The US economy is no longer producing anything and the finance industry is completely saturated, presenting a unique opportunity for young people to study agriculture and mining, Jim Rogers told a crowd at a recent public appearance:
The event’s moderator began by quoting Rogers to himself:
“Scrap career plans for Wall Street or the City, London’s financial district, and study agriculture and mining instead. Power is shifting again from financial centres to the producers of real goods. The place to be is in commodities: raw materials and natural resources.”
After hearing the quotes, Rogers asked who had done the “homework” for the event, suggesting that they deserve a raise.
“We’ve had long periods in history when the financial types were in charge, then long periods when the producers of real goods were in charge, followed by the financial types again.”
“In 1958, there were 5,000 MBAs produced in America, none in the rest of the world. Last year there were 200,000 MBAs in the US and tens of thousands in the rest of the world. So there’s massive competition now in the financial area.”
“In the 50s, 60s and 70s, Wall Street was a backwater, for many historic reasons. But then we had a bull market. Everybody gets an MBA. There are hundreds of thousands of them out there.”
“Now financial companies – banks especially – are extremely leveraged, which means they have a lot of debt, which never happened in the old days. There were partnerships and the partners wouldn’t take on a lot of debt cause they knew they could go bankrupt.”
“So you’ve got huge debt, massive competition, and governments don’t like financial types anymore..they’re constantly passing laws and regulations and special taxes, blaming all their problems on you, me, us.”
Meanwhile, “the farmers are dying out..anybody in this room even know a farmer?”
“If any of you have got MBAs, I urge you to rush to try to turn it in for a farming degree if you can.”
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