Jim Rogers Picks Obama to Win Election but Prefers Ron Paul

February 24, 2012 at 08:45 AM
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Investor Jim Rodgers (Photo: AP)Famed international investor Jim Rogers says that if he were a betting man, he'd pick Barack Obama to win the 2012 presidential election. Only the multimillionaire Quantum Fund founder isn't a betting man, so it looks like his vote this year will be going to libertarian Ron Paul.

Leading presidential hopefuls Obama, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum "don't have a clue what's going on", Rogers (left) told Reuters in a televised interview on Thursday. "If I were a betting man, I would bet that Obama would win. He is a sitting president, and it's hard to defeat a sitting president."

Obama is printing and spending a lot of money to make sure the U.S. economy looks good this year, Rogers said, but he added that "the only one that understands" is Ron Paul, the Texas congressman who ran for president on the Libertarian ticket in 1988 and went on to espouse his libertarian platform as a Republican candidate in 2008 as well as 2012.

The Jim Rogers Blog quoted Rogers as supporting Paul as early as last August. "A pox on both their houses, the Democrats and Republicans," Rogers said. "In this election if Ron Paul gets anywhere close to a nomination, I will certainly support him."

The Jim Rogers Channel on YouTube shows that if he could see anybody for president, dead or alive, Rogers would pick laissez-faire economics philosopher Adam Smith, who died in 1790.


Rogers, who made a name for himself as co-founder of the Quantum Fund with billionaire investor George Soros, is now chairman of Rogers Holdings and currently overseeing a number of commodities funds.

"Throughout history when you have people printing money and debasing currency, the way to protect yourself and to make money is to own real assets," Rogers recently said in Economic Times. "Silver, rice, natural gas and those are not specific recommendations. I am just saying those are natural resources."

At the same time, American-born Rogers, who is now based in Singapore, doesn't own any U.S. equities, although he does own U.S. dollars. "At the moment, there is nothing that's going to make me sell my U.S. dollars.  What could happen, a war? That would make it go up for awhile, wrongly, but there's nothing that would make me sell my U.S. dollars right now," he said.

As for U.S. Treasuries, Rogers told Reuters he is neither long nor short the asset class.

"I don't own Treasuries, and I'm not short Treasuries. I'm waiting to short. I should have been long all this time," Rogers said. He added that close look at the Federal Reserve's balance sheet shows that a third round of quantitative easing to stimulate the economy is already quietly taking place.

"We already have QE3," he said. "You can see that unadjusted M2 is going through the roof…. They don't call it that, but it's there. That won't be good for the dollar down the road"

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