Loading ...You Can See This Collapse Coming A Mile Away-James Rickards
By Greg Hunter On October 12, 2014 In Market Analysis 4 Comments
Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com (Early Sunday Release)
Best-selling author and financial expert James Rickards contends a big financial crash is locked in. Rickards says, “Everyone is waiting for some blunder down the road, and the point I try to make is the blunders have already been made. The blunders have already been built into the system. You can see this collapse coming a mile away. . . . Using science, we can’t say very much about the timing, but we can say a lot about the magnitude. This will be the greatest financial collapse in history. I am quite sure about that, but I am not sure about the timing. . . . People think I can call them up at 3 o’clock in the afternoon and tell them tomorrow’s that day, sell your stocks and buy some gold. I can’t do that. I don’t know what day it will be. If we get to that point, it would be too late to act. So, the time to act is now.” Rickards goes on to say, “On top of the threats from Ebola, the Islamic State, the normal currency wars and the normal depression the world is in, there is financial war going on right now. We put sanctions on Russia. Do you think Russia is going to sit there and take it? Russia is responding asymmetrically through cyber warfare.”
Rickards says in the coming crash, it is going to be very difficult to turn your assets into spendable cash. Rickards explains, “People think everything is money. People think your stocks are money because you can sell them and get the cash in your account in a couple of days. People think your money market funds are money because you can call your broker and get the cash in your bank account tomorrow. You think your house is money because you can take a second mortgage or sell your house. What you find out in a panic is all those things are not money. You are locked in, locked down and the only thing that is money is money. That would be cash, if you happen to have it or gold or silver in physical form, not paper gold. So, people don’t understand what money really is until everyone wants their money back. That’s when you find out only a small number of things are actually money.”
On the Islamic State or caliphate, Rickards says, “There is nothing new about this. Islam has been establishing caliphates since the seventh century A.D. This is just the latest in a long string; it’s part of their plan for global domination. Their theology is you convert to Islam . . . or they behead you. They kill you. What they are doing is according to their scripts. None of it comes as a surprise. What is a surprise is how unprepared the United States was for the emergence of something like the Islamic State and the weakness of our response.” Can things like beheadings in America take down the markets? Rickards says, “That’s kind of street violence, and that by itself will terrorize people, but that won’t take down the markets. What would take down the markets is some type of bomb or radiological device and other kinds of asymmetric warfare on a large scale. That’s probably coming. The other thing is disruption to the flow of oil. The United States does not get its oil from the Middle East . . . but it’s a world market and a world price. . . . If the Islamic State spreads and disrupts the flow of oil . . . that would have an enormous impact upon markets. You’ve seen the price of oil drop like a stone lately because the world is in depression and there are deflationary fears, but that could turn around on a geopolitical vector.”
When asked if a crash was a mathematical certainty, Rickards said, “It is a mathematical certainty, but I can take it further . . . what you don’t hear is this will be exponentially larger than any financial panic in the past. . . . The next time, the Fed is going to be in trouble. They are already insolvent on a mark-to-market basis. Each bailout gets much bigger than the one before. The Fed has a 10 foot seawall, and they are going to get hit with a 50 foot tsunami.”