Feb. 11 (Bloomberg) -- Jim Rogers, chairman of Rogers Holdings, said he renewed bets that U.S. stocks will drop as the government’s economic revival plan is a “disaster.”

Rogers is shorting U.S. equities including International Business Machines Corp., General Electric Co. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. after closing earlier bets during October’s meltdown, he said in Singapore. So-called short sellers borrow stocks and sell them on hopes of capturing a profit by replacing the shares after prices fall.

“I covered most of my shorts in the U.S. stock market back in October specifically, and waited for a rally and there’s been a bit of a rally, so now I’ve started shorting again,” Rogers said. The bank-rescue plan is “a big, horrible disaster.”

The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index slid 4.9 percent yesterday, the biggest retreat since President Barack Obama’s inauguration, on concern that the government’s rescue plan will fail. The benchmark for U.S. equities is still 9.9 percent above the 11- year low reached on Nov. 20. The gauge tumbled 17 percent in October, the most for a month since 1987.

Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc. sank more than 15 percent yesterday after Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said he’s still “exploring a range of different structures” to bail out lenders.

Geithner pledged up to $2 trillion in government financing for programs aimed at spurring new lending and addressing banks’ toxic assets. The proposals, which he said will “take time” to bear fruit, includes limits on bank dividends and acquisitions.

‘Adding More Debt’

“America doesn’t have reserves and it doesn’t have anything except, so far, the ability to borrow,” Rogers said. “That’s not going to be good for the world economy. It’s just adding more debt, more consumption to a problem that’s caused by debt and consumption.”

While Rogers has increased his bets against the U.S. market, other short sellers are losing their conviction as Obama works with Congress on a spending and tax-cut plan of about $800 billion to revive the economy. The number of shares borrowed and sold short on the New York Stock Exchange fell 28 percent last month from the peak in July.

IBM spokesman Fred McNeese declined to comment on the wagers against the company’s shares made by Rogers. Armonk, New York- based IBM, the world’s biggest computer-services provider, has rebounded 11 percent this year.

GE, JPMorgan

GE, based in Fairfield, Connecticut, has lost 66 percent of its market value in 12 months amid concern about declining profit in its finance businesses that span credit cards, aircraft leasing and bankruptcy lending for midsized companies.

Company spokesman Gary Sheffer said, “We don’t comment on any individual stock picks.”

JPMorgan’s spokesman Brian Marchiony declined comment by e- mail. The New York-based bank has slipped 22 percent this year.

Geithner is attempting to revive a U.S. banking system throttled by $756 billion in credit losses and an economy that lost almost 600,000 jobs last month. His new approach comes four months after the start of the $700 billion so-called TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which both Democrats and Republicans have criticized as ineffective.

“He caused the problem all last year,” Rogers said on Bloomberg Television. “He came up with TARP, and he came up with all these absurd bailouts. Mr. Geithner has never known what he is doing. He doesn’t know what he is doing now and pretty soon everybody is going to find out, including Mr. Obama.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Chen Shiyin in Singapore at schen37@bloomberg.net; Lori Rothman in New York at lrothman@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: February 11, 2009 09:17 EST