EXTRACT -

They'll taper until the markets start hurting and then they'll panic and loosen up again. They've got themselves in a terrible box.”

“It'll turn into a bubble or a very inflated situation, but eventually the markets will say, we're not going to take your garbage anymore, whether it's treasury bonds or currency.” Inflation, Rogers says, has only been kept in check in the US by the country's shale gas discovery, putting a “dampener” on energy prices.

Whist Rogers views mass money printing as untenable, in the short term, he expects equities to turn parabolic, rather than collapse.

“The Japanese Central Bank has said that it will print unlimited amounts of money,” he says. “That's their word and they're doing it. When people look back 20 years from now they'll say that's what killed Japan, but in the meantime, all the staggering, unlimited amounts of money have got to go somewhere and it's going to go into Japanese shares.”

Rogers prefers gold over gold mining shares and divisible coins over bullion, but says “there's nothing in precious metals that I'm tempted to buy at the moment.” Indian import tariffs he views as the single biggest drag on the gold market currently.

“They've got a huge balance of trade deficit and the three largest parts are oil, gold and cooking oil. They cannot do anything about oil or cooking oil, so they're attacking gold, blaming their problems on gold. Gold has not caused their problems, gold is a symptom of their problems, but politicians are pretty simple-minded people and they look for the easy answer.”

For early 2014, Rogers is therefore long inflatable equities and neutral on gold, but longer term, he expects to short junk and government bonds and is ultra bullish on gold. “Gold will become one of the only refuges around,” he says. “That's not this quarter.”

http://www.mineweb.com/mineweb/content/en/mineweb-political-economy?oid=222934&sn=Detail

Read that first sentence again. This was clear to me and others, and I think I posted as much here, when (and against all opinions and common sense), the Fed announced it's first move at tappering some weeks ago. It was for show, meaninglessly small, and probably designed to dampen the gold market with which the Fed competes for investor funds.

So, going into the New Year, gold and mining may weaken, but further out a new bull market may well begin and take POG and other metals prices to previously unimagined levels.

I hate what this means for most people, especially here in the US, but being prepared is the best defense.