Our friends at Hard Assets Investor, who I’ve penned a few guest articles for in the past, recently got Jim Rogers on the horn from his place in Singapore. Some highlights I found interesting:
HAI: If you could buy one commodity right now, what would it be?
Rogers: I guess it would probably be something in agriculture, because agriculture, on a historic basis, is very, very depressed. Over the past 38 years sugar — and I’m not suggesting you buy sugar, I’m using this as an indication — is down 70 percent, I believe, from its all-time high. Well, there’s not much that’s down 70 percent in price since 1974, 37-38 years ago. But sugar is one of those things.
So agriculture is where the opportunities are. And let’s see what’s down the most, rather than what’s up the most, as a place to start.
Jim made a similar comment in a March interview – so I speculated that we might start by looking at rough rice and cotton, as both are well off of their recent highs.
HAI: Do you think the United States could become the No. 1 oil producer in the world?
Rogers: It’s highly unlikely. I see the same numbers that North America combined might be, but even that’s unlikely. In regard to those same numbers, I have questions I have not found the answers for. One is, how long-lived are these new fields? I have read they’re not long-lived. The other fields in the U.S. are also in serious decline. So you may have this initial jump from the new oil stands or shale oil or whatever you want to call it, but even if that goes up and stays up, the other fields are in serious decline in the U.S. And again, I don’t know about the lives of these fields, these new fields.
I hope somebody knows. But most of them are such new fields that it’s hard to have a real answer.
I haven’t been following the oil market recently – usually pay more attention to agriculture – so I hadn’t been following this story. Jim always reads between the lines (and reads a lot…when I spoke with him last April he was reading the whole time, and still had no problem answering my questions!)
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