Posts by James G. Rickards

There’s nothing new about cyber-warfare. It has been going on for decades. Mostly it consists of intercepting electronic signals and recording the information. If signals are encrypted, then sophisticated decryption methods are used. This kind of signals intelligence (SIGINT) is practiced by all major intelligence agencies, but the U.S. is perhaps the best. This work…

We’ve written a lot about the government’s desire to eliminate cash. This is a longstanding struggle. In 1968, the U.S. government eliminated the $500 bill. They were in circulation at the time, and even as a kid, I remember seeing a few of those around. After 1968, the largest bill in circulation was the $100…

We know what happened in the banking meltdown over the last few months. Silvergate Bank, Silicon Valley Bank, and Signature Bank all failed within a matter of days from March 9 through March 12, 2023. Credit Suisse failed just a week later on March 19, and was forced into a hastily arranged shotgun wedding with…

We’ve heard a lot about de-dollarization in recent weeks. That’s a movement of foreign countries and trading partners to move away from using U.S. dollars as a means of payment for exports and imports. Taken further and given enough time, the de-dollarization movement could spread from payment currencies to affect the role of reserve currencies.…

The letters “DEI” stand for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, which is the mantra of corporate and political America today. It sounds good. Who doesn’t like diversity in experience and conversation? Who doesn’t support equity? And what’s wrong with the inclusion of individuals in larger groups and institutions? The problem is that none of these words…

FBI Director Christopher Wray is best understood as the leader of a war on decent Americans. He put the Catholic Church under surveillance because some practitioners prefer the Latin Mass. I grew up with the Latin Mass and loved the poetic cadences. I didn’t understand Latin as a ten-year-old, but the spirit of the liturgy…

Readers are certainly aware of the debt ceiling fight going on in Washington right now between the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and the White House. The U.S. Treasury is not allowed to issue more public debt than is permitted by a statutory ceiling. New debt can be issued to retire maturing debt, but no net…

I met with Mike Morell when he was Deputy Director of the CIA in his office on the 7th floor of Langley Headquarters across the hall from the Director’s office and secure conference room. We were discussing a prototype system I had helped to develop that could use open-source market information to identify anomalous price patterns…

We all know the “Fed pivot narrative” by heart at this point. The narrative is that the Fed has raised interest rates enough already, inflation is coming down on its own with no further help from the Fed, and the Fed should go on “pause” in terms of further rate hikes. Once the pause is…

The 2024 presidential election campaign is now in full swing, like it or not (I don’t, but we’ll take it as it comes). Biden’s team is actively trashing “MAGA Republicans” while Trump’s team is pointing out the economic consequences of Biden’s open borders policy and the stupidity of banning gas stoves. Bring it on. Meanwhile,…