Legendary global investor and chairman of Singapore-based Rogers Holdings, Jim Rogers has been talking about his 2012 predictions.

In a nutshell, he is neither too optimistic about the stock market for 2012 nor about what’s going to happen in the world in the next two or three years.

Speaking to Australia Financial News Network (AFNN) December 23, Rogers said: “The problems are going to continue to get worse until someone solves the basic underlying problem of too much spending and too much debt.”

He sees the biggest risk to global growth in 2012 as “too much debt…too much consumption…and the central bank in the US which keeps printing money.”

Rogers, seen as one of the world’s most successful investors, highlighted the scale of the problem to his host: The problem is that the measures America needs [to solve the crisis] would cause huge pain for a while, but, if we don’t take our pain now, and we wait until the market forces the pain on us, then it’s going to be systemic collapse.”