Jim Rickards

“To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious, but the stupid have an answer for everything.” ~Edward Abbey

“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.” - Buddha

Why Now?

You don’t actually have any savings. When you make a deposit, you’re trading your money for a banker’s promise to repay you. And there are countless regulations giving them the authority to break that promise. (If you want to test this premise, try withdrawing $25,000 just to see how your bank reacts.) That’s the system that controls your wealth today. It’s almost entirely digital. And it’s run by unelected bureaucrats whose interests are not aligned with your own. This is not a free system. And any rational person should consider parking at least a rainy day fund outside of this system.

The production structure has long since adapted to ZIRP and “short-term gambling, punting on momentum-driven moves, on levered buybacks” are further lifting the opportunity costs of abandoning it. In order to try to rescue its credibility, the Fed may decide to try some timid, quarter-point increases. But what will they do if markets really crash?

Almost all serious analysts see a Terminal problem developing - "We will go from deflation to hyperinflation without seeing inflation." But hyperinflation is a political phenomenon. It is caused by those same authorities the masses think they can trust. When they are threatened, they will protect themselves by printing money on a scale we haven’t seen since the War Between the States (consumer prices in Richmond, Virginia, had risen 6,700% by the end of the war).

Somehow everything in the following statement from David Petraeus is wrong: "There is no shortage of customers for the purchase of U.S. Treasuries," said Petraeus.... "Given the relative strength of the U.S. economy and the prospect of the Fed raising interest rates at some point in the months ahead, I suspect there will continue to be very keen interest in U.S. Treasuries." 

Rickards said that gold is like “fire insurance on your house” ... “Nobody wants their house to burn down but if it does you are glad you have some insurance”. 

As an investor, you have enough to be concerned about just taking into account factors like inflation, deflation, Fed policy and the overall state of the economy. Now you have another major threat looming – financial warfare, enabled by cyberattacks and force multipliers. What can you do to preserve wealth when these cyberfinancial wars break out? The key is to have some portion of your total assets invested in nondigital assets that cannot be hacked, wiped out or disrupted by financial warfare. The time to take defensive action by acquiring some non-digital assets is now.

There is no better way to describe the international monetary system today than through the statement made in 1971 by U.S. Treasury Secretary, John Connally. He said to his counterparts during a Rome G-10 meeting in November 1971, shortly after the Nixon administration ended the dollar’s convertibility into gold and shifted the international monetary system into a global floating exchange rate regime that, "The dollar is our currency, but your problem.” This remains the U.S. policy towards the international community even today. On several occasions both the past and present chairpersons of the Fed, Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen, have indicated it still is the U.S. policy as it concerns the dollar. Is China saying to the world, but more particularly to the U.S., “The yuan is our currency but your problem”?

What better way to mute demands for a return to sound money and the gold standard, than by making them equivalent to jihadist terrorism? Why, there are none, which may explain the hilarious appearance of the "Islamic State's" latest 55-minutes pro gold standard YouTube clip, which is nothing but a crash course in Austrian economics.

Jim Rickards, “I think it’s always very important to own gold. I’ve recommended that investors have about 10% of their portfolio in the yellow metal.” “If I’m right and some catastrophic event is on the horizon, then that 10% would be your portfolio insurance.”

Tick, tock... "it could never happen here?"

The People’s Bank of China may have tripled holdings of bullion since it last updated them in April 2009, to 3,510 metric tons. It is worth noting that the U.S. refuses to allow their gold reserves to be publicly audited and the Bundesbank is having difficulty repatriating much of its gold stored with the Federal Reserve. This has led many analysts to speculate that the U.S.’s gold reserves have been leased out or sold or are encumbered as part of an ongoing effort to manipulate gold prices.

The built-up tensions and fragilities are begging for release. The unfortunate consequence of not allowing the process of “creative destruction” to occur in banking and Big Business is that the historic forces behind it will seek expression elsewhere in the realm of politics and governance. The desperate antics of central banks to cover up financial failure can’t help but provoke political upheaval, including war.