Jim Rogers stated in 1990, most of his money was in utility stocks, U.S government bonds, and foreign currencies. Rogers owned utility stocks particular nuclear power for companies like Illinois power and Niagara Mohawk which were distressed.

Rogers states, "I thought U.S Interest rates were headed south, so I was bullish-optimistic-on bonds and bearish-pessimistic-on the dollar, that is, I expected the price of bonds to rise and that of the dollar to fall. I figured politicians would do everything to keep the economy going. Since they aren't very smart, all they really know how to do is cut interest rates. I bought foreign currencies, mainly certificates of deposit denominated in guilders or deutsche marks, reasoning that the dollar would go down as the politician's cuts rates."

In 2008, dollar demise has caused exports to increase, unemployment to drop, bond yields to drop and price to increase, GDP to rise, consumption to drop, investment to decrease, real wages to drop, and credit to get tighter.

The US economy is strong enough to continue climbing for the next sixty years without disruption from business cycles. Commodities will continue to be a profitable sector for the rich and commodities indexes supposing the commodity boards can remain solvent and stable.

Currency exchange controls: "The soviet union exchange rate for travelers was six rubles per dollars. On the black market I got between twelve and eighteen rubles, whereas today you might get a hundred times that". For this reason Rogers carried a few travelers checks and a healthy sum of cash while traveling through Turkistan.

Georgian: Stalin had been a Georgian. "Georgia had always been a trading nation and a crossroads." Jim saw similiarities between Georgia and Texas, New Mexico, and California. "As those parts of the United States become more Lationo, and as the United States begins to suffer its inevitable economic decline, I wonder if we won't see the same things: ethnic strife and a drive for separatism, either a desire to rejoin Mexico or to be independant". "Georgia has always been a merchant area and of a capitalist bent".

Baku: "Baku, a major center of oild production, all around the road lay rusted pipes and drill rigs, idle, unmaintained, a cluttered junk heap. No wonder Soviet oil production was down." Communism fails because managers work to meet quotas, no incentives, no accountability, skimming oil from the top and running, and no private property ownership. "On of the reasons Soviets never built their capital bases, because they never built their capital." "Riding along the Caspian Sea we saw hudnreds of these discarded drilling rigs, all stripped."

Kazakhstan: "Kazakhstan had become a gigantic farmland, a desert that had bloomed into vast arable tracts." It had become 40 percent Russian, 2/3 of water provided from the Aral Sea, heavy salization, high rates of birth defects and infant mortality, and thirty mile coast line. "The Russians had thought they could use the water to turn the area into a cotton plantation. But they had treated the land the way they treated the oil fields we had passed: They stripped it and moved on." In communism you can ruin a resource without anyone saying halt. On the other hand, China in the seventies admitted its ways were not working and deregulated agriculture to teh peasants, allowing farmers to lease land for a very long time, and in some place buy it; the government allows the farmers to sell crops that they could sell for a profit on the world market; the farmers went wild; every field was planted and cultivated with items being reused and no waste; the farmers didn't strip the land; and China became an agricultural exporting country.

Samarkand: The most prosperous city in Baku. "The Centerpiece of the city's ancient splendor is the Registan, and esemble of three madrasas, or Islamic schools". "Under the corner domes of the Ulug-bek Madrasa, completed in 1420, were lecture halls, and in its rear was a mosque. The Tiger Madrasa flouted the Islamic injunction against showing pictures of live animals by boldly diplaying glorious tilework devoted to its namesake...Samarkland was like the Taj Mahal in that way, if not even more extraordinary." "We discovered that forty mosques had opened in Uzbekistan alone in 1989, and at least one was being built in every town we passed through-Ashkhabad, Mary, Bukhara."

Muslim: "The Muslims were always trying to come into Europe through Austria, through Hungry, through Spain. The Christians beat them back several times. During the centuries of the Dark Ages in Europe the Muslims were much more dynamic than the Christians. They expanded geographically, spreading their culture and religion from the Altantic to the Pacific". "All the Muslims are resurgent, not so much because they want to be Islamic, but because the need a vehicle to help them get more. If people are prosperous, they tend not to fight. What they're reaching out for is Islam, the only unifying thread they have, to help them achieve their own prosperity and identity."

Soviet Union: "The Soviet Union is actually headed toward a system that will resemble feudalism: the economic, political, and social system of the medival Europe after the breakup of the Roman Empire, in which their were innumerable and ever-changing fiefdoms."

China: "By early 1990 China's harsh new monetary policy began to cause hard times. Several months later, people surged into Tiananmen Square to complain about tight money". "Like successful entrepreneurs in many parts of the world, Chinese entrepreneurs are bringing every scrap of energy, money, technology they can marshall into their business"

Currency valuation: "If the rate on the black market is five and a half zlotys to the dollar, compared with the state banks rate of five, then things might not be so bad. But if it is ten or fifteen to the dollar, then I know the country is in terrible shape, with maybe the collapse of the government or hyperinflation on the horizon." During Jim's first visit to China he paid Renminbi for a dollar, a 50 percent premium and by 1990s the premium had dropped to 35 percent. The chinese want out of the their currency less.