INTERNATIONAL. Legendary global investor and chairman of Singapore-based Rogers Holdings, Jim Rogers said the global economy is at the risk of prolonging a recession after reports over the past two days showed US home sales plunged by a record and Japan’s export growth slowed for a fifth month in July.

Speaking to Bloomberg in a phone interview from Singapore on Tuesday, Rogers said:  “We never got out of the first recession.”

“If the US and Europe continue to slow down, that’s going to affect everyone," he added.

The legendary investor doesn't subscribe to the idea that China can lead the world out of recession.

"The Chinese economy is 1/10 of the U.S. and Europe, and India is a quarter of China, they can’t bail us out,” he said.

Rogers advised China and other global economies should increase interest rates to contain a surge in inflation.

“Everyone should be raising interest rates, they are too low worldwide,” he said.

“If the world economy gets better, that’s good for commodities demand. If the world economy does not get better, stocks are going to lose a lot as governments will print more money.”

Rogers has been saying, in recent interviews with various media channels,  that there will be another recession, probably in 2012.

While he doesn’t call this a double dip, he does say that “the next time it’s going to be worse because we’ve shot all of our bullets.”

"With zero interest rates and huge government deficits all around, policy options are definitely more limited," he recently said.

In a recent interview with Campaign for Liberty, when asked what he would do if the was President, the legendary investor said: I would abolish the Federal Reserve. I would cut taxes. I would cut spending in a draconian manner. A very draconian manner. The idea that you can solve a problem of too much debt and too much consumption, with more debt and more consumption, defies comprehension".

Rogers has spent a career being one step ahead of mainstream investment thinking.  He rose to fame after co-founding the now-closed Quantum Fund with George Soros nearly four decades ago. During his ten years with the fund, the portfolio gained more than 4,000%, while the S&P rose less than 50%.

The Quantum Fund shot to fame after making more than US$1 billion betting against the British Pound in the early 1990s.

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