Jim Rogers truly believes Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke will end quantitative easing, as planned, at the end of the month.
"(Bernanke) says he's going to stop QE2 ... I take him at his word since he's said it so many times," explains Rogers. If that seems like a backhanded compliment, it is. It's also the nicest thing Rogers said about either Bernanke or the Fed as a whole in our latest interview.
If there's any truth to the long held market cliche "don't fight the Fed," then Rogers is in for a world-class beat down. He seems utterly unable to stop brawling with the Fed. At the very least, Rogers rages at the Fed machine at every opportunity.
When Rogers visited Breakout in March, I made him "imaginary Fed chief" by virtue of the powers of Yahoo! Finance. It was the shortest imaginary reign in history as Rogers made shutting the Federal Reserve the top item on his agenda. Today, the man is harder-lined on the subject than ever, based on our interviews. He says you should reject everything you know or are told about the Fed, starting with the idea that the job of Fed chairman is an apolitical role. All Fed chairmen are political stooges, says Rogers, and Bernanke is no different. And as we move closer to November 2012, he says "there's enormous pressure to get Obama re-elected ... Bernanke knows where his bread is buttered."
Rogers dismisses Dr. Ben as "just an Ivy League professor" who has never been right. According to Rogers, Bernanke has been out of ideas since arriving in Washington -- and that's a good thing, because what the Fed and Bernanke have done so far has sent us down a path that the economy might never recover from. The stimulus from two rounds of quantitative easing are only the most recent and public, and have been likened to giving a drunk more booze to avoid a hangover, according to Rogers and many trading economic-types. At this point, rather than just a hangover, the economic patient is headed for the morgue. Rather than a severe recession or even depression, we've been putting off feeling the pain, stashing a few trillion of bad debt here or there, and hoping it goes away. It won't, in Rogers' view.
However, all is not entirely lost. Rogers notes that the Federal Reserve, enacted in 1913 by Woodrow Wilson, was only the latest in a long line of attempts at U.S. central banking, all of which have ended in tears and disaster. The Federal Reserve will hopefully be gone before the country is, he says Until the Fed is abolished, Rogers has one piece of advice for traders and investors about Bernanke: "Don't pay attention to the man."
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