Posts by James G. Rickards

The fact that Antony Blinken is one of the worst secretaries of state in U.S. history is well-known by now. He was a chief promoter of both the humiliating retreat from Afghanistan in 2021 and the pointless War in Ukraine, which the U.S. side is now losing badly. There was certainly a case for reducing…

It’s a mistake to believe that the banking crisis that began on March 10, 2023, with the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank is over. In response to a cascade of bank failures from March to May, regulators took extraordinary and unprecedented actions. The Federal Reserve opened a facility that makes loans against U.S. Treasury securities…

The X-Date is the day the U.S. Treasury goes broke. It’s not the same as the debt ceiling, but it is a consequence of the failure of Congress to raise the debt ceiling. Right now, the Treasury is at the debt ceiling. That means it has no legal authority to issue net new debt. It…

Toward the end of the Obama administration and during the Trump administration, the U.S. fought a largely successful financial and economic war against Iran. The war had to do with Iran’s efforts to enrich uranium to a level that could be used to produce nuclear weapons to destroy Israel. Sanctions included freezing Iranian bank accounts,…

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) on March 10, 2023, can be understood on three levels. At the simplest level, the bank held over $100 billion in U.S. Treasury securities at a time when interest rates were rising. The Federal Reserve began its campaign of interest rate hikes in March 2022, but it warned…

The phrase “X-Date” may remind readers of the TV drama X-Files or the superhero X-Men. It actually refers to the date when the U.S. Treasury goes broke. Perhaps Special Agents Mulder and Scully could help Janet Yellen solve her financial problems. More likely, the Treasury will need help from Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Iceman, and the…

Living through three years of the pandemic in 2020, 2021, and 2022 was also a matter of living through three years of lies. The U.S. government, especially the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), offered a steady stream of lies. They lied about the efficacy of the vaccines, which are not even true vaccines and don’t…

The list of abuses by Pfizer and Moderna over the course of the recent pandemic is long and sickening. It begins with the fact that the so-called mRNA “vaccines” are not really vaccines; they’re experimental gene modification treatments. They were rushed through the development process, urged on by Jared Kushner and the Trump White House.…

In April 2022, I taught a seminar in financial warfare at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. My class consisted of 12 hand-picked mid-career military officers and civilians from the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, CIA, and State Department being trained in advanced strategic arts to prepare them for future roles at the…

We’ve written extensively about monetary policy and the role of the Federal Reserve. Between 2008 and 2014, the Fed increased the base money supply from $800 billion to $4.6 trillion. After reducing that amount to $3.6 trillion between 2014 and 2019, the money supply exploded again to almost $8 trillion during the COVID pandemic panic…