Mumbai: Investment guru Jim Rogers is not invested in India currently, as the market trends upward.
He believes it is about time India opened up all its markets including currency and agriculture.I invested in India before Mr Modi was elected.
I owned the Indian shares, but then after few weeks seeing that he did not do much, I sold Indian shares.
I have had no position in India since, Rogers, chairman of Rogers Holdings, said in a candid phone interview from Singapore.Rogers said that he has no investment in the Indian market right now, as he likes to buy stocks when they are going down, and not when they are headed higher.Modi has done some nice things.
He has done a few small things.
He has not done any big good thing as far as I can think, he said.I am not a big fan of Mr Modi.
He gets great, great, great publicity all over the world and he is very well liked all over the world.
But as far as the real policy (is concerned), I have not seen much dramatic change yet, he said.He, however, believes the stock market would prefer current Prime Minister Modi to regain power at the Centre, when the worlds largest democracy announces their general election results on May 23.I just wish you would open up all the markets, especially agriculture, agro-investments and currencies.
I would love India much more if you did that, he said.It is not 1990, it is 2019, he said..Rogers is in the camp which believes no government data is trustworthy around polls across the globe.
I do not pay much attention to economic data, especially around elections.
You probably know all governments fudge their numbers all the time, especially during elections.
So, I do not trust government numbers most of the time, and certainly not during election time, he said.So I have no idea if these numbers (Indian economic data) are real or not.
I do not trust anybodys numbers, especially those of US, he said.Rogers, a commodity market veteran, said crude oil was on its way to form a complicated bottom.US crude oil prices headed for a weekly decline but were still above $70 a barrel.
Rising US oil production helped mitigate some of the disruption caused by US sanctions against Iran and Venezuela and supply cuts led by OPEC and its allies.He said he has been foreseeing a correction in the global equity markets, which would likely be the worst in his lifetimeNext time we have a bear market, it is going to be the worst in my lifetime.
I do not know when it is going to come, but I do know we are going to have it.
Its been 10 years since the American stock market had a major problem, Rogers said, adding that he cannot set a timeline to it.In 2008, we had a problem of too much debt.
Since 2008, debt has skyrocketed everywhere.
So when we have the next bear market, it is only going to be horrible.
I do not know when it is going to be, he said.Rogers said typically there are small problems that go unnoticed and balloon into bigger ones, leading to a crisis situation.
He said the first signs of it are already there.In 2007, Iceland went bankrupt, but nobody noticed or cared.
Then Ireland went bankrupt.
A few weeks later Bear Sterns went bankrupt and a few weeks later Northern Rock the English Bank went bankrupt and then eventually Lehman Brothers went bankrupt.
By then everybody knew there was a problem, he pointed out.It starts when we are not watching.
It has already started.
Latvia collapse.
Argentina, Venezuela, Turkey, some banks in India are having problems, we have issues in Indonesia; so it has already started showing.
It has not made to evening news yet, he said.All these markets are small but until they make it to the big markets, people do not notice, he said.