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Taiwan to gain from PRC boom: expert

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.
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