Jim Rogers: Market Surge from Eurozone Debt Crisis Deal Won't Last

Stock markets around the world soared Friday in reaction to the morning's Eurozone debt crisis deal, but noted investor Jim Rogers wasn't impressed.

"This is no more than just another temporary stopgap to make the market feel good for a few hours, days or even weeks," Rogers, Chairman of Rogers Holdings, told CNBC. "Then everybody's going to wake up and say, "This doesn't solve the problem.'"

Meeting in Brussels, European leaders announced a plan early Friday that would provide struggling banks with money directly from the bloc's bailout fund.

The leaders also said bailout funds could be used to stabilize European bond markets. But they did not tie such use to additional austerity measures, which have angered citizens in debt-troubled nations like Greece and Spain.

The summit is just the latest in a series of high-level attempts to resolve the 2-year-old Eurozone debt crisis, which has required bailouts of Greece, Portugal, Ireland, and most recently the Spanish banking system.

Markets around the world surged on the announcement, with some European indexes rising as much as 4%. In the United States, the Dow Jones Industrial Average shot up 200 points at the open. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index was up about 25 points, or just under 2%.

Don't get used to it, Rogers said.

"They've had 20 summits in the past three years. And every time they have a summit and they announce something, the markets rally," Rogers said. "After they read it and see what it really means, then the markets go back down. The same thing is going to happen again."

Rogers noted that commodities markets generally were up even more than stocks in anticipation of a new flood of money. Gold was up about 3% and oil almost 6%.

"That's one reason gold is going up. Because in the end they're going to print more money," Rogers said. "Commodities are going through the roof right now."

Despite all the market action, Rogers is content to remain on the sidelines – for now.

"I'm not doing anything. I'm watching," Rogers said. "I'll see what goes up the most and what goes down the most and then I might do something."

Rogers said his beef with the latest attempt to tackle the Eurozone debt crisis is that it not only solves nothing — it makes the problem worse.

"The solution to too much debt is not more debt," Rogers said. "All this little agreement does is give [the banks] a chance to have even more debt for a little while longer."

To Rogers, the answer to the European debt crisis, and for that matter the huge U.S. national debt, is simple.

"What needs to happen is that people need to stop spending money they don't have," Rogers said. "This is not going to be solved until people start cutting spending – cutting spending dramatically – and paying down debt."

Rogers added that "one thing that would make me very excited would be if a few [big banks] went bankrupt."

Responding to a question that such an event could result in "financial Armageddon," Rogers warned that we're headed there anyway.

"There's going to come a time when the rest of the world is not going to give these people any more money," he said. "then you have much worse Armageddon."

Rogers went on to paint a bleak scenario:

"What are you going to do in two years or three years or four years when the market suddenly says, "No more money'? And the Germans don't have any more money. And American debt has gone through the roof. Who's going to come to the rescue then?"

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David Zeiler

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Dave has been a journalist for more than 35 years, including 18 spent at The Baltimore Sun. He has worked as a writer, editor, and page designer at different times in his career. He's interviewed a number of well-known personalities - ranging from punk rock icon Joey Ramone to Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak.

Over the course of his journalistic career, Dave has covered many diverse subjects. Since arriving at Money Morning in 2011, he has focused primarily on technology. He's an expert on both Apple and cryptocurrencies. He started writing about Apple for The Sun in the mid-1990s, and had an Apple blog on The Sun's web site from 2007-2009. Dave's been writing about Bitcoin since 2011 - long before most people had even heard of it. He even mined it for a short time.

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