Jim Rogers: Brexit Blowback “Worse Than Any Bear Market You’ve Ever Seen”

By Tyler Durden

When it comes to being direct and offering up some truth, one can rest assured that Jim Rogers is a prime candidate to do both.

In an interview with Yahoo! Finance, the legendary investor had some candid and quite unnerving things to say about the global market in the aftermath of Brexit.

This is going to be worse than any bear market that you’ve seen in your lifetime. 2008 was pretty bad because of debt, well the debt all over the world is much, much higher now. Stocks in the US for instance have been going sideways for 18 months, 24 months. That’s called distribution by many people, so when you have distribution for a year and a half, it usually leads to bad things.”

If that was too upbeat, Rogers unveils his bear scenario:

“The bear scenario, the bad scenario is that Scotland now leaves and takes the oil money, the city of London gets whacked by Europe, they lose a lot of income. The UK already has huge international debts, and it has balance of trade problems, budget problems, so the bear case is the pound disappears and England becomes Spain, or Poland, or Italy or something.

“It won’t happen anytime soon but the deterioration will continue, it makes stocks go down a lot. Remember, stock markets are anticipating the future, they see that happening it will now lead to many other separatist moments in the EU. This is going to encourage a lot of separatist movement, I’m not saying it’s good or bad I’m just telling you what’s going to happen, or what the bear case is, that if all that happens we all should be very worried.”

Regarding where EU will be five years from now, Rogers doesn’t believe it will even exist:

The EU as we know it now will not exist, the Euro as we know it will not exist.

On how to play this market now,

“I’ll tell you what I’m doing, people have to make their own decisions, going into this I’m long the US Dollar, I’m short US stocks, I own some Chinese shares, I own agriculture around the world. These are things that might do well no matter what happens going forward. These are going to be perilous times, I hope I get it right.”