Rickards: September Meltdown Ahead
Plus, the Economic crash is coming!
Not all opinions expressed are that of tradCatKnight's
Jim Rickards’ latest New York Times bestseller, The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites’ Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis, is out now. Learn how to get your free copy – HERE.
This vital book transcends rhetoric from the Federal Reserve’s
quantitative tightening program to prepare you for what you should be
watching now.]
Jim Rickards joined Alex Stanczyk at
the Physical Gold Fund to discuss current destabilizing factors that
could drastically impact investors. During the first part of their
conversation the economic expert delved into gold positioning for the
future, the expanding threats from North Korea and liquidity in global
markets.To begin Rickards’ was prompted on his latest analysis over North Korea and the international threat the country poses going forward. The currency wars expert urged, “The fact is, the threats from North Korea, even if not to the mainland, still threaten U.S territory. There are a lot of Americans living there. As this escalation continues in sequence the problem is not new.”
“The threat of North Korea has been going on for decades and has escalated since the mid 1990’s. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both offered sanctions relief for the country in exchange for program reductions. The Obama administration essentially did nothing for eight years. I do think the Trump administration at least deserves credit for clarity.”
Coming Soon, Worst Crash of Our Lifetime
Blodget: And how big a crash could we be looking at?
Rogers: It’s going to be the biggest in my lifetime, and I’m older than you. No, it’s going to be serious stuff. …You’re going to see governments fail. You’re going to see countries fail, this time around. Iceland failed last time. Other countries fail. You’re going to see more of that.
You’re going to see parties disappear. You’re going to see institutions that have been around for a long time — Lehman Brothers had been around over 150 years — gone. Not even a memory for most people. You’re going to see a lot more of that next around, whether it’s museums or hospitals or universities or financial firms.
TOTAL MARKET DEBT AS PERCENTAGE OF GDP
When
economic warnings increase, those entrusted with the care and feeding
of the bankers’ confidence game take extra-steps to reassure victims of
capitalism’s credit and debt feeding-frenzy that everything is alright,
there is nothing to worry about, that taking out a loan for a vacation,
for a home, for a college education, etc. should not be a concern; that
tomorrow’s economic expansion will pay back today’s and yesterday’s
borrowing, that the economic tooth fairy is real and the metastasized
deflationary forces eroding global economic growth are nothing to worry
about.
I don’t believe we will see another financial crisis in our lifetime.
Janet Yellen, Fed Chair, June 27, 2017
THE TIME OF THE VULTURE
In 1991, during a prolonged period of meditation, the following words came to me:
In times of expansion, it is to the hare the prizes go. Quick, risk taking and bold, his qualities are
exactly suited to the times. In periods of contraction, the tortoise is
favored. Slow and conservative, quick only to retract his vulnerable
head and neck, his is the wisest bet when the slow and sure is
preferable to the quick and easy.
Every
so often, however, there comes a time when neither the hare nor the
tortoise is the victor. This is when both the bear and the bull have
been vanquished, when the pastures upon which the bull once grazed are
long gone and the bear’s lair itself lies buried deep beneath the rubble
of economic collapse.
This
is the time of the vulture, for the vulture feeds neither upon the
pastures of the bull nor the stored up wealth of the bear. The vulture
feeds instead upon the blind ignorance and denial of the ostrich. The
time of the vulture is at hand.
In
1991, those words appeared implausible and far-fetched. Today, they are
eerily prescient. Jim Rogers’ prediction of the collapse of governments
and countries as well as the disappearance of such ubiquitous
institutions as [political] parties, museums or hospitals or universities or financial firms coincides with what I wrote in 2011:
Humanity
is in the midst of a momentous paradigm shift. Governments will fall,
natural disasters will increase and the present world will pass away,
paving the way for the better world that is to come.
DRSchoon, Silver, the Canary in the Gold Mine, April 12, 2011
Today,
humanity is in the midst of a paradigm shift of historic proportions.
It is not just capital markets that will change. Today’s paradigm shift
involves the rebalancing of universal polarities, e.g. yin and yang,
male and female, east and west, light and dark, etc. and while
resistance to the new paradigm is evident, e.g. the election of Donald
Trump, the GOP war on women, the rise of the alt-right/alt-white
movement, i.e. Steve Bannon’s “rootless white males” (his description),
etc; such resistance is as futile as it is dangerous.
The
current dysfunction of the US presidency and the inability of the
two-party system to govern effectively are indications of the widespread
institutional failures that occur during deep change, i.e. paradigm
shifts. We are in such a period today.
The
world is always changing—but not always in the same way. We..find
empirical evidence of distinct “change-regimes” in the past [that] were
often highly dynamic, but stable in their dynamism. Sooner or later,
even the strongest of these change-regimes broke down in moments of what
might be called “deep change”.
In
periods of deep change, understanding lags behind the movement of
events. The world changes faster than our thoughts about it. For
example, in the late 1990s, central bankers in many countries continued
to think of themselves as inflation-fighters in a new era when greater
dangers rose from disinflation or even deflation. Economists in the
1990s (monetarists especially) predicted that large increases in the
money supply would cause inflation to pick up again, as would have
happened a generation ago. But other factors have been more powerful.
In
the United States problems of economic understanding have been
compounded by the effect of economic prosperity. The Japanese in WWII
spoke ruefully of “shoribyo”or “victory disease”. The Greeks called it
hubris and thought it always ended in the intervention of the goddess
Nemesis. That lady makes her appearance when wave-riders begin to
believe that they are wave-makers, at the moment when the great wave
breaks and begins to gather its energy again.
David Hackett Fisher, The Great Wave, Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History, Oxford University Press, 1996
Our
inability to understand deep change is exacerbated by our lack of an
experiential context; and the more radical and profound the change, the
less we are able to understand and/or accept it. Deep change, however,
occurs irrespective of our understanding, acceptance or resistance.
THE CONTEXT OF DEEP CHANGE
My
observations of deep change and history did not begin in Hungary in
2007. It began fifty years ago, in 1967, in San Francisco’s
Haight-Ashbury district. Ignited by a covert CIA mind control experiment
using LSD, see Project MKUltra, the results were not what the CIA intended or expected.
Instead
of LSD being used to breakdown Russian agents, it liberated America’s
youth from the collective straight-jacket of social repression and
cultural control, much to the chagrin of their economic overlords and
cultural controllers.
One
year before, in 1966, I was a student at Hastings College of the Law in
San Francisco studying torts, procedure and criminal law. One year
later, I was living on Haight Street and working at the Family Dog’s
Avalon Ballroom, the storied venue that hosted the Grateful Dead, Janis
Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, Country Joe and the
Fish, etc.
That
I, a hippie, would fifty years later be writing about credit and debt,
the global economy, fiat money and gold was then inconceivable. So, too,
is what may happen to the Earth and all those on it.