start looking there.”
The host went on to mention cannabis and cannabis stocks like Canopy Growth and Cronos Group, asking what Rogers thinks of the emerging market that has been all the rage the past year and a half or so.
“I’m extremely interested in cannabis. It’s going to be — it already is a huge market. It’s going to get bigger and bigger,” Rogers said. “Something like 90 percent of Americans can now buy cannabis legally, all of Canadians, Columbians. More and more people are becoming eligible to buy cannabis and it’s going to be a great investment if you find the right companies and the right prices.”
As for which companies Rogers suggests for investors: “I have a private company in Columbia in which I’m an investor but I don’t have any public stocks,” Rogers said. “Not at the moment, but I wish I did — we all wish we did.”
Rogers and the host also went on to discuss Bitcoin, and he outright dismissed crypto altogether, though he wished he had gotten in before the Bitcoin boom.
“They’re all going to go to zero and disappear, so I’m not a player with the cryptocurrencies,” he said. “I wish I had been. It’s one of those things that went up a lot and still is up a lot, but I have never bought or sold any of them. In my view, they’re all going to zero and disappearing.”
As for Rogers’ best guess at the biggest threats to the U.S. economy, he said “Washington D.C.”
“It’s not some of, but the risk for the American market,” he said. “The central bank, the president, Congress — everybody in Washington has no clue and they’re going to be the ruination of us all. They’ve driven interest rates to the lowest in record history, they don’t know what they’re doing and we’re all going to pay the price for it. Interest rates are absurdly low. They’ve never been this low in history. We’re going to pay a serious price.”
Rogers blamed Congress and President Donald Trump for the skyrocketing national debt — a debt he promised on the campaign trail he would erase by the time his possible two terms ended — before closing with his top investment idea right now.
“Maybe Russian bonds in rubles, certainly North Korea but I can’t invest there because I’m a citizen of the land of the free (U.S.),” he said. “But I would say probably North Korea at the moment. A lot of people are investing there, the Chinese, the Russians; they’re pouring in there. Unfortunately, I cannot.”
Click here to watch the IGTV interview with host Jim Rogers and host Victoria Scholar in full.