Jim Rogers Calls U.S. Debt Ceiling Talks “A Sham”

While his former colleague at the Quantum Fund, George Soros, was busy discussing the euro zone sovereign debt crisis, Jim Rogers chose to focus this week on the fiscal problems facing the United States.

In an interview on Fox Business News, the legendary investor provided his latest scathing criticism of American politicians and the federal government as a whole.

“They will probably raising the debt ceiling and announce some kind of wonderful deal, which they will promptly ignore,” Rogers contended. “The United States is not going close down. It might be good for the world if the United States closed down for a while, but I can’t see that happening. Something will happen, things will look better, but then in six months or a year, things will be worse again.”

“We are going to default one way or the other but they may not call it default. These debt reduction talks are a sham.”

While he did not discuss President Barack Obama specifically, he had some rather frank words for Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. ”He never should have taken the job…Mr. Geithner doesn’t have a clue about what’s going on. Just about everything he has done has been wrong. We are in worse shape now than we were a couple of years ago except now we have staggering debt to show for the efforts.”

Rogers, generally quite entertaining in his media interviews, went on to say that “If congressmen had to go to the same grocery stores you do and send their kids to the same schools, and ride public transportation, the world would be a lot different. They go down to Washington and laws get passed that we have nothing to do with. But if everybody stayed home and voted from the high school gym, we would have a much different government and the world would probably be better.”

He also discussed some of his current investment positions, which happen to include the U.S. dollar. ”I own the U.S. Dollar. It has been terribly beaten down. Everybody is bearish on the U.S Dollar including me. It’s fundamentally a terribly flawed currency. But when everybody is bearish on something it is usually a time to own it.”