Bailout Is ‘Nail in the Coffin’ for Euro, Rogers Says

Bailout Is ‘Nail in the Coffin’ for Euro, Rogers Says

Shiyin Chen and Haslinda Amin
Bloomberg
May 12, 2010

Investor Jim Rogers said Europe’s bailout of indebted nations to overcome the sovereign-debt crisis is just “another nail in the coffin” for the euro as higher spending increases the region’s debt.

The 16-nation currency weakened for a second day against the dollar after rallying as much as 2.7 percent on May 10, when the governments of the 16 euro nations agreed to make loans of as much as 750 billion euros ($962 billion) available to countries under attack from speculators and the European Central Bank pledged to intervene in government securities markets.

“I was stunned,” Rogers, chairman of Rogers Holdings, said in a Bloomberg Television interview in Singapore. “This means that they’ve given up on the euro, they don’t particularly care if they have a sound currency, you have all these countries spending money they don’t have and it’s now going to continue.”

U.S. and European stocks fell yesterday on concern the plan to rescue debt-laden governments in the region will fail to reverse the euro’s worst start to a year since 2000, forcing the European Central Bank to keep rates at a record low for longer.