Rickards is the author of a few books that my readers might be interested in.\u00c2\u00a0 His first book (2011) was called “Currency Wars<\/a>” (if you haven’t noticed, we’re in one now); the Financial Times reviewed it saying\u00c2\u00a0 “let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hope he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s wrong”. His response was, “I hope I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m wrong, too”.\u00c2\u00a0 His most current book,\u00c2\u00a0 “The Death of Money<\/a>” is currently on my Kindle, although I’ve just barely cracked the cover.<\/p>\n Rickards recently did a short, 20 minute-ish interview with Glenn Beck on the radio program.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0A video and the transcript is available<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 The interview was centered on what economic collapse looks like and what the world looks like after it happens.\u00c2\u00a0 I think what got Beck interested in interviewing him was an article he published on the\u00c2\u00a0Daily Reckoning:\u00c2\u00a0 “In the Year 2024”<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 The combination of that piece and the interview rate pretty high up on the pucker scale.<\/p>\n Rickards has some interesting things to say about where the various central banks are, since they’ve been creating money at a breakneck pace since 2008.\u00c2\u00a0 The central banks are insolvent.\u00c2\u00a0 Behind closed doors with one of their own, like Rickards, they’ll admit they’re insolvent and then claim it doesn’t matter.\u00c2\u00a0 According to one standard definition (“a prolonged period of below-trend growth, which neither collapses nor gets back to trend”),we’re in a depression now and have been for some time<\/a>.<\/p>\n JAMES: … People say – I say we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re in a depression. People go, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re nuts. GDP is not going down. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been recovering for six years. Where are the soup lines? Well, the soup lines are Whole Foods. Because now you get food stamps on a digital card. By the way, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not disparaging people. You can go into Whole Foods and get your soups. So we have the soup lines. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re just at Whole Foods. We all know the only reason why unemployment is not higher is because labor participations collapsed.<\/p>\n The point is, this 2 percent growth that we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re chugging along. In some quarters, a little more. In some quarters, a little bit less. If we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re capable of three and a half, which we are, and in the short-run, maybe 5 percent, which we saw between \u00e2\u20ac\u212283 and \u00e2\u20ac\u212286, if we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re capable of that and you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re actually growing at two, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the gap between the three and two. Or the five and the two that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s depressed growth. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the definition of a depression. The problem is, we are Japan. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be in this for 20 years, unless we make structural changes. A depression is structural. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not cyclical. You can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t solve a [structural] problem with a cyclical solution, which is money. Money printing, if you know, inflation is a little high and you want to dial down the money supply. Or unemployment is high, dial it up. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a cyclical solution. We need structural solutions. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not getting them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n He’ll be among the first to tell you that financial collapse could happen this week or in a decade.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s impossible to tell.\u00c2\u00a0 In many ways, it’s like an avalanche: it’s impossible to blame the avalanche on any particular snowflake, but any one of the continuing snowflakes could cause it.\u00c2\u00a0 What’s it look like?\u00c2\u00a0 The only “bank” with any solvency left is the International Monetary Fund.\u00c2\u00a0 The IMF has Special Drawing Rights, SDRs, that would allow it to prop up the world when the collapse happens.\u00c2\u00a0 His most likely scenario would be that all banks around the world,\u00c2\u00a0all banks<\/b>, would be shuttered.\u00c2\u00a0 After some time, perhaps a few days, perhaps a week, everyone would be able to withdraw 250 or $300 a day for food and energy expenses.<\/p>\n GLENN: And all of a sudden we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re just out. This could happen in a three-day, four-day, five-day period where all of a sudden the world has changed. The banks are closed. You don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have access to money. $300 out of the ATM. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all you can get.<\/p>\n JAMES: Right. Gas and grocery money. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s about it.<\/p>\n GLENN: That can go on for?<\/p>\n JAMES: Weeks, months. Hey, if you have your gas and groceries, what else would you need? That would be the point. They wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t steal your money. You just couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get it. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not just stocks. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s money market funds. You wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be able to redeem those. Close the stock exchange. Say, hey, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not stealing your equity. But we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve converted it to private equity.<\/p>\n GLENN: You said they wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t steal things. Well, they did in Cypress.<\/p>\n JAMES: It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s state power.<\/p>\n GLENN: The state comes in and says, everybody gets a 50 percent haircut. So whatever you have, you lose 50 percent of it. To me, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s theft. This is all going on. The state starts to crock down. Everybody is kind of pinned into their own place. What does it \u00e2\u20ac\u201d what does it look like afterwards?<\/p>\n JAMES: Well, now there are a couple of states to the world. So maybe everybody will just acquiesce. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s actually a lot of history. When things get bad, people just say, hey, don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t bother me. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll go alone with this. But you could see the outbreak of money riots. You could see people in the streets, protesting not social conditions, but financial conditions. Of course, we have a heavy militarized police ready to respond to that with tear gas and flash bang grenades and they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re armored up with all this money from the federal government. So they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re ready.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The Daily Reckoning piece,\u00c2\u00a0In the Year 2024<\/a>, is an interesting read, too. Yes, dystopian; yes, shocking, but reasonable.\u00c2\u00a0 It describes a future in which the collapse just described has happened.\u00c2\u00a0 The financial structure of the world has come down to three currencies: the dollar in the Americas; the Euro in Europe, Africa and Australia, and the “Ruasia”, a new currency that combines the old Russian ruble, Chinese yuan and Japanese yen in a currency for Asia.\u00c2\u00a0 All the gold in the world has been confiscated and buried in a secure vault so that nobody ever tries to use it as money again, and no country can create a gold-based economy.\u00c2\u00a0 All G-20 nations contributed their national gold to the vault. All private gold was forcibly confiscated and added to the Swiss vault as well. All gold mining had been nationalized and suspended for “environmental reasons”.\u00c2\u00a0 Land and personal property were not confiscated, because much of it was needed for living arrangements and agriculture. Personal property was too difficult to confiscate and of little use to the state. Fine art was lumped in with cheap art and mundane personal property and ignored.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" First up, here’s Saturday, at the bottom of this will be Sunday’s post… This morning not sure what happened as I just forgot to post anything. We had baseball again last night and there’s too much parent drama. Every parent … Continue reading