Jan. 28 (Bloomberg) -- Peter Thiel, founder of hedge-fund firm Clarium Capital Management LLC, said the U.S. dollar and Japanese yen will appreciate this year.

“There’s no fast recovery,” he said in a Bloomberg Television interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland today. “You stay very underweight equities, if at all, and you basically assume that the bailouts will not work to the degree they are expected to, the government will do less or not succeed in stopping this deleveraging process.”

Thiel, whose fund trades everything from stocks to commodities, seeks to profit from broad economic trends, a strategy known as macro investing. Macro funds gained 5.7 percent last year, according to Hedge Fund Research Inc. All hedge funds lost an average of 18 percent globally, the Chicago-based firm said.

The British pound will continue to weaken and the U.K. is the “worst country in the world at this point” partly because of its trade deficits, he said.

Thiel, 41, who co-founded PayPal, started Clarium in 2002 after selling the online-payments service to EBay Inc. for $1.5 billion.

Government officials including U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has backed greater regulation and disclosure requirements for hedge funds.

“Some degree of regulation is probably desirable at this point, just as a way of reassuring the people who are invested in this industry,” Thiel said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Saijel Kishan in New York at skishan@bloomberg.net; Erik Schatzker in New York at eschatzker@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: January 28, 2009 11:20 EST