Jim Rickards on Oil Prices Collapse & Russian Currency Crisis

European Central Bank QE and What It Means for Gold

Jim Rickards discusses the recent QE program unleashed by the European Central bank and the effects it is going to have on the global markets.

- Source, Russia Today

The Fed Is Trying to Import Inflation

The Market Collapse Investors Won’t Expect

The forces of inflation and deflation that we’ve talked about take a while to play out, but this market collapse could happen very suddenly and catch investors completely unaware.

Now, the thing is, we’ve come within hours or days of total global financial gridlock, total market collapse in the last 14 years. Everyone knows about 2008. People have a sense of that.

But it also happened in 1998 as a result of the Russia default and the collapse of hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management. At the time, I was involved with Long- Term Capital Management…I actually negotiated that bailout. I was in the room. I saw the $4 billion moved into our bank accounts to prop up the balance sheet. The money came from Wall Street. But there was a lot of give and take that almost didn’t happen and we were literally hours away from markets collapsing. We muddled through that. We kind of found the runways and got through.

But, people learned all the wrong lessons. Instead of banning derivatives and backing away from overleverage and putting a lid on banks, public policy did the opposite. We repealed Glass-Steagall, which allowed banks to act like hedge funds; we repealed Schwab’s regulation, which meant that you could do derivatives on anything. We repealed or increased broker dealer leverage from 15 to 1 to 30 to 1. The SCC did that in 2006 and the Boswell three capital requirements to allow greater bank leverage.

So, we said, game’s on. You can do whatever you want with as much leverage as you want and as much opaqueness as you want because of the use of derivatives. Is it any surprise that in 2008 we had another market collapse? Now, Bear Stearns goes down, Fannie goes down, Freddie goes down, Lehman goes down, AIG goes down – one by one the dominos were falling. We were days away.

Morgan Stanley would have been next, Goldman right behind it and then Citi then Bank of America and then J.P. Morgan — so all the dominos were falling. The government dropped a steel curtain between two of the dominos. They stopped it after Lehman and AIG so Morgan Stanley didn’t fall, but Morgan Stanley was days away from collapse.

- Source, Jim Rickards, via The Daily Reckoning

Jim Rickards Reveals What He Does Differently

James Rickards, best-selling author of Currency Wars, spoke with Hedgeye CEO Keith McCullough about how he finds the truth, the continuation of the currency wars, what the Fed gets wrong and much more in this exclusive interview.

Jim’s first appearance on Hedgeye TV in May 2014 was met with wide acclaim, and he did not disappoint in his return to Stamford for Hedgeye’s first ever,live “Market Marathon”held in January. After 45 minutes of raw & unfiltered commentary on markets and the people that move them, Rickards and McCullough turned it over to the viewers, offering an extended viewer Q&A session powered by user-submitted questions.

A New Era for Credit Suisse

Investors NEED to be Prepared NOW

We’re out there making the San Andreas Fault bigger so we can have even bigger earthquakes in the future. That’s exactly what’s going on.

So, I would say two things about the monetary collapse. No. 1, it could happen very suddenly — and likely it will — and we won’t see it coming, so investors need to prepare now.

Investors almost say to me, ‘You know, Jim, call me up at 3:30 the day before it happens and I’ll sell my stocks and buy some gold.’

First of all, it doesn’t work that way for the reasons I just explained, but secondly, you might not be able to get the gold and that’s very important to understand. When a buying panic breaks out, you know, and the price starts gapping up, not $10.00, $20.00 an ounce per day, but $100.00 an ounce then $200.00 an ounce and then all of sudden, it’s like up $1,000.00 an ounce and people say oh, I got to get some gold. You won’t be able to get it. The big guys will get it, you know, the sovereign wealth funds, the central banks, the billionaires, the multibillion-dollar hedge funds, they’ll be able to get it, but everyday investors won’t be able to get it.

You’ll find that the mint stops shipping it. That your local dealer has run out so there’ll still be a price somewhere. You’ll be able to watch the price on television, but you won’t actually be able to get the gold. It’ll be too late.

How to Survive the Monetary Collapse

Those are logical questions, but the event that triggers the collapse doesn’t matter — and here’s what I mean by that.

Imagine you’re on a mountainside and there’s snow building up and it’s still snowing and you’ve got some avalanche danger… it’s windswept, it’s unstable. You’re watching the snowpack, and if you’re an expert, you know it’s going to collapse and it could kill some skiers or wipe out the village.

Well, here comes a snowflake, it disturbs a few other snowflakes, that spreads, it starts to shoot, it starts to slide, it gets momentum, it comes loose and the whole mountain comes down and buries the village.

Who do you blame? Do you blame the snowflake or do you blame the unstable pack of snow?

I say the snowflake’s irrelevant. If it wasn’t that one, it could have been the one before or the one after or the one tomorrow.

The same goes for the collapse of the monetary system. It’s the instability of the financial system as a whole. So, when I think about the risks, I don’t focus so much on the snowflake, it could be a lot of things that trigger the event. It could be a failure to deliver physical gold because gold’s getting scarce. It could be a Lehman type of collapse of a financial firm or another MF Global. It could be a prominent suicide. It could be a natural disaster.

It could be a lot of things, but my point is, it doesn’t matter. It will be something that causes the system to collapse. What matters is that the monetary system is so unstable. The blunders have already been made. It’s not as if we’re going to do some bad things that’s going to create risks. The risk is already there. It’s embedded. We’re just waiting for that catalyst.

So as to what will cause the global monetary system collapse, my answer is it could be a lot of things, but it doesn’t matter. What matters — and what investors need to be concerned about — is the instability is already baked in the pie.

Now, as to when this will happen, it will be sooner than later. By that I mean three, four years. This is not necessarily something that’s going to happen tomorrow, (although it could) but that’s not a ten-year forecast either, because we’re not going to make it that far and we never do.

These things do happen every four or five years. The dynamics, what we call the scaling metrics, and the size of the financial system and risk. One definition of risk is: What’s the worst thing that can happen?

- Source, Jim Rickards via the Daily Reckoning

FED Has Major Conundrum