With its managerial talent and capital, Taiwan can greatly benefit from China’s economic boom, investment guru Jim Rogers said in Taipei yesterday.
“With Taiwan’s brain and capital as well as China’s cheap labor and markets, you can take over the world,” Rogers said in a speech sponsored by ING Antai Life Insurance Co (ING 安泰人壽) and attended by more than 3,000 local participants.
Rogers said that while the 19th and 20th centuries were dominated by the UK and the US respectively, the 21st century belonged to China, which he said would be “the best capitalist country in the world.”
As China continues to boom, neighboring countries other than Taiwan such as South Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia will also greatly benefit from their “rich neighbor,” he said, further predicting that the “renminbi [yuan] will go up and the New Taiwan dollar will also benefit.”
Despite his confidence in China, Rogers warned that investments could go wrong and recommended stock investors find smart ways of investing there.
“The key to success is finding the right sector and industry [to invest in],” he said, adding that his current holdings included real estate, agricultural and international airline stocks.
Rogers said that he started putting money into Taiwanese shares in February and “may invest more” after the nation opens up to China in the near future.
He said his family was considering moving to Taiwan, from Singapore, as people here “speak better Mandarin,” providing a better bilingual environment for his two baby daughters, while also urging foreigners to take up the next mainstream language – Chinese.
The US-born Rogers, who retired at the young age of 37 after making a fortune in investments, made a push for a commodities index, which he said “is going to outperform stocks and bonds.”
He said that his Rogers International Commodity Index, established in 1998, had reaped a 410.9 percent return in the past 10 years, outperforming the Lehman LT Treasury Index’s 94 percent and the S&P 500 Total Return Index’s 38.7 percent.
Rogers was less enthusiastic about bonds and mutual funds. He urged bondholders to dump the products as they were losing value, but recommended fund investors be patient as “jumping in and out is not a good way to invest” and to find out how well their fund managers were doing to protect them from bad times.
Rogers painted a negative picture of the US economy, saying it was already in recession and the US government was mishandling the financial crisis.
The US is falling deeper into debt by US$1 trillion every 15 months, he said, while urging investors to dump the declining greenback.
In late February, he had told 750 global fund managers in Tokyo that the US was “completely out of control” and that there would be a 20-year bull market in commodities and that prices would be in turmoil.
Born in the state of Alabama in 1942, Rogers said that his first job was picking up soda bottles in ballparks at the age of five. After graduating from Yale and Oxford, Rogers headed to Wall Street with US$600 in his pocket and co-founded the now closed Quantum Fund with George Soros in 1970.
DOLLAR CHALLENGE: BRICS countries’ growing share of global GDP threatens the US dollar’s dominance, which some member states seek to displace for world trade US president-elect Donald Trump on Saturday threatened 100 percent tariffs against a bloc of nine nations if they act to undermine the US dollar. His threat was directed at countries in the so-called BRICS alliance, which consists of Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. Turkey, Azerbaijan and Malaysia have applied to become members and several other countries have expressed interest in joining. While the US dollar is by far the most-used currency in global business and has survived past challenges to its preeminence, members of the alliance and other developing nations say they are fed
LIMITED MEASURES: The proposed restrictions on Chinese chip exports are weaker than previously considered, following lobbying by major US firms, sources said US President Joe Biden’s administration is weighing additional curbs on sales of semiconductor equipment and artificial intelligence (AI) memory chips to China that would escalate the US crackdown on Beijing’s tech ambitions, but stop short of some stricter measures previously considered, said sources familiar with the matter. The restrictions could be unveiled as soon as next week, said the sources, who emphasized that the timing and contours of the rules have changed several times, and that nothing is final until they are published. The measures follow months of deliberations by US officials, negotiations with allies in Japan and the Netherlands, and
Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團) yesterday said it expects any impact of new tariffs from US president-elect Donald Trump to hit the company less than its rivals, citing its global manufacturing footprint. Young Liu (劉揚偉), chairman of the contract manufacturer and key Apple Inc supplier, told reporters after a forum in Taipei that it saw the primary impact of any fresh tariffs falling on its clients because its business model is based on contract manufacturing. “Clients may decide to shift production locations, but looking at Foxconn’s global footprint, we are ahead. As a result, the impact on us is likely smaller compared to
TECH COMPETITION: The US restricted sales of two dozen types of manufacturing equipment and three software tools, and blacklisted 140 more Chinese entities US President Joe Biden’s administration unveiled new restrictions on China’s access to vital components for chips and artificial intelligence (AI), escalating a campaign to contain Beijing’s technological ambitions. The US Department of Commerce slapped additional curbs on the sale of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and chipmaking gear, including that produced by US firms at foreign facilities. It also blacklisted 140 more Chinese entities that it accused of acting on Beijing’s behalf, although it did not name them in an initial statement. Full details on the new sanctions and Entity List additions were to be published later yesterday, a US official said. The US “will
RSS