He told me to become a farmer; is he right?

SINGAPORE – When Gordon Brown said that he wouldn’t be dictated to by “a few speculators who want to make money out of Britain,” he was talking about Jim Rogers. Peter Mandelson called Mr Rogers “foolish“.

Those were understandable responses to Mr Rogers’ assertions that post-oil-and-credit-boom Britain “had nothing left to sell” and that “sterling is finished”.

On the way back from my trip to China, I decided to pop in on him in Singapore, and find out if he was a maestro or madman. He moved out to Singapore ostensibly because he wanted his young daughters to be children of the East.

I think whatever one thinks of his gloomy prognosis, he does raise a vital question that I can see no politician answering at the moment. What exactly is the business plan for UK plc?

We were hugely dependent on financial services for taxes, for value-added jobs, and secondary service-sector employment. If British banks are to “become boring again”, if the FSA is to adopt intrusive aggressive regulation, then I don’t see much of the financial wizardry that drove the city returning quickly.

Watch Faisal Islam’s interview with Jim Rogers

There’s now a consensus that the credit boom was caused by the additional lending from “non-traditional lenders”. Most of that money came from abroad, from America via complex securitisations.

Even as the conventional banks increase their lending that other source of lending has disappeared, and still not reappeared. Can the government really step into this market and replace the lending power of those (basically foreign) sources of lending that have gone away?

So nor do I see the debt-fuelled consumption economy returning quickly. What does a post-credit crunch British economy look like? Jim Rogers cannot see it (though he suggests I might like to retrain as a farmer).

He has concerns about the US too. In my interview he memorably refuses to refer to the US and the UK as “rich countries” on account of their reliance on foreign creditors. He invites someone to fly from China, Hong Kong or Singapore to New York’s JFK and describe which was the “third world” country.

It is really uncomfortable stuff. But you are left wondering: “what if he is right?”

We spend billions of pounds making contingencies for bird flu, and for terrorism. Is anyone planning for Britain’s economic security?

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