martinRogers basically said, “Capital wants to earn a return; just like labor want to earn a return; land wants to earn a return.”
And in the sense that he was saying, “Figure out the money and you’ll figure out what’s really going on”, I now believe he was saying it in the sense (just as he explained in his book ‘Adventure Capitalist’) that a currency is like a thermometer:
“In most places around the world, the currency is like a thermometer. It may not tell you what is going on, but it tells you that something is going on. You know a country is falling apart when even the government and its own citizens will not accept its own currency; then you know a country is really in trouble. One of the ways to take the temperature of a country and its currency is to visit the local black market in currency (one exists wherever there are exchange controls) because it’s one quick and sure way for an investor to find out what’s going on in a country. The price of the currency is to the prudent investor what an X-ray is to an experienced radiologist.”