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Jim Rogers on commodities, currencies - and crops

No one should invest in anything unless they know a lot about what they're doing. It's better to put your money in the bank at very low rates of interest than to invest in things you don't know and lose money.

Index investing has been proven repeatedly for decades to outperform active management, so most amateur investors should invest in an index fund.

some of the best opportunities in the next year or two or three are going to be in the currency market.

There may well be a currency crisis centred on the US dollar and, if there is a currency crisis, most stocks will go down.

I don't like being down on the US dollar, but US is a horrible creditor nation, it's running up gigantic debts.

The United States government itself has tripled its own national debt in the last six months, the Central Bank in America has tripled the obligations on its balance sheet and has taken a lot of garbage, and they're printing a lot of money.

Throughout history, this has always led to a decline in the debasement of your currency. They actually want to debase their currency - that's their conscious policy.

But, even if it weren't their conscious policy, it has never failed to cause problems in the currency market and unless the world has changed somehow in the past 5,000 years, or the Americans are different - which I don't think at all - this is going to lead to problems with the dollar and the currency markets.

Right now, because the yen is subject to the carry trade and has been beaten down unnaturally, so in my view the carry trade* will reverse and that's where the best opportunities are.

Once the yen goes up a lot - if it goes up a lot, like I think it will - then I will have to figure out what to do, as the Japanese have a serious fundamental problem down the road and unless they do something, I don't want to have anything to do with Japan in ten years.

I don't know what I'm going to do when I stop buying the yen. I own the Singapore dollar, I own Canadian dollar, but if you look around the world, it's very very hard to find a sound paper currency these days.

Right now, we're renting. If we found the perfect place in the perfect location... we do not know yet where we want to wind up.

But, I don't think this is a great time to be buying property in much of the world. It's a great time to stay away from property, unless you're going to buy farmland, timberland or if you can find some land near some mines. Or buy yourself a lake house where there are a lot of farmers, it'll probably be ok.