US INVESTMENT guru Jim Rogers has warned that the Irish economy has turned into a bubble and that people are going to suffer over the coming years.

Mr Rogers, a well-known author and commentator who co-founded the Quantum Fund with billionaire speculator George Soros in the 1970s, said politicians and central bankers were "always promising soft landings but I have never seen them".

"The Irish success story has been a wonderful story. I have written about it in the past, but it has turned into a bubble, a property bubble in many ways, and like all bubbles someone is going to have to suffer. Unfortunately it looks like people are going to be suffering for the next year or two in Ireland. All bubbles end badly," Mr Rogers told reporters ahead of an investment conference organised by Merrion Capital in Dublin.

A commodity specialist, Mr Rogers (65) sold his home in the US and relocated to Singapore, which he compares to 1908 New York, to take advantage of the investment opportunities in Asia.

He has said his best advice is "to teach your children and grandchildren Chinese". His four-year-old daughter is being taught Mandarin to prepare for the future.

He warned against US central bankers printing money to stop a recession and said they were making the same mistakes they made in the 1970s and their Japanese counterparts made in the 1990s when they tried to stop their credit-inflated economy bursting.

"They are printing too much money and putting on Band Aids to try to bail out their friends in finance. The Japanese still have not recovered 18 years later."

He predicted the dollar would fall further and lose its status as the world's reserve currency. "As long as the [ US] central bank and the federal government keep making the mistakes, you will have a longer period of slowdown and it will be perhaps one of the worst recessions we have had in a long time in America. . .This bubble has been 10-15 years in the making. You don't clear out a bubble like that in six months or a year."

Mr Rogers said he was backing the Japanese yen, the Swiss franc, and commodities such as cotton, coffee and sugar. "Agriculture is the place to be, [ and] maybe silver, maybe palladium." Food inflation would rise because inventories were at their lowest "in 40 or 50 years in some cases".

Mr Rogers predicted hard times for the financial sector, but said fortunes could be made in firms that "come out the other side unscathed".