Posts by James G. Rickards

Ukraine is losing badly to Russia in the ongoing war. The Russians have broken through Ukrainian lines in central Donbass and are now capturing village after village while encircling cities that will soon be captured as well. The Ukrainians are almost out of ammo, are defenseless against Russian air power, and have exhausted their elite…

This past weekend, Donald Trump spoke at the Libertarian Party’s national convention. The media are gloating that the crowd booed Trump at times. But the fact that they gave Trump a cool reception shouldn’t come as a surprise. Many libertarians (though not all) are for open borders. Trump wants a border wall. Libertarians doctrinally support…

Projection is a closely studied psychological and behavioral phenomenon. It involves projecting onto others the bad behavior we are guilty of ourselves. In its simplest form, people who call others names are likely examples of exactly the behavior implied in the name calling. There’s no better example of projection today than the behavior of Joe…

Lawfare is running wild this election cycle. It’s being used against candidates, advisors, members of Congress, judges, and others who in any way support Trump or his policies. But is it really new? This article makes a good case that lawfare is a good way to understand what happened to Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal in…

We all know about the non-stop lawfare attacks on Donald Trump. These began with the Russian collusion hoax orchestrated by Hillary Clinton in 2016, followed by Operation Crossfire Hurricane, run by the FBI and CIA that tied the Trump administration in knots (as intended) from 2017 to 2019. This was followed by two impeachments (2019…

For the past two years, I’ve been warning about the emergence of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), or as I like to call the U.S. version, “Biden Bucks.” Can good old-fashioned American federalism stop them? We’ll consider that possibility today. If you’re a new reader who isn’t familiar with Biden Bucks, or an existing reader…

We all know the usual caveats when it comes to political polling: Polls are just a snapshot, not a forecast. Polls have material margins of error. Polls can change. Polls are skewed by the selection of respondents. Most people don’t even participate in polls. And so on. Most of the criticisms have some validity. Yet,…

This article is longer than those we usually post and somewhat more technical. Still, it’s the best single treatment of the most important economic policies of the coming Trump administration. It’s a profile of Robert Lighthizer, who was U.S. Trade Representative during the first Trump administration. (Lighthizer was also Deputy U.S. Trade Representative during the Reagan administration).…

There’s a lot of anguish in elite policy circles about the situation in Gaza and the war between Israel and Hamas taking place there. That’s strange because the situation can be looked at in a very straightforward way. It’s only the delusions and posturing of the elites that create the anguish. The left-wing activists are yelling,…

We’ve watched the weaponization of the U.S. dollar in the form of sanctions on Russia and others in connection with the war in Ukraine. That has backfired and is leading to a de-dollarization movement that may end in a much weaker dollar and much higher inflation down the road. We’ve also seen the weaponization of…