James Rickards Quotes

“A gold standard is the ideal monetary system for those who create wealth through ingenuity, entrepreneurship, and hard work. Gold standards are disfavored by those who do not create wealth but instead seek to extract wealth from others through inflation, inside information, and market manipulation.”

“Developed economies are engaged in a long-term global effort to force all savers into digital accounts at one of a small number of megabanks. This process resembles herding pigs into a pen before they are slaughtered. Savers will get slaughtered with negative interest rates, fees, taxes, confiscation and account freezes when the time comes.”

“Money in the bank is not money – it is an unsecured liability of an occasional insolvent financial institution.”

“People say there's not enough gold to support a gold standard. That's nonsense. There's always enough gold, it's just a question of price.”

“What does reflect reality very well is complexity theory, which comes from physics. I'm the one pioneering the idea of bringing it to capital markets. When you look at capital markets through the lens of complexity theory, you ask what's the scale of the system. Scale is a fancy word for size. What measures are you using? If you look at total debt, the concentration of assets in the five largest banks, what percentage of the total assets of the five largest banks are interconnected? What you see is a very densely connected, fragile system that could collapse at any moment.”

“When you own gold you're fighting every central bank in the world. That's because gold is a currency that competes with government currencies and has a powerful influence on interest rates and the price of government bonds. And that's why central banks long have tried to suppress the price of gold. Gold is the ticket out of the central banking system, the escape from coercive central bank and government power.”

“Prospects for a reduction in income inequality and improvement in the relative well-being of the middle class are dismal absent the appearance of one of these violent four horsemen in the form of warfare, revolution, plague, or systemic collapse. No one is rooting for those outcomes, yet no one should expect a reduction in income inequality without them.”

“The global monetary reset is coming. What's missing is leadership and foresight.”

“The stock market continued performing as if the trade war had never happened.”

“A country running deficits under the gold exchange standard could find itself like a tenant whose landlord does not collect rent payments for a year and then suddenly demands immediate payment of twelve months’ back rent. Some tenants would have saved for the inevitable rainy day, but many others would not be able to resist the easy credit and would find themselves short of funds and facing eviction.”

“A prohibition on the hoarding or possession of gold was integral to the plan to devalue the dollar against gold and get people spending again. Against this background, FDR issued Executive Order 6102 on April 5, 1933, one of the most extraordinary executive orders in U.S. history. The blunt language over the signature of Franklin Delano Roosevelt speaks for itself:

I, Franklin D. Roosevelt declare that a national emergency still continues to exist and do hereby prohibit the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the United States by individuals, partnerships, associations and corporations. All persons are hereby required to deliver, on or before May 1, 1933, to a Federal reserve bank or to any member of the Federal Reserve System all gold coin, gold bullion and gold certificates now owned by them. Whoever wilfully violates any provision of this Executive Order may be fined not more than $10,000 or may be imprisoned for not more than ten years.

The people of the United States were being ordered to surrender their gold to the government and were offered paper money at the exchange rate of $20.67 per ounce. Some relatively minor exceptions were made for dentists, jewellers and others who made 'legitimate and customary' use of gold in their industry or art. Citizens were allowed to keep $100 worth of gold, about five ounces at 1933 prices, and gold in the form of rare coins. The $10,000 fine proposed in 1933 for those who continued to hoard gold in violation of the president’s order is equivalent to over $165,000 in today’s money, an extraordinarily large statutory fine.”

“America has, in fact, run trade deficits large enough to wipe out its gold hoard under the old rules of the game. Still, the idea of the gold standard was not to deplete nations of gold, but rather to force them to get their financial house in order long before the gold disappeared. In the absence of a gold standard and the real-time adjustments it causes, the American people seem unaware of how badly U.S. finances have actually deteriorated.”

“From its creation in 1913, the most important Fed mandate has been to maintain the purchasing power of the dollar; however, since 1913 the dollar has lost over 95 percent of its value. Put differently, it takes twenty dollars today to buy what one dollar would buy in 1913.”

“Higher prices are the symptom, not the cause, of currency collapse.”

“Hyperinflation produces fairly predictable sets of winners and losers and prompts certain behaviors and therefore can be used politically to rearrange social and economic relations among debtors, creditors, labor and capital, while gold is kept available to clean up the wreckage if necessary.”

“In 1922, the inflation turned to hyperinflation as the Reichsbank gave up trying to control the situation and printed money frantically to meet the demands of union and government workers. A single U.S. dollar became so valuable that American visitors could not spend it because merchants could not locate the millions of marks needed to make change. Diners offered to pay for meals in advance because the price would be vastly higher by the time they finished eating.”

“It is one thing when prices drift downward over time due to innovation, scalability or other efficiencies. This might be considered 'good' deflation and is familiar to any contemporary consumer who has seen prices of computers or wide-screen TVs fall year after year. It is another matter when prices are forced down by unnecessary monetary contraction, credit constraints, deleveraging, business failures, bankruptcies and mass unemployment. This may be considered 'bad' deflation. This bad deflation was exactly what was required in order to return the most important currencies to their prewar parity with gold.”

“On the whole, it is difficult to think of another government agency that has failed more consistently on more of its key missions than the Fed.”

“Printing dollars at home means higher inflation in China, higher food prices in Egypt and stock bubbles in Brazil. Printing money means that U.S. debt is devalued so foreign creditors get paid back in cheaper dollars. The devaluation means higher unemployment in developing economies as their exports become more expensive for Americans. The resulting inflation also means higher prices for inputs needed in developing economies like copper, corn, oil and wheat. Foreign countries have begun to fight back against U.S.-caused inflation through subsidies, tariffs and capital controls; the currency war is expanding fast.”

“Regulators and bankers were using the wrong tools and the wrong metrics. Unfortunately, they still are.”

“University biologists working with infectious viruses have airtight facilities to ensure that the objects of their study do not escape from the laboratory and damage the population at large. Unfortunately, no such safeguards are imposed on economics departments.”

“When the public realizes that it is being deceived, a feedback loop is created in which trust is broken and even the truth, if it can be found, is no longer believed. The United States is dangerously close to that point.”

“Debt used to finance government spending is acceptable when three conditions are met: the benefits of the spending must be greater than the costs, the government spending must be directed at projects the private sector cannot do on its own, and the overall debt level must be sustainable.”

“Deflation increases the real value of government debt, making it harder to repay. If deflation is not reversed, there will be an outright default on the national debt, rather than the less traumatic outcome of default-by-inflation.”

“Derivatives serve practically no purpose except to enrich bankers through opaque pricing and to deceive investors through off-the-balance-sheet accounting.”

“Economists’ failure to embrace the new science of complexity goes some way toward explaining why the market collapses in 1987, 1998, 2000, and 2008 were both unexpected and more severe than experts believed possible.”

“Gold and silver have, uninterruptedly to this day, continued to be the universal currency of the commercial and civilized world.”

“Gold offers adversaries significant benefits in a world of U.S.-imposed dollar-based sanctions. Gold is physical, not digital, so it cannot be hacked or frozen. Gold is easy to transport by air to settle the balance of payments or other transactions between nations. Gold flows cannot be interdicted at SWIFT or FedWire. Gold is fungible and nontraceable (it is an element, atomic number 79), so its provenance cannot be ascertained. The United States is unprepared for this.”

“If an economy has a stagnant labor force operating at a constant level of productivity, it will have constant output but no growth. The main drivers of labor force expansion are demographics and education, while the main drivers of productivity are capital and technology. Without those factor inputs, an economy cannot expand. But when those factor inputs are available in abundance, rapid growth is well within reach.”

“In markets today, the dead hands of the academic and rentier have replaced the invisible hand of the merchant or the entrepreneur.”