Posts by James G. Rickards

We’ve written extensively about the fact that financial crises never happen in one shot. They typically begin with one or two institutions or countries in a certain market segment. Then the crisis grows through financial contagion, which works exactly like a real pandemic. The panic virus spreads from bank to bank in the same way…

There’s an interesting and possibly historic case now pending in the Supreme Court, as described in this article. The case involves a government agency called the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) set up by Senator Elizabeth Warren with congressional approval in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis. The CFPB is just another bureaucracy putting…

The censorship that we all endured from 2020 to 2022 during the pandemic was despicable in two respects. In the first place, information providers like Google, Facebook and YouTube should be trying to earn our trust with accurate and balanced information. Instead, they abused that trust by shutting down debate, deplatforming critics and analysts with…

Trump came into Washington in 2017, promising to “drain the swamp.” He failed. The fault was partly his and partly the extent to which swamp creatures have had 140 years to embed themselves in the mud. This article does a good job of explaining how and why. The article also explains how Joe Biden’s staff is…

We’ve written for years about what a fraud the government response to COVID was. Of course, it was a serious disease and millions died from it. It’s also the case that millions die from the flu and other diseases every year. The fact that there’s a public health crisis doesn’t mean that the government got…

Our regular readers are well-versed in the technical features and dangers of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), which we call Biden Bucks. CBDCs are a form of money issued by central banks or the Treasury in digital-only form. It’s true that most payments today – credit cards, direct deposit, ATMs, online shopping, etc. – are…

Inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI), hit a high of 9.1% (annualized) in June 2022. Since then, the Fed made steady progress in reducing inflation until it was down to 3.0% in June 2023. Economists and Fed fans were ready to pop the champagne corks to celebrate the Fed’s victory against inflation.…

You all know about the obsessive, even demented, persecution of Donald Trump since he announced he was running for president in 2015. First came the Russia collusion hoax and the Steele dossier (a fraud paid for by Hillary Clinton). Then came the Mueller Report, which dominated headlines for two years but, in the end, exonerated…

Readers know that the financial system is in a slow-motion meltdown. Commercial real estate values are crashing, and the associated loans are going into default. Credit cards are maxed out and borrowers are being punished with 20% or even 30% interest rates (that will double the outstanding balance in three years if you don’t pay…

Saying the CIA lied about something is redundant. The CIA lies all the time. It’s what they do. Denial and deception are among the main tasks of any intelligence agency. When you establish an intelligence community, you should expect nothing less. Still, the National Security Act of 1947 (which created the CIA) made it explicit…