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Winding down or not, you still need to know where to invest, so let's get some advice from a billionaire.

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The investor Jim Rogers sat down for a cup of Chinese tea -- that's significant -- with CNN's Felicia Taylor in New York.

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Still driving hard, Jim Rogers is famously bullish on China having moved his family to Singapore to be closer to the Asian giant.

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He made his fortune at the Quantum Fund with George Soros,

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retired at 37 and drove around the world by motorbike, and then by car, journeys he chronicled in best-selling books.

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We caught up with him on a recent visit to New York.

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Obviously, you've been bullish on China for a long time. Are you still bullish, as bullish as you've been?

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Yes, I'm very optimistic about the future of China. My children speak Mandarin.

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And there will be setbacks in China. Don't worry, Felicia, there'll be many problems in China.

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There is probably a real estate bubble in urban coastal real estate in China, but that's not China.

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Here we had a huge real estate problem which took us down for many reasons because it was very pervasive.

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That's not China. China has many other things going for it.

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China's got a huge savings rate. They save and invest 35 percent of their income.

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They work from dawn to dusk. They're the largest creditor nation in the world.

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They're not always on the up and up.

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Even... even the...I think it was the vice...Chinese vice premier admitted that their economic data was what he called "manmade."

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I mean, so they're manufacturing numbers that they can't count on.

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Felicia, it's like ours. You believe the numbers that come out of the U.S. government?

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You believe the numbers that come out of any government?

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Oh, if you believe numbers that...Ho! I've been waiting for somebody like you.

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If you believe what people tell you, if you believe any government numbers.

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They're all made up. How can they possibly know most of the stuff they say.

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In the U.S., we're constantly changing the numbers. We're constantly saying, "Oh, gosh, We were wrong." 

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Look at Mr. Bernanke. Mr. Bernanke's been in Washington for eight years.

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Every month, about everything that he's ever said, he's been wrong.

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He has most recently talked about inflation, and he is 100-percent certain that he can contain inflation.

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Do you think that's true?

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If you go to the grocery store, if you go anywhere, you know that prices are going up.

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Whether it's education or insurance or medical care or groceries, everything is going up in price.

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The government keeps telling us there's no inflation. Where do they shop?

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How can they sit and tell us there's no inflation when it's as clear as day that there's inflation everywhere,

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and it's getting worse, not better.

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What does this country need to do to solve the unemployment problem?

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Whenever you have a long period of excess, eventually, let's say you had a...were drinking for three weeks in a row.

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That's a period of...you're gonna have to pay for that. 

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You're gonna have hangovers, you're gonna have illnesses, you're gonna have problems.

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We had a 20...at least 20 years of excess in America in the credit markets, the housing, in many markets.

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We've gotta pay the price.

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I don't like saying it, but we cannot just snap our fingers and, well everything's OK now; let's start over.

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But does that mean that there really is nothing that Bernanke and company can do? I mean, it just has to ride its course.

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They can stay out of the way and let the system work itself out.

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Let the market clear, to use that expression.

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Throughout history, when people get in trouble, they go bankrupt, competent people come in, reorganize and it starts over.

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You have a period of pain. There's no question you have a period of pain.

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But after the pain, things start over from a sounder base.

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Now, Scandinavia had this problem 20 years ago. Everybody went bankrupt.

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It was horrible for three years, but then they had a 15-year boom.

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Korea, Chile, lots of people have been through this. They take the pain, they reorganize and start over.

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It's not fun, but when you make bad mistakes, somebody has to pay. It's the way the world works.