[shady28]

Well under way. Keep in mind this is a translation from original French, so it sounds a bit weird. The gist is this : 20% decline in values in 2 months.

French News Source (machine translated via babelfish) - (link)

[BabyPeanut]

We caught up with Jim by phone from Shanghai earlier this month, where he was apartment shopping. Starting with the recent news out of China, we'll cover Jim's thoughts on China in the first part of this interview...

Sjuggerud: Let's talk about China. You're in Shanghai right now. Are you thinking about moving from New York?

Jim Rogers: Well, that's one reason we're here, because we're contemplating moving to a Chinese-speaking city, and Shanghai is at the top of the list - at the moment, anyway. Our child is bilingual. We have a 25-month-old baby girl, and she's bilingual. We got her a Chinese nanny from the beginning, whose instructions were to only speak Mandarin to the baby.

So she is literally bilingual, at age 25 months, and we're doing everything we can to encourage and develop that. It doesn't do any good to be bilingual at 25 months if you don't keep it up; you'll forget everything you ever knew by the time you're 25 years old, or even 12 years old.

There are a lot of exciting things going on in China, and in Chinese-speaking areas. And even if I'm wrong about the baby - teaching her Chinese - even if China's not going to be the next great country in the world, there's still a billion and a half people in the world who use Chinese, so it's not a complete waste. It's not like I'm teaching her Danish or something.

There are 7 million who speak Danish, and there are a billion and a half who speak Chinese.

Sjuggerud: You talk in your book about the importance of the Chinese currency, the yuan (or renminbi) being allowed to float against other currencies instead of being pegged to the U.S. dollar, as it is now.

Jim Rogers: The Chinese are moving more and more towards making it more convertible. They're letting Chinese institutions invest abroad now. Chinese tourists can get passports easily now... And they can take, I think, up to $6,000 if they go on a trip. So you're starting to see huge amounts of Chinese travel.

So China is taking very small steps toward making this a completely convertible currency. It will happen by 2007, under the terms of the World Trade contract they have - you know, they joined the World Trade Organization. And they've got the Olympics in 2008. So certainly by 2008, China is not going to be sitting around here with a blocked currency anymore.

The consequences? Who knows? I'm sure there are going to be unexpected consequences. There always are, when an event is greatly anticipated.

Sjuggerud: Would you speculate on the possible rise of the yuan at this point? Some expect it will shoot up once it's freed from the U.S. dollar peg.

Jim Rogers: I know that hundreds of billions of dollars are being poured into China to take advantage of the rise in the renminbi. First of all, whenever something like that happens, it wouldn't surprise me if this renminbi didn't go down for awhile, because all those people who poured hundreds of billions into China to speculate have got to get it out.

But whether it goes up or down in the beginning, I don't care. I'm going to be buying more of it myself. Because longer term, the renminbi's going to be a big currency, a great currency.

The consequences, again, there have been hundreds of billions of dollars of speculation on the renminbi, and that always worries me. So I know there are going to be some surprises. I just wish I were smart enough to know exactly what the consequences will be and what the timing will be.

I'm not one of the people pouring money into China right now to speculate on the renmimbi, that's for sure.

Sjuggerud: Is a hard landing in China inevitable at some point, as you suggest in your book?

Jim Rogers: Yeah, I don't remember if I specifically said... But real estate is where the major speculation has been, and that's where I'd expect the hard landing to center, if you will. It will reverberate out from there, of course. There will be other people who will suffer. That's my view.

I mean, some parts of the Chinese economy will never even know that there's a hard landing in Shanghai real estate, say, or that a bunch of real estate speculators in Beijing went broke. The guys out there producing coal, or building power plants, won't even know that there's a hard landing in other parts of the Chinese economy.

So I suspect it will certainly start with real estate, or something, and reverberate out... But parts of the economy will never know it.

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[BabyPeanut]

"Some experts say that there is a bubble in the real estate market in cities like Shanghai, this does not mean that Nanjing has also got a bubble. The two cities are different and their house prices cannot be compared," said Guo.

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