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Street Talk

Jim Rogers: I Have No Shorts Now Friday, November 13, 2009 10:18 AM By: Julie Crawshaw Article Font Size   This is one of the few times in my life I have not had shorts anywhere in the world, says commodities guru Jim Rogers. “I have kept away from shorts because there is a gigantic amount of money being printed and it has to go somewhere. . . I thought some of it would end up in the stock market, and it has,” he told the Pragmatic Capitalist Web site. Rogers, who has chosen to restrain his long positions to commodities and currencies, isn’t buying stocks at all, simply because he doesn’t like to buy when shares have been “going straight up for a while.” He refuses to speculate on how much higher equity markets will rise. “There are a lot of problems in the economy, but I don’t know when those problems will cause a downdraft in the stock market,” Rogers says. “All we’ve done is paper over the problem, so I expect we’ll have to deal with those issues in the future. Printing and spending money we don’t have simply prolongs the problems and makes them worse in the long run.” As U.S. stocks keep climbing, some think Wall Street's recovery has come too far, too fast. The market poses a "quandary for investors who believe in close historical relationships among share prices, earnings and balance sheets," Michael Farr, president of Farr Miller & Washington, told MarketWatch. However, "a nonstop supply of monetary opiates could keep a dead elephant jogging for miles," Farr commented, referring to ongoing government-stimulus programs as well as the Federal Reserve's easy-money monetary policy.