Posts by James G. Rickards

Remember how Biden was going to destroy Russia with economic and financial sanctions? Biden actually did impose sanctions and they were the most extreme sanctions ever used. So, how are they working out? Not very well. Here’s a report card: The Russian currency has returned to its pre-war level, even a little stronger after a…

You’ve probably heard the expression noted above. It’s often seen on T-shirts under a skull-and-crossbones; (I know. I bought that exact T-shirt while bar-hopping by boat in the British Virgin Islands). It’s a reference to a cruel pirate captain who says, in effect, he’ll keep beating and flogging his crew until they’re happy. It’s a…

As widely expected, the Federal Reserve raised its target rate by 50 points today, its largest increase in 22 years. Some market analysts were even predicting a 75-basis point hike. But today, Jay Powell reassured markets by claiming that he’s not considering such a move. The stock market soared after Powell’s reassuring announcement. The Dow…

Analysts and authors, myself included, have been warning about the collapse of the dollar as the global reserve currency for years. I described this prospect in my first book, Currency Wars (2011), and in several other books in the years since. This process can take many years. The decline of sterling as the leading global reserve currency…

We’re just past the second anniversary of the major outbreak of COVID in the U.S. There have been five waves of infections since then, vaccine mandates, mask mandates, and one government lie after another. Masks don’t work, the vaccines don’t work to stop the infection and spread (they do reduce severe symptoms in some cases),…

Free speech advocates, conservatives, and many (not all) Twitter users were thrilled with the announcement of a takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. (Full disclosure: I’m active on Twitter @JamesGRickards with over 238,000 followers). The reasons are straightforward. At one level, it’s not particularly interesting if one Silicon Valley oligarch buys…

The War in Ukraine is not quite over; fighting will probably continue until the early summer. After that, the Russian victory will be complete. This does not mean a total Russian conquest of Ukraine; that was never the goal. The goal is to consolidate Luhansk and Donetsk as independent republics, build a land bridge from…

I’ve studied nuclear warfighting doctrines and scenarios since the late 1960s. Most of the art of nuclear warfighting was developed in the 1950s by scholars such as Herman Kahn, Albert Wohlstetter, and Henry Kissinger. Nuclear weapons were developed with such urgency at the end of World War II that it took theoretical reasoning about how…

The articles we highlight for our readers come in all sizes. Some are as long as 4,000 words. Some may be as short as a few sentences. We judge each article not by its length, but by its quality and importance to readers. The greatest speech in history, the Gettysburg Address, was only three minutes…