Jim Rogers says may short U.S. Treasuries, later today

Influential investment veteran Jim Rogers said on Tuesday he plans to short U.S. Treasuries, maybe as soon as later in the day, as he expects the end of the Federal Reserve's quantitative easing program to pressure government bonds.

Rogers, who rose to prominence after co-founding the now defunct Quantum Fund with billionaire investor George Soros four decades ago, said he expects the U.S. dollar to rally when the Fed's unconventional monetary measure ends in June.

I'm not short bonds yet but I plan to short bonds -- maybe this afternoon if I get around to it, Rogers told Reuters Insider television.

The Fed in November launched a second round of purchases of long-term securities, which investors and traders refer to as QE II, pumping $600 billion into the financial system.

Rogers let slip a cautionary note on bonds, however. The problem is that polls show 95 percent of investors are bearish on bonds. One reason that I'm not short on bonds yet is that there are too many bears, he said.

The long-time commodities investor said he was unruffled by last week's commodities rout that knocked 13 percent off oil prices. Silver dropped 25 percent last week in its biggest correction since prices collapsed in 1980. The metal was hit by a succession of margin increases that nearly doubled trading costs. Silver had risen 27 percent in April.

The price of increasingly scarce commodities like oil and precious metals will be on an uptrend for a number of years, Rogers said, regardless of impressive market corrections.

We are in a bull market that has several years to go. I don't know when it is going to end, Rogers said. We have virtually no new supply of anything. The world's known reserves of oil continue to decline.

He described the commodity crash as nothing unusual. Corrections happen all the time in markets, he said.

Despite his insistence that he's the worst market timer out there, before last week's plunge Rogers had expressed concern a sudden rise in silver prices could lead to a correction.

But now that silver has fallen back, he remains optimistic. It's not the end of the silver market, he said. I want to buy more silver.

(Reporting by Edward McAllister; Editing by Dan Grebler and Andrew Hay)