Posts by James G. Rickards

This is not a note on Donald Trump. You can like him or not, vote for him or not, that’s up to you. This is a note on a not-so-rare disease called Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). If TDS is not formally recognized in the public health literature yet, it will be someday; it’s a serious…

After 18 months of political arm wrestling inside the Democratic Party, it seems the Democrats finally have enough votes to pass their long-awaited Build Back Better plan (although they dropped the name Build Back Better months ago; it was one of the worst political PR ploys ever). The Democrats can do what they want in…

If you’re still working on the assumption that China is a financial and economic juggernaut destined to pass the U.S. in total output and eventually rule the world, it’s time to put those ideas aside. None of that is true. To begin, China is entering the greatest demographic collapse in the history of the world,…

I began studying complexity theory as a consequence of my involvement with Long Term Capital Management, LTCM, the hedge fund that collapsed in 1998 after derivatives trading strategies went catastrophically wrong. After the collapse and subsequent rescue, I chatted with one of the LTCM partners who ran the firm about what went wrong. I was…

The name “Texas” is practically synonymous with energy. The Texas oil boom started in 1901 with the Lucas gusher at Spindletop. Texas dominated U.S. oil production by the 1940s. The City of Houston boomed on the back of oil exploration, production and refining. In more recent years, Texas oil production has been matched by its…

China has the world’s largest holdings of reserve assets, about $3 trillion. Included in that reserve position is what was the world’s largest portfolio of U.S. Treasury securities (outside of the Federal Reserve balance sheet and U.S. government retirement and benefit funds), of about $1 trillion. However, as recently as 2014, that U.S. Treasury note…

When binary outcomes are presented to decision-makers, stupid people should be right about half the time. That’s how often a trained chimpanzee would be right if you let it choose heads or tails. The chimp would have no idea what the probabilities or degree distributions were, but it would be right about half the time…

A funny thing happened on the way to crypto-currency nirvana. A huge financial infrastructure grew up around key cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. This infrastructure resembled what exists on Wall Street. There were exchanges, custodians, de facto banks that would take crypto deposits and make crypto loans, crypto news channels, crypto hedge funds, ETFs, futures, options,…

Remember Deborah Birx? She was the scientist and White House spokesperson on COVID at the height of the pandemic in the spring and summer of 2020. Perhaps she’s best remembered for the collection of Hermes scarves she wore during her daily TV briefings from the White House press room. She was second only to Dr.…