Rickards Calls It Again

Post Reply
User avatar
Wade Hampton III
Posts: 2339
Joined: Fri Oct 18, 2013 10:40 pm
Location: Pontiac, SC

Rickards Calls It Again

Post by Wade Hampton III » Fri Sep 09, 2016 1:39 pm

A promise is a comfort for a fool. ~Proverb

Janet Yellen’s recent speech at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, was eagerly
awaited, and a complete non-event. The headlines were dominated by
breathless accounts of Janet Yellen’s speech at a Federal Reserve
conference in Jackson Hole. The robot scanners read the speech first;
it took a while for humans like me to catch-up. But I’ve since had
the chance to digest it. What was striking about the speech was how
ordinary it was. As I predicted she would, she threw a bone to the
hawks (“the case for an increase in the federal funds rate has
strengthened”) and then threw another bone to the doves (“as
ever, the economic outlook is uncertain, and so monetary policy
is not on a preset course”). She also talked about “data dependence,”
etc., and then went to lunch. The conference at which the speech
was delivered was titled “Designing Resilient Monetary Policy
Frameworks for the Future.” That title at least suggested that
some new thinking and new policies might be on display. They weren’t.
Yellen basically said that interest rate cuts, quantitative easing,
interest on excess reserves and forward guidance were sufficient to
pull the U.S. economy out of a future recession if needed.

In short, Yellen said the Fed’s existing toolkit is adequate,
and is unwilling to consider more radical tools or remedies. If
you like weak growth, money printing and market manipulation,
get ready for more of the same. She took negative rates off
the table (she said they were “impossible”). She also agreed
that “helicopter money” (really fiscal policy supported by Fed
bond purchases to finance deficits) could be useful, but made
it clear that it was up to Congress to implement that and the
Fed would not lead the charge. Investors should ignore Fed noise.
But that doesn’t stop markets from overreacting to every syllable
of Fedspeak. Gold investors just have to live with day-to-day
volatility until the world finally realizes that central banks
are impotent and can safely be ignored in favor of global
macroeconomic fundamentals. Investors should ignore Fed noise.
But that doesn’t stop markets from overreacting to every syllable
of Fedspeak. Does this mean Jackson Hole was a nonevent for gold
investors? Not at all. Yellen was not the only one speaking there.
Another major speech was by an economist named Marvin Goodfriend,
from Carnegie Mellon University. His speech was called The Case
for Unencumbering Interest Rate Policy at the Zero Bound.

On its face, the Goodfriend speech was about negative interest
rates — and just because Yellen doesn’t like them now doesn’t mean
they’re not coming in the future. That negative rate idea has been
around for a few years. But Goodfriend’s focus was to promote
“unencumbered” negative interest rate policy, which means getting
rid of things standing in your way. Specifically, the No. 1 thing
standing in the way of negative rates is cash. If citizens can go
to cash, that makes it difficult to impose negative rates on digital
bank accounts. That’s also not a new insight. The war on cash has
been going on for a while, and prominent economists from Larry
Summers to Ken Rogoff have called for an end to cash. Rogoff did
so just recently, in a front-page article in the “Review” section
of The Wall Street Journal. What is new in all of this are ideas
that Goodfriend presented to the Fed to neutralize the role of cash.
His preferred way is just to “abolish paper currency,” as his paper
outlines in Section 5A. But then Goodfriend laments that “the public
is likely to resist the abolition of paper currency.” He’s right
about that. So Goodfriend comes up with a new concept called the
“flexible market-determined deposit price of paper currency.”
(Seriously, I’m not making this up; you can find it in Section
5B of his paper.) In plain English, this means the “money” in
your bank account and the “money” in your purse or wallet would
be like two different kinds of currency. There would be an exchange
rate between the two, just as there is an exchange rate between
dollars and euros. The Fed could set this exchange rate at whatever
level it wanted and would not be obligated to “defend” that rate
at any particular level. What this means is if you go to the bank
and withdraw $1,000, the bank might only give you $980 in cash
because of the “exchange rate” between your bank account and cash.
Or if you deposit $1,000 in cash, the bank might only credit your
bank account $980 because of the same “exchange rate” between your
cash and the bank account balance. In short, it’s a way to impose
negative interest rates on physical cash.

It’s true that Goodfriend is an academic, not a policymaker. But
Yellen and other Fed bigwigs like William Dudley and Stanley Fischer
were sitting in the audience. In my experience, this is how things
start. Some ivory-tower academic writes about a policy proposal. A
few other ivory-tower academics and beltway think tanks take the
idea and run with it. Then one of those academics gets appointed to
a policy position. The next thing you know, the policy is in effect.
That’s how I saw SDRs coming years in advance, and that’s how I see
the war on cash coming now. That’s why I also see a war on gold...
Curiously, academic policymakers have spent so many years disparaging
gold they seem to have forgotten that gold is money. Once the war on
cash heats up — and certainly when that war is in full swing, out in
the open — people everywhere will turn to gold as an alternative form
of money. And then, once policymakers see the massive shift to gold,
they will launch a war on gold also. So my advice to people
interested in gold is — get it now while you still can. What are
you waiting for?

"Writer's block or creative pathways?"



But it’s not just the government and the banks that are doing
everything they can to make it impossible for you to get your own
money in the form of cash. Now they have a new partner — big
business! It seems that businesses have their own war on cash.
They hate handling it and it’s expensive to transport, store and
insure. More and more, businesses are refusing to take your cash.
This is just another form of discrimination against the poor who
may not have banking accounts or who rely on check cashing services
and live paycheck to paycheck. It’s also aimed at you because it
forces you into a digital system where your money can be hit with
negative interest rates, service fees, account freezes, bail-in
charges and other forms of theft. When pigs are going to be
slaughtered, they are first herded into pens for the convenience
of the slaughterhouse. When savers are going to be slaughtered,
they are herded into digital accounts from which there is no escape.
The war on cash may be a losing battle for you and me, but there is
still shelter in physical gold, silver, land and other hard assets.
The key defensive play is to obtain your gold now, while you still
can, before the war on gold begins. As this realization sinks in,
it will create more demand for physical gold, which is already in
short supply. That demand-driven tail wind for physical gold will
take gold mining stocks much higher. These scenarios are more
disturbing, and the tempo more rapid, than I imagined just a short
time ago. The time to position yourself in gold and gold miners
is now; don’t wait. The war on gold is coming. That’s why I’m so
serious about getting into gold and gold miners now; before it’s too
late. There’s still time, but I strongly urge you to act today.
Things are happening faster than even I imagined.
Attachments
the-real-deal
the-real-deal
eagle.JPG (70.5 KiB) Viewed 8020 times

User avatar
Wade Hampton III
Posts: 2339
Joined: Fri Oct 18, 2013 10:40 pm
Location: Pontiac, SC

Re: Rickards Calls It Again

Post by Wade Hampton III » Sun Sep 18, 2016 5:47 pm

Following a recent keynote presentation at the Sprott Natural
Resource Symposium, James G. Rickards, best-selling author and
advisor to the U.S. Department of Defense and Intelligence
Communities, was kind enough to share a few comments with
the Sprott’s Thoughts publication. It was a fascinating
conversation, as Jim noted the world’s monetary structures
resemble, “Two tectonic plates; there’s the natural tectonic
plate — deflation — and then… the policy plate of inflation
— which is money printing, currency wars, QE, operation twist,
negative interest rates, and zero interest rates…”

“These [tectonic] forces are not only coming together,” he
explained, “[But] they’re getting more powerful and they’re
going to snap… When? No one knows… [But] the effect will be
dramatic.” That tectonic “snap,” Jim described, will have
devastating impact on peoples’ confidence in fiat currencies.
“Confidence will be lost very quickly,” he said. And like a
coiled spring, “You will have your inflation—all at once.”

Even more chilling, was a recent conversation Jim had with
banking & government officials, while at the Pentagon. “I
was down in Washington, DC,” he explained, “[And visited]
the Pentagon. We were doing a closed door war game [with]
maybe 20 people around the table… government officials, CIA,
military, think tank people and bankers, etc. “I was talking
about SDRs… [And] a very senior official in the US Treasury…
sitting one person away from me (there was somebody in between
us), he said, “Don’t you… “

To read Jim Rickard’s full interview comments, follow the link:


User avatar
Wade Hampton III
Posts: 2339
Joined: Fri Oct 18, 2013 10:40 pm
Location: Pontiac, SC

Re: Rickards Calls It Again

Post by Wade Hampton III » Mon Oct 10, 2016 4:55 am

Fire Jim Rickards and hire Harry Dent? There is a third party involved....
here.JPG
here.JPG (58.28 KiB) Viewed 7885 times
For fence-sitters who are still watching Negroball:
right.JPG
right.JPG (33.07 KiB) Viewed 7885 times
:o

User avatar
Wade Hampton III
Posts: 2339
Joined: Fri Oct 18, 2013 10:40 pm
Location: Pontiac, SC

Re: Rickards Calls It Again

Post by Wade Hampton III » Mon Oct 24, 2016 7:59 pm

World War III Is Here!

Jim Rickards posted...

The history of warfare is the history of innovation in weapons. Arrows
replaced spears, guns replaced swords, tanks replaced horses, and so on.
Yet all of those weapons were visible and kinetic. Now we have entered
the age where new digital weapons systems are invisible and non-kinetic,
but they are no less lethal and destructive. This means that when war
breaks out, no one will notice on day one. There will be no bombers
flying overhead and no tanks or artillery on the horizon. Still, systems
will be attacked and may fail one by one. Critical infrastructure will
shut down, power outages will occur, airports will be shut down, stock
exchanges will close, and no one will know why. In fact, this cyber war
has already started. The main combatants are Russia, the U.S., Iran,
China, Syria and North Korea, but others have capabilities as well. The
U.S. imposed sanctions on Russia because of Crimea. Russia struck back
in cyber space, including apparent hacks of political communications
and distribution via Wikileaks. Now the CIA is preparing a clandestine
counterattack. The problem is that none of this has been thought through
in a proper game theoretic context. The risks of unintended escalation
or accidental destruction are high. The only way to preserve wealth in
this environment is with non-digital assets such as gold, silver, fine
art, physical cash, land and natural resources.
fine-art-by-original-artist.JPG
fine-art-by-original-artist.JPG (175.25 KiB) Viewed 7832 times
Those contemplating the death of the dollar imagine a single catalytic
event that will wipe out the dollar’s value overnight. That’s technically
possible but unlikely. What is far more likely is a slow, steady erosion
of value and confidence. By the time the final loss of confidence arrives,
much of the damage will already have been done. The analytic key is to
look for those minor events pointing in the direction of lost confidence
in the dollar. With that information investors can take defensive measures
before it’s too late. Other than gold, the real rival to the dollar is
not the yuan, euro, or ruble — it’s the IMF’s world money, called the
special drawing right or SDR. There has been a lot of news about SDR’s
lately (something I warned about in my 2014 book The Death of Money.
Now the SDR market is being expanded to include private bonds issued
by private (do I smell Jew?) banks, mostly in China. This is all part
of a plan to increase acceptance and liquidity in the SDR market before
the next crisis. At that point the IMF will flood the world with SDRs
and the institutional investing world will be ready to deal in them.
golden-gurl.jpg
golden-gurl.jpg (54.7 KiB) Viewed 7832 times

User avatar
Wade Hampton III
Posts: 2339
Joined: Fri Oct 18, 2013 10:40 pm
Location: Pontiac, SC

Re: Rickards Calls It Again

Post by Wade Hampton III » Thu Oct 27, 2016 6:02 pm

Even Rickards Would Agree!

Jeremy Glenesk, Born in the US, written Oct 11 and posted....

Can a person earn Ducentillion FRN'S in today's money? Who
is the best person to ask about that much of money? No,
this is most definitely not even remotely possible. All
the currency on Earth, in both physical, and digital forms,
is estimated to be around $75 Trillion. A trillion is 10^12.
A ducentillion is 10^603. This number isn’t just more than
all the money on Earth. It’s a number so mind-boggling huge,
to say it’s larger than all the atoms in a trillion universes,
is still horrifically underballing how big a ducentillion is.
You could have humans living on every planet in a quadrillion
universes, and the collective economy of humanity would still
never come remotely close to reaching this number.
Not Enough
Not Enough
big-green.JPG (49.03 KiB) Viewed 7816 times

User avatar
Wade Hampton III
Posts: 2339
Joined: Fri Oct 18, 2013 10:40 pm
Location: Pontiac, SC

Re: Rickards Calls It Again

Post by Wade Hampton III » Mon Oct 31, 2016 4:19 pm

Here’s All The Money On Earth!

Jim Rickards comments...

The author of the previous wants to know, “How much money there
is in the world?” It’s a great question. But the author goes on
to show that he has no idea what money is. That’s OK; most people
don’t know what it is. In fact, there are so many definitions of
“money” floating around, (thanks to corrupt bankers and professors
with obsolete theories) that it’s not a stretch to say that society
has lost its concept of “money.” For example, the author says that
“purists” would count only cash, coins and bank accounts as money.
Actually, I’m a purist and I would not count bank accounts — those
are unsecured liabilities of fragile financial institutions and
might not be available when you need them for transactions. The
author also counts gold as part of a “broader” definition, whereas,
I would include gold in the primary definition. From there, things
get even more attenuated. The author counts derivatives, real estate,
debt and stocks as forms of “money” even though they are nothing
of the sort. Despite this, the article and the infographic that
go with it are still useful for visualizing just how much supposed
wealth there is in the world supported by a thin sliver of real
money. Here’s the best way to use this infographic: Imagine if
all the investors in the world holding stocks, derivatives, bank
accounts and real estate all decided on the same day they wanted
real money? It’s easy to see there’s not nearly enough of the real
stuff to go around. Now, what would happen to the prices of all
of those other assets if investors tried to sell them to get real
money? That’s not a pretty picture. And imagine governments printing
more money to make up the difference. That’s not a pretty picture
either. So despite my disagreements with this author, I recommend
her article because it shows you just how bad things will be in a
year or so when there’s another financial panic and rush to liquidity
as there was in 1998 and 2008. The difference is the next one will
be much worse. You’ll see over $1 quadrillion of claims trying to
grab about $13 trillion of real money; that’s over $75 of claims
for every $1 of real money. In other words, the world is leveraged
75-to-1. Make sure you’ve got some gold so you have real money when
the whole world is screaming for it!
very-much.png
very-much.png (350.69 KiB) Viewed 7782 times

User avatar
Wade Hampton III
Posts: 2339
Joined: Fri Oct 18, 2013 10:40 pm
Location: Pontiac, SC

Re: Rickards Calls It Again

Post by Wade Hampton III » Wed Dec 28, 2016 4:09 pm

Jim Rickards posted on Wednesday, 28 Dec 2016 09:01 AM....

Author James Rickards says President-elect Donald Trump
will be helpless to stop the next financial crisis. “A
financial crisis is certainly coming. What is most
important is that the crisis is coming and the time
to prepare is now. It could happen in 2018, 2019, or
it could happen tomorrow. The conditions for collapse
are all in place,” he told MarketWatch. “Likely triggers
could include a major bank failure, a failure to deliver
physical gold, a war, a natural disaster, a cyber–financial
attack and many other events. The trigger does not matter,"
he said. "The exact timing does not matter. What matters is
that the crisis is inevitable and coming soon. Investors
need to prepare,” said Rickards, who was the principal
negotiator of the 1998 bailout of Long-Term Capital
Management as the hedge fund’s general counsel.

“Since we have vastly increased the scale of the financial
system since 2008, with larger banks, greater concentration
of banking assets in fewer institutions, larger derivatives
positions, and $70 trillion of new debt, we should expect
the next crisis to be much worse than the last. The next
crisis will be of unprecedented scale and damage,” he said.
He argues that rather than pumping the financial system with
liquidity, as happened in 2008, “elites” will freeze the
financial plumbing until the crisis has passed, MarketWatch
explained. That means banks will close, as will exchanges.
Money-market funds will be inaccessible. Freezing customer
funds in bank accounts is what happened in Cyprus is 2012
and Greece in 2015, he says. In the U.S., the Securities
and Exchange Commission adopted a rule in 2014 that lets
money-market funds suspend redemption's. Rickards says the
U.S. is still under the state of emergency declared by
President George W. Bush days after the Sept. 11, 2001,
terrorist (aka Larry Silverstein) attacks and renewed
annually since then. Rickards argues that such measures
can be applied in any emergency, “including money riots
in the event of a financial system breakdown and ice-nine
asset freeze.”
cyprus 2012.jpg
cyprus 2012.jpg (53.31 KiB) Viewed 7399 times
He said the Trump administration is focusing on macroeconomic
policy relating to taxes, spending and regulation. "That’s
fine, but it does not address the issue of systemic risk,
which exists separately from normal business-cycle and credit-
cycle considerations,” he said. “The policies to avoid a
systemic catastrophe in the financial system that I would
recommend to the Trump administration include reinstatement
of Glass-Steagall, breaking up big banks and banning derivatives.
The odds of any of these policies becoming law are close to
zero because of the power of bank lobbyists," he explained.
"These policies could make a huge difference but are unlikely
to happen; therefore my systemic-risk forecast is still
intact,” he said. He said victims of the next financial disaster
will fall into two groups. “The first are those who hold wealth
in digital form, such as stocks, bonds, money-market funds and
bank accounts. This type of wealth is the easiest to freeze in
a panic. You will not be able to access this wealth, except
perhaps in very small amounts for gas and groceries, in the
next panic," he said.
greece 2015.jpg
greece 2015.jpg (34.13 KiB) Viewed 7399 times
"The solution is to have hard assets outside the digital system
such as gold, silver, fine art, land and private equity where
you rely on written contracts and not digital records,” he said.
“The second group are those who rely on fixed-income returns
such as life insurance, annuities, retirement accounts, social
security and bank interest. These income streams are likely to
lose value, since governments will have to resort to inflation
to deal with the overwhelming mountain of debt collapsing upon
them. The solution to this is to allocate 10% of your investible
assets to physical gold or silver. That will be your inflation
insurance when the time comes.” Trump certainly may have his work
cut out for himself. Every Republican president since World War II
has been in power during at least one recession, Bloomberg reported.

Bloomberg explained "with the economic expansion soon to become
the third-longest on record, the risk of a contraction occurring
during his time in office can’t be cavalierly dismissed. “Republican
presidents seemingly can't do without” recessions, Joachim Fels,
global economic adviser for Pacific Investment Management Co.,
wrote in a blog post dated Dec. 12. And it seems that the party
is the difference. "The U.S. economy has performed better when
the president of the United States is a Democrat rather than a
Republican," Princeton University professors Alan Blinder and
Mark Watson wrote in a paper published in the American Economic
Review this year. The difference isn't due to more expansionary
fiscal and monetary policies under Democrats, according to Blinder,
who served in the Clinton White House, and Watson. Instead it
appears to stem from less costly oil shocks, a more favorable
international environment, productivity-boosting technological
advances and perhaps more optimistic consumers, they wrote. Some
of those disparities may be down to better policies, but luck
also played a role.
USofA (when).jpg
USofA (when).jpg (39.7 KiB) Viewed 7399 times
Wade says, "Equally germaine to this post is a passage from Rickards'
new book, "The Road To Ruin;" page 229, paragraph 2:"

A sensible solution to this political stasis begins by abolishing
the corporate income tax, raising the minimum wage, and empowering
workers through a version of German codetermination law that
places worker representatives on corporate boards. The left (Jews)
would howl about corporate tax cuts, the right (Christian con-
servates) would condemn codetermination, and both would be seen
for the ideologues they are. Smart policy - helping capital AND
helping workers - is the way forward for the US.

User avatar
Wade Hampton III
Posts: 2339
Joined: Fri Oct 18, 2013 10:40 pm
Location: Pontiac, SC

Re: Rickards Calls It Again

Post by Wade Hampton III » Tue Jan 03, 2017 5:24 pm

Six Million "Gassed" Yids - And No One Cares!

The Death of the U.S. Dollar Commenced on Sept 30... Now, the expansion
of this "New World Money Order" may complete its destruction...(and the
Levant Yids will be out in the cold with millions of pissed Arabs! Kewel!)

It all began 12 months ago, when the IMF voted to make the Chinese yuan
a reserve currency, by adding it to its basket of Special Drawing Rights
(SDRs).

Wade says "Also interesting to note - there are NO 'holohoax' museums in
Red China! They could not give a lesser damn about six million 'gassed'
Yids...or six for that matter!"

Now, this seismic change is official: As of September 30, 2016, the Yuan
was officially added to the SDR. Years from now, we may recognize this
date as "the day the dollar died" – when SDRs replaced the USD as the
world's sole reserve currency. Jim Rickards believes that this is a
"monetary earthquake", in part because nations no longer have to deal
in dollars. Instead, they can sell their trillions of reserves and FLOOD
the market with unwanted greenbacks. Rickards adds that the IMF may expand
the role of SDRs, thus making "China an integral part of the new world
money order." In other words, this new SDR is about to get stronger...
and the USD is about to get MUCH weaker. In short, a huge dollar
devaluation is on the horizon!
Home Of SDRs
Home Of SDRs
IMF.jpg (42.49 KiB) Viewed 7337 times

User avatar
Wade Hampton III
Posts: 2339
Joined: Fri Oct 18, 2013 10:40 pm
Location: Pontiac, SC

Re: Rickards Calls It Again

Post by Wade Hampton III » Mon Jan 09, 2017 6:15 pm

Miners Running Out!

We all learned about “supply and demand” in our first week of economics
class. When the price of something rises because of demand, more supply
is rushed to the market and the price stabilizes. The demand is satisfied
at a new equilibrium. Like most things we’re taught in economics class,
this model is badly flawed especially when it comes to gold. That’s
because gold has both a physical market (actual gold bullion), and a
much larger synthetic market (paper gold such as futures and ETFs).
Gold prices are dominated in the short-run by the synthetic paper gold
market; physical supply is mostly irrelevant. Players on the physical
side are price takers, not price makers. This has been true for years,
but now the tables may be turning. I’ve received first-hand reports of
shortages of physical gold from refiners. Vault operators have told me
physical gold holders are taking gold out of banks and putting it into
private vaults where it is no longer available to prop up the paper market.
In this article, you’ll see that now even the miners are saying they’re
running out of gold. Due to the price decline since 2011, new mines are
not opening, output from existing mines is declining, old mines are being
shut-in, capex is being cut, and reserves are being reduced. We’re heading
for a crack-up where physical shortages will cause delivery failures and
ignite panic buying of physical gold that even the paper market can’t contain.
This article explains why. The paper market is doing physical buyers a favor
by keeping the price artificially low, making the entry point attractive.
A gold price super-spike is coming!
Empty!
Empty!
oregon-champion-mine.jpg (380.48 KiB) Viewed 7244 times
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... aining-why

User avatar
Wade Hampton III
Posts: 2339
Joined: Fri Oct 18, 2013 10:40 pm
Location: Pontiac, SC

Re: Rickards Calls It Again

Post by Wade Hampton III » Mon Jan 16, 2017 3:26 pm

Definition Resolution: Jim Rickards posted...

The U.S. has been in a depression since 2007. That sounds strange because
the technical recession ended in June 2009 and the economy has been expanding
steadily since then. How can an expansion be a depression? The answer is in
the definition of depression. The term “depression” does not mean continual
negative growth; it refers to persistent growth below trend or below potential.
It is this depressed growth (with or without technical recessions along the
way) that best defines economic depression. If trend growth or potential growth
is 3–5% per year and actual growth is about 2% for a sustained time, then that’s
depressed growth or a depression. Japan has been in a depression since 1989,
even longer than the U.S. The difference between actual growth and potential
growth, the “output gap” may only be 1.5% per year. But at that rate, the depressed
economy will have grown only half as much as the normal economy in 45 years,
about the time it takes to go from college to retirement. That’s a radically
different result than normal growth. Lost output will be in the tens of trillions
of dollars and will never be recovered. What’s causing the depression? There
are many causes, including lack of investment, high taxes, structural impediments,
excessive debt and overregulation. Click here to see a new cause that has been
identified — demographics:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... -s-economy

The U.S. population is not growing. Since economic growth is simply the sum of
workers and productivity, the lack of population growth means fewer workers and,
therefore, less economic growth. Productivity is declining, also making the situation
worse. The last time this happened to such an extent in the U.S. was during the
Great Depression of 1929–1940. That depression lasted 11 years and was only ended
by increased production related to World War II. The current depression has lasted
almost eight years. Let’s hope it doesn’t take another war to get us out of it.
bloomberg.jpg
bloomberg.jpg (260.13 KiB) Viewed 7133 times
Wade says "Let us hope that Trump doesn't play 'follow my leader' to solve this
mess by invading another Middle Eastern country and spread Jewish 'freedom and
democracy' to those unfortunates!"

Post Reply