James Rickards > Quotes

“Printing dollars at home means higher inflation in China, higher food prices in Egypt and stock bubbles in Brazil. Printing money means that U.S. debt is devalued so foreign creditors get paid back in cheaper dollars. The devaluation means higher unemployment in developing economies as their exports become more expensive for Americans. The resulting inflation also means higher prices for inputs needed in developing economies like copper, corn, oil and wheat. Foreign countries have begun to fight back against U.S.-caused inflation through subsidies, tariffs and capital controls; the currency war is expanding fast.”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“A prohibition on the hoarding or possession of gold was integral to the plan to devalue the dollar against gold and get people spending again. Against this background, FDR issued Executive Order 6102 on April 5, 1933, one of the most extraordinary executive orders in U.S. history. The blunt language over the signature of Franklin Delano Roosevelt speaks for itself: I, Franklin D. Roosevelt . . . declare that [a] national emergency still continues to exist and . . . do hereby prohibit the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the . . . United States by individuals, partnerships, associations and corporations.... All persons are hereby required to deliver, on or before May 1, 1933, to a Federal reserve bank . . . or to any member of the Federal Reserve System all gold coin, gold bullion and gold certificates now owned by them.... Whoever willfully violates any provision of this Executive Order . . . may be fined not more than $10,000 or . . . may be imprisoned for not more than ten years. The people of the United States were being ordered to surrender their gold to the government and were offered paper money at the exchange rate of $20.67 per ounce. Some relatively minor exceptions were made for dentists, jewelers and others who made “legitimate and customary” use of gold in their industry or art. Citizens were allowed to keep $100 worth of gold, about five ounces at 1933 prices, and gold in the form of rare coins. The $10,000 fine proposed in 1933 for those who continued to hoard gold in violation of the president’s order is equivalent to over $165,000 in today’s money, an extraordinarily large statutory fine. Roosevelt followed up with a”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“It is one thing when prices drift downward over time due to innovation, scalability or other efficiencies. This might be considered “good” deflation and is familiar to any contemporary consumer who has seen prices of computers or wide-screen TVs fall year after year. It is another matter when prices are forced down by unnecessary monetary contraction, credit constraints, deleveraging, business failures, bankruptcies and mass unemployment. This may be considered “bad” deflation. This bad deflation was exactly what was required in order to return the most important currencies to their prewar parity with gold.”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“There is hardly a part of the United States where men are not aware that secret private purposes and interests have been running the government.” President Woodrow Wilson”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“University biologists working with infectious viruses have airtight facilities to ensure that the objects of their study do not escape from the laboratory and damage the population at large. Unfortunately, no such safeguards are imposed on economics departments.”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“Higher prices are the symptom, not the cause, of currency collapse.”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“A country running deficits under the gold exchange standard could find itself like a tenant whose landlord does not collect rent payments for a year and then suddenly demands immediate payment of twelve months’ back rent. Some tenants would have saved for the inevitable rainy day, but many others would not be able to resist the easy credit and would find themselves short of funds and facing eviction.”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“A regulator's greatest fear is the sequential collapse of hedge funds, banks, and brokerages. That process is hard to spot and even harder to stop.
...
There are two sides to every trade. In a crash there can be just as many winners as losers. The problem arises when the losers go out of business. At that point the winners can't collect so they become losers too. It's as if you were a big winner at roulette and went to the cashier to collect your winnings only to find the cashier window closed and the casino had just filed for bankruptcy. All you have left is a pocketful of worthless chips. At that point, even the market winners can fall into financial distress. Because of leverage, total losses can exceed the size of the market itself. It's like a minefield. Banks running from panic start stepping on mines.”
― James Rickards, MoneyGPT: AI and the Threat to the Global Economy

“Gold is the world's least understood asset class. Confusion arises because gold is traded like a commodity, yet gold is not a commodity, it is money.”
― James Rickards, The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis

“While there's nothing new about financial panics, the role of AI/GPT is new and makes matters exponentially worse. That's not a criticism of AI which works as intended. It's a criticism of humans who don't understand the tool, over-rely on it, and allow it far too much autonomy in the trading process.”
― James Rickards, MoneyGPT: AI and the Threat to the Global Economy

“Elite support for so-called free trade is due to the fact that elites share a global perspective at odds with the best interests of the United States. Policies that produce world growth at U.S. expense are endorsed. Policies that benefit the United States while slowing world growth are rejected. Today globalization’s triumph over nationalism is energizing a nationalist revival as nations reassess their individual interests. Certain”
― James Rickards, The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis

“So the dollar is money, money is value, value is trust, trust is a contract, and the contract is debt.”
― James Rickards, The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System

“Regulators and bankers were using the wrong tools and the wrong metrics. Unfortunately, they still are.”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“It may be too late to save the dollar, but it is not too late to preserve wealth. We live in an ersatz monetary system that has reached its end stage.”
― James Rickards, The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System

“If an economy has a stagnant labor force operating at a constant level of productivity, it will have constant output but no growth. The main drivers of labor force expansion are demographics and education, while the main drivers of productivity are capital and technology. Without those factor inputs, an economy cannot expand. But when those factor inputs are available in abundance, rapid growth is well within reach.”
― James Rickards, The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System

“World Order New World Order is not new. Civilizations have devised forms of world order for millennia because the alternative to order is chaos. Order rarely includes liberty or justice. Order mainly ends disorder, and mitigates violence. That is how order achieves legitimacy. The next world order is emerging. What is new is that world order is no longer circumscribed by a defined “world” such as in the Roman or Chinese empires. The next world order will encompass the globe and all of its civilizations at once.”
― James Rickards, The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis

“Keynes asked me what I was advising my clients. “To insulate themselves as much as possible from the coming crisis and to avoid the markets,” I replied. Keynes took the opposite view. “We will not have any more crashes in our time,” he insisted. . . . “And where is the crash coming from in any case?” “The crash will come from the gap between appearances and reality. I have never seen such stormy weather gathering,” I said. 1927 conversation with Keynes recounted by Felix Somary in The Raven of Zurich (1986)”
― James Rickards, The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis

“Gold offers adversaries significant benefits in a world of U.S.-imposed dollar-based sanctions. Gold is physical, not digital, so it cannot be hacked or frozen. Gold is easy to transport by air to settle the balance of payments or other transactions between nations. Gold flows cannot be interdicted at SWIFT or FedWire. Gold is fungible and nontraceable (it is an element, atomic number 79), so its provenance cannot be ascertained. The United States is unprepared for this”
― James Rickards, The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System

“Hyperinflation produces fairly predictable sets of winners and losers and prompts certain behaviors and therefore can be used politically to rearrange social and economic relations among debtors, creditors, labor and capital, while gold is kept available to clean up the wreckage if necessary.”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“Devaluation and currency wars never produce either the growth or the jobs that are promised, but they reliably produce inflation.”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“Central banks and finance ministries do not hold copper, aluminum, or steel supplies, yet they hold gold. The only explanation for central bank gold hoards is the obvious one - gold is money.”
― James Rickards, The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis

“The gross size of all bank derivatives positions now exceeds $650 trillion, more than nine times global GDP.”
― James Rickards, The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System

“gold and silver have, uninterruptedly to this day, continued to be the universal currency of the commercial and civilized world,”
― James Rickards, The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System

“Worse yet, when the public realizes that it is being deceived, a feedback loop is created in which trust is broken and even the truth, if it can be found, is no longer believed. The United States is dangerously close to that point. ■”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“America has, in fact, run trade deficits large enough to wipe out its gold hoard under the old rules of the game. Still, the idea of the gold standard was not to deplete nations of gold, but rather to force them to get their financial house in order long before the gold disappeared. In the absence of a gold standard and the real-time adjustments it causes, the American people seem unaware of how badly U.S. finances have actually deteriorated.”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“From its creation in 1913, the most important Fed mandate has been to maintain the purchasing power of the dollar; however, since 1913 the dollar has lost over 95 percent of its value. Put differently, it takes twenty dollars today to buy what one dollar would buy in 1913.”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“If the dollar falls, America’s national security falls with it.”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“broad-based tax cut . . . accommodated by a program of open market purchases . . . would almost certainly be an effective stimulant to consumption.... A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous “helicopter drop” of money.... Of course . . . the government could . . . even acquire existing real or financial assets. If . . . the Fed then purchased an equal amount of Treasury debt with newly created money, the whole operation would be the economic equivalent of direct open market operations in private assets.”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“Ironically, solutions are not hard to devise. These solutions involve breaking big banks into units that are not too big to fail; returning to a system of regional stock exchanges, to provide redundancy; and reintroducing gold into the monetary system, since gold cannot be wiped out in a digital flash.”
― James Rickards, The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System

“Deflation increases the real value of government debt, making it harder to repay. If deflation is not reversed, there will be an outright default on the national debt, rather than the less traumatic outcome of default-by-inflation.”
― James Rickards, The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System