Book Discussion: Adventure Capitalist by Jim Rogers

BOOK DISCUSSION : Adventure Capitalist by Jim Rogers (Random House, 2003)

It’s a great concept: A guy makes a killing on Wall Street, then drives a bright yellow Mercedes 152,000 miles around the world through 116 countries with his girlfriend (later wife), making interesting observations and giving you valuable investment advice all along the way.

Well, it’s a concept. This book is a real rough ride. There’s “take-home value” here that you can use for your portfolio’s benefit, but there are so many chuckholes, so many intellectual flat tires that the journey can be grindingly infuriating.

Rogers is one of those guys who is very smart and continually has to prove it to you by being endlessly sarcastic. I’d call him a smart rectum. The other thing to realize is that he is not a businessman. He’s a Wall Street guy. He’s never been an entrepreneur with his own business and payroll making his own products. He made his money investing other people’s money in other people’s businesses. So sprinkle a little salt on what he has to say about “capitalism.”

One moment you’re cheering over his call for the complete abolishment of the IMF and the World Bank, his denouncing “UN fatcats” and NGO (non-governmental organizations, normally government subsidized) do-gooders as “international parasites.” You appreciate his informing you that food aid to Ethiopia has destroyed an entire generation’s ability to grow their own food, and that the “greatest growth industry in Africa today” is selling stolen stuff (bags of rice, clothing, etc.) donated by American and other Western charities.

Your eyebrows raise when he says that the Chinese are the best capitalists in the world because they don’t take siestas, and calls Shanghai the “Emerald City of 21st Century capitalism.” Evidently he didn’t notice most all of the skyscraper office buildings he stood in awe of in the Pudong business district are vacant and bereft of occupants.

You get angry and disgusted when he claims there is “no religious persecution” in China, and praises its Communist government for giving its people such “extensive religious freedom” (Tibet is never mentioned once).

And then you start laughing out loud at the breathtaking kookiness. “Africa should organize a new continentwide congress,” he grandly proposes, “made up of representatives of (all the African) countries… (to) “redraw the borders of the various African nations… (creating) “many more countries than there are now.” In other words, African leaders are going to get together and break apart their countries into pieces. This takes naïveté into a supernatural dimension.

Sometimes the kookiness is so absurd that you can’t laugh, you’re just stunned into silence. The book ends with a gratuitously vicious attack on Alan Greenspan, concluding that Greenspan didn’t resign from the Fed when Bob Rubin quit as Treasury Secretary in 1998 because “he had nowhere to go — he knew he could not get another job.”

Should I take back the first part of Rogers being a smart rectum?

You may have no doubt when you see his asserting that “North Korea is no conceivable threat to us.”

At the end of the road, what you’ve got is a wealthy guy who believes that driving through a country for a few days qualifies him to sagely and deeply pontificate upon it. Sometimes he gets it right — Spain has one of the best-managed economies in Europe, Tanzania may be on the verge of a boom — and sometimes flat wrong — Angola is now one of the world’s great investment opportunities, all of a Central Europe is going to be an economic disaster.

And other times you just want to toss the book into File 13, such as when he advocates — seriously — the abolition of all passports in the world. Anyone should be able to freely immigrate to any country they want. There should be no limits whatever to immigration to the US, or any other nation. Yes, this was written over a year after September 11, 2001.

You may find nuggets in Adventure Capitalist that are valuable and useful. But in order to extract them, you’re in for a long, long slog.