Absolutely not. "This is making the fundamentals better for commodities...farmers cannot even get loans for fertiliser any more, inventories for agricultural products are the lowest they've been for fifty years. Coming out of this, the secular supply is going to be even less.
The key word there is "secular", and Mr Rogers is keen to draw the distinction between a cyclical downturn - a short period of lower demand - and a structural change in the long-term fundamentals. "In 1987 the stock market collapsed. Was that the end of the bull market? In retrospect, it was not. I would suggest that this period of forced liquidation is not the end of the bull market in commodities.... in fact, the fundamentals of commodities are improving."
He cites an International Energy Agency (IEA) study showing that reserves of oil are declining at the rate of six or seven per cent a year. "It's getting worse by leaps and bounds". Does this mean he's a believer in 'peak oil' - the idea that the world's production of oil has already peaked, and can only fall goiing forward?
"I'm not a geologist, but I do know that nobody's discovered a major 'elephant' oil field in over forty years. There may be huge amounts of oil out there, but if so, we don't know where it is, and we'd better find it fast and it'd better be in accessible areas," he says. I take this is a qualified 'yes.'
Much his preferred way to play the commodities bull market is to buy the underlying asset, rather than shares in producers or processors. "In the 1980s, oil went up ten times but a lot of oil stocks did next to nothing," he points out, going on to note that more recently, gas prices tripled while Enron - a gas trader - went bust.
"If you're a good stock picker, of course you're going to make more money in the stock...but most people are not good stock pickers. All the studies show that indexing outperforms 80 per cent of fund managers year after year," he says. Such is his belief in indexing that he created his own commodities index in 1998, the RICI (full details on that here; although relatively few exchange-traded funds track it)
Mr Rogers is buying into practically all commodities at the moment, "because they've fallen so much". But as with emerging markets, sentimentality doesn't come into it. That's one reason why he's more equivocal about gold, the most romantic of the metals complex.
"I've been making speeches to gold bugs for years and they always hate me, because I tell 'em that gold's just a function of supply and demand, and they think it's all holy and mystical," he laughs. Mystical it may be, but generally speaking, it's been a rotten investment. "For thousands of years, alchemists have tried to figure out how to turn lead into gold, and I point out that for the past 30 years, you'd have been better off turning gold into lead!"
