Five-time, best-selling financial author James G. Rickards says, “We could be in a recession right now,” but the title of his most recent book “The New Great Depression” says where we are definitely going soon. Rickards says, “The current crisis is not like 2008 or even 1929.
The New Depression that has emerged from the COVID pandemic is the worst economic crisis in U.S. history.
Most fired employees will remain redundant. Bankruptcies will be common, and banks will buckle under the weight of bad debts.
Deflation, debt and demography will wreck any chance of recovery, and social disorder will follow closely on the heels of market chaos.”
Rickards says there are many negatives to the current economy, Covid, inflation, war, sanctions, supply destruction, and on top of all that, Rickards says the Fed will ultimately kill the economy with a policy mistake. Rickards explains, “Probably in May they are going to have quantitative tightening, which means you actually reduce the money supply.
So, this is triple tightening: Three interest rate hikes, no more taper and doing quantitative tightening at a very rapid rate. What just happened? We had a down quarter.
The economy was at recession levels in the first quarter, and the stock market is on the way down. So, here we go again. The Fed is tightening into weakness. It’s tightening into certainly a stock market bubble, and they are probably going to destroy the markets again.”
Inflation, according to Rickards, is very serious, and he explains, “It is the worst inflation in 40 years. You can’t argue about it, it’s there. The inflation we are seeing now does not come from the demand side.
It’s from the supply side. It’s because of the war in Ukraine. That’s a supply side disruption. It’s also from the ‘Zero Covid’ policy in China.
They locked down two of the biggest cities in the world. . . . There are multiple reasons for supply chain disruptions. By the time you pay for gas and groceries, if you can, there is not much left over. That’s going to kill discretionary spending.”
Rickards says the signs that gold is going way up are global. Rickards contends, “The world could not destroy the dollar, but we could.
If you are putting sanctions on dollars and kicking people out of dollar accounts why would I want dollars? The U.S. destroyed trust.
If you want to get away from the dollar, there is not a currency or bond market you can go to, but there is gold. Gold is money good, and it’s the only form of money the whole world can agree on.”
Rickards says the minimum gold price is $15,000 per ounce in the not-so-distant future. Rickards says depending on the backing and math, it could go up in value much higher.
Rickards likes silver, too, and food for the common guy. Food prices are going to go much higher according to Rickards, and in some places in the world, he expects out right starvation.