Legendary investor Jim Rogers, the creator of the Rogers International Commodity Index (RICI) and co-founder of the world-renowned Quantum Fund,  has issued a dire warning for the world economy, saying there will be serious economic challenges over the next few years, according to the Russian news outlet Sputnik on Monday.

When asked what he was coming in the new year, Rogers replied, “You should be worried.” He went on to predict, “there’s going to be a period of good, something will cause optimism to return.”

However he went on, “After the optimism, you should be extremely worried because we’re going to have economic problems again sometime in the next two or three years and they will probably be the worst in my lifetime because there’s so much debt. So much debt worldwide has built up since 2009. So, the next time we have a problem, it’s going to be very, very bad.”

He also predicted there would be more inflation coming, whether it was due to war, or simply printing money to cover debts. He said, “Energy and some prices have come down a bit, but that’s the way markets work. When something goes straight up, it always has a reaction of correction going on, and that’s what’s happening now, for a variety of reasons. If the war gets worse, the prices will go higher. If money printing continues, prices will go higher. Many banks raised interest rates. That is one of the reasons we had corrections and reactions, but in the end we’re going to have more inflation, because money printing always leads to inflation and they will print money again.”

He added the money printing would likely begin if there were to be a continued economic slowdown, saying, “They always do and that will lead to more inflation. Inflation is not over. I’m afraid we’re gonna have serious inflation in the next few years because central banks have printed and will print a lot of money in the future. Interest rates are up in the last year or two but nothing compared to what they have been historically. Interest rates must go really, really high to kill inflation and they’re not killing inflation yet, except in the short term.”

The investment legend’s comments come on the heels of a new forecast predicting global growth will slow to 3.2% in 2022, and 2.7% in 2023. In its recently released outlook, the International Monetary Fund predicted the weakest growth expectation since 2021, excepting the global financial crisis, and the most acute period of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Photo of Jim Rogers courtesy of Wikipedia