Wealth & Money Quote by Jim Rogers

Rogers is selling a seductively blunt story: commodities are real, therefore safer. The line works because it taps a post-crisis, post-tech-bubble suspicion that finance is mostly elaborate paperwork. By mocking stocks as an "intangible piece of company", he paints equity ownership as a fragile social agreement - a claim that can evaporate with bankruptcy court ink. In that framing, a commodity future feels almost honest: it’s tethered to wheat, oil, copper, the stuff civilization trips over when it’s scarce.

The subtext is less about pricing theory than about status and control. Rogers is positioning himself against the white-collar abstraction of modern markets, arguing for assets that look like physical necessity rather than corporate narrative. It’s a clever rhetorical move for a commodities booster because it turns complexity into a moral distinction: paper versus real.

The claim also smuggles in an important omission. Commodity prices can crater, and futures aren’t barrels and bushels in your garage; they’re contracts with rolling costs, margin calls, and the occasional humiliating lesson in storage and delivery. (Oil going negative in 2020 is the footnote that haunts this kind of certainty.) Rogers isn’t wrong that companies can go to zero; he’s highlighting a genuine asymmetry between a bankrupt equity and a finite resource. But his real intent is persuasion: to make commodities feel like gravity - and stocks feel like vapor - in an era when many investors already fear that the system is one legal clause away from disappearing.