Roger That

The Dow is sliding again today. It’s interesting; the lower the index goes, the more serious a three-digit loss seems. At 12,000-14,000, it didn’t seem like a big deal to lose 500 points in a day. Now it looks a lot worse. There are only about 15 500-point days between the current index level and zero.

Obama’s socialist policies, which, oddly, George Bush agreed with, are already killing us. And the pain is only beginning. Socialism doesn’t work. Socialism doesn’t work. I can’t say it enough. It didn’t work in good times. It is bizarre that people have decided it will work in bad times, when capitalism is more important than ever.

Obama is not a financial guru; he’s a hack politician who has never defied his handlers and Illinois-machine patrons. It’s amazing that he succeeded in billing himself as the agent of change, because he is the personification of reactionary liberalism. I can’t think of a politician who is more opposed to change. He’s giving us exactly what a pre-Reagan liberal would have given us in 1976: pork, big government, excess regulation, debt without reward, and paternalism. Obama is a leftist; therefore, all his ideas about prosperity are diametrically opposed to what works. If he knew anything about wealth, he’d be a successful investor, but he is not. He survives on high income and sweetheart deals. When you have those things going for you, you don’t learn anything about investing. He’s in the same class as people like Britney Spears. We shouldn’t be listening to them. We should be listening to people who have proven they can invest.

Case in point: Jim Rogers. If you don’t know who he is, you might as well quit reading now. Here are a couple of recent interviews.

Jim Rogers is rich. He will die rich, in all likelihood, and it won’t be because he was a powerful politician to whom people funneled money. It won’t be because his fame as a rock-star politician allowed him to sell five million copies of a self-worshiping autobiography. It will be because he knew what he was doing.

Look what he’s telling us. Let the bad businesses fail. Let the bad executives be fired, so they can be replaced by competent executives who will lead their companies to success. Don’t pile up debt with bailouts that prolong the agony and make things worse. And he’s telling us America is going to keep declining for a good long time, so he’s betting on continued losses in our most respected stocks. And he has moved to Singapore. He says moving to Asia now is like moving to New York in 1907.

What can I tell you? Jim Rogers is shorting blue chips, and we’re both shorting Obama.