 | The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline .(August 2022) |
James G. Rickards (29 September 1951) is an American lawyer, investment banker, media commentator, and author on matters of finance and precious metals. [1] He is the author of Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis (2011) and six other books. He currently lives in Connecticut.
Rickards graduated from Lower Cape May Regional High School in Cape May, New Jersey, in 1969. [2] He graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 1973 with a Bachelor of Arts degree with honors, and in 1974, from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C., with an M.A. in international economics. He received his Juris Doctor from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and an Master of Laws in taxation from New York University School of Law. [3]
He has held senior positions at Citibank, Long-Term Capital Management, and Caxton Associates. [4] As general counsel for the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), [5] he successfully negotiated the $3.6 billion rescue of the firm via the U.S. Federal Reserve in 1998. [6] Rickards worked on Wall Street for 35 years. [7] Later, Rickards became the senior managing director at Tangent Capital Partners LLC, a merchant bank based in New York City, [8] and also the senior managing director for market intelligence at Omnis, Inc., [9] a technical, professional and scientific consulting firm in McLean, Va. [3] On March 24, 2009, Rickards presented his view at a symposium at Johns Hopkins University, that the U.S. dollar was facing imminent hyperinflation and was vulnerable to attack from foreign governments through the accumulation of gold and the establishment of a new global currency. [10]
On September 10, 2009, Rickards testified before the U.S. House Science Subcommittee on Oversight about the risks of financial modeling, value at risk, and the 2008 financial crisis. [11]
He has also claimed he advised the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. intelligence community, and major hedge funds on global financial issues, and has served as a facilitator of the first ever financial war games conducted by The Pentagon. He also guest-lectures at The Kellogg School at Northwestern University and the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. [8] He states he was on the Advisory Board of the Center on Sanctions and Illicit Finance, a former organization within the right-wing think tank and lobbying organization, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) in Washington, D.C. [4]
Rickards's first book, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis, was published in 2011. In it, he argued that currency wars are not just an economic or monetary concern but a national security concern. He maintained that the United States faced serious threats to its national security, [12] from clandestine gold purchases by China to the hidden agendas of sovereign wealth funds, and that greater than any single threat was the very real danger of the collapse of the dollar itself. Rickards charged that the Federal Reserve was involved in what he called "the greatest gamble in the history of finance." The Fed's easing of financial conditions through lowering long-term interest rates was, he wrote, "essentially a program of printing money to spur growth."
Rickards subsequently authored another six books:
Rickard's second book The Death of Money was released on April 8, 2014 and was a New York Times Best Seller. His third book The New Case for Gold was released on April 5, 2016. His fourth book The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis was released on November 15, 2016.
In The Road to Ruin, Rickards promulgates a conspiracy theory that "global elites" are using the "hobby horse" of climate change to advance a "new world order" that includes a global currency. [14] [15]
This is a view Rickards has expressed on various platforms:
Climate change is being used as a stalking horse by global elites to push an agenda of global taxation and global governance.
— Jim Rickards, Problems with the Global Elite — When Money is Weaponised
He is an Op-Ed contributor to The Financial Times , Evening Standard , The New York Times , and Washington Post . He is the Editor of Strategic Intelligence, a financial newsletter, and Director of The James Rickards Project, an inquiry into the complex dynamics of geopolitics and global capital. [4]
Selected articles
A currency is a standardization of money in any form, in use or circulation as a medium of exchange, for example banknotes and coins. A more general definition is that a currency is a system of money in common use within a specific environment over time, especially for people in a nation state. Under this definition, the British Pound Sterling (£), euros (€), Japanese yen (¥), and U.S. dollars (US$) are examples of (government-issued) fiat currencies. Currencies may act as stores of value and be traded between nations in foreign exchange markets, which determine the relative values of the different currencies. Currencies in this sense are either chosen by users or decreed by governments, and each type has limited boundaries of acceptance; i.e., legal tender laws may require a particular unit of account for payments to government agencies.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is a major financial agency of the United Nations, and an international financial institution, headquartered in Washington, D.C., consisting of 190 countries. Its stated mission is "working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world." Formed in 1944, started on December 27, 1945, at the Bretton Woods Conference, primarily by the ideas of Harry Dexter White and John Maynard Keynes, it came into formal existence in 1945 with 29 member countries and the goal of reconstructing the international monetary system. It now plays a central role in the management of balance of payments difficulties and international financial crises. Countries contribute funds to a pool through a quota system, from which countries experiencing balance of payments problems can borrow money. As of 2016, the fund had SDR 477 billion. The IMF is regarded as the global lender of last resort.
Long-Term Capital Management L.P. (LTCM) was a highly leveraged hedge fund. In 1998, it received a $3.6 billion bailout from a group of 14 banks, in a deal brokered and put together by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
A gold standard is a monetary system in which the standard economic unit of account is based on a fixed quantity of gold. The gold standard was the basis for the international monetary system from the 1870s to the early 1920s, and from the late 1920s to 1932 as well as from 1944 until 1971 when the United States unilaterally terminated convertibility of the US dollar to gold, effectively ending the Bretton Woods system. Many states nonetheless hold substantial gold reserves.
In economics, deflation is a decrease in the general price level of goods and services. Deflation occurs when the inflation rate falls below 0%. Inflation reduces the value of currency over time, but sudden deflation increases it. This allows more goods and services to be bought than before with the same amount of currency. Deflation is distinct from disinflation, a slow-down in the inflation rate, i.e. when inflation declines to a lower rate but is still positive.
A reserve currency is a foreign currency that is held in significant quantities by central banks or other monetary authorities as part of their foreign exchange reserves. The reserve currency can be used in international transactions, international investments and all aspects of the global economy. It is often considered a hard currency or safe-haven currency.
The global financial system is the worldwide framework of legal agreements, institutions, and both formal and informal economic actors that together facilitate international flows of financial capital for purposes of investment and trade financing. Since emerging in the late 19th century during the first modern wave of economic globalization, its evolution is marked by the establishment of central banks, multilateral treaties, and intergovernmental organizations aimed at improving the transparency, regulation, and effectiveness of international markets. In the late 1800s, world migration and communication technology facilitated unprecedented growth in international trade and investment. At the onset of World War I, trade contracted as foreign exchange markets became paralyzed by money market illiquidity. Countries sought to defend against external shocks with protectionist policies and trade virtually halted by 1933, worsening the effects of the global Great Depression until a series of reciprocal trade agreements slowly reduced tariffs worldwide. Efforts to revamp the international monetary system after World War II improved exchange rate stability, fostering record growth in global finance.
The 1997 Asian financial crisis was a period of financial crisis that gripped much of East and Southeast Asia during the late 1990s. The crisis began in Thailand in July 1997 before spreading to several other countries with a ripple effect, raising fears of a worldwide economic meltdown due to financial contagion. However, the recovery in 1998–1999 was rapid, and worries of a meltdown quickly subsided.
Monetary reform is any movement or theory that proposes a system of supplying money and financing the economy that is different from the current system.
Monetary policy is the policy adopted by the monetary authority of a nation to control either the interest rate payable for very short-term borrowing or the money supply, often as an attempt to reduce inflation or the interest rate, to ensure price stability and general trust of the value and stability of the nation's currency.
In international economics, the balance of payments of a country is the difference between all money flowing into the country in a particular period of time and the outflow of money to the rest of the world. These financial transactions are made by individuals, firms and government bodies to compare receipts and payments arising out of trade of goods and services.
The Bretton Woods system of monetary management established the rules for commercial relations among the United States, Canada, Western European countries, Australia, and Japan after the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement. The Bretton Woods system was the first example of a fully negotiated monetary order intended to govern monetary relations among independent states. The Bretton Woods system required countries to guarantee convertibility of their currencies into U.S. dollars to within 1% of fixed parity rates, with the dollar convertible to gold bullion for foreign governments and central banks at US$35 per troy ounce of fine gold. It also envisioned greater cooperation among countries in order to prevent future competitive devaluations, and thus established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to monitor exchange rates and lend reserve currencies to nations with balance of payments deficits.
A country's gross government debt is the financial liabilities of the government sector. Changes in government debt over time reflect primarily borrowing due to past government deficits. A deficit occurs when a government's expenditures exceed revenues. Government debt may be owed to domestic residents, as well as to foreign residents. If owed to foreign residents, that quantity is included in the country's external debt.
Foreign exchange reserves are cash and other reserve assets such as gold held by a central bank or other monetary authority that are primarily available to balance payments of the country, influence the foreign exchange rate of its currency, and to maintain confidence in financial markets. Reserves are held in one or more reserve currencies, nowadays mostly the United States dollar and to a lesser extent the euro.
Economic collapse, also called economic meltdown, is any of a broad range of bad economic conditions, ranging from a severe, prolonged depression with high bankruptcy rates and high unemployment, to a breakdown in normal commerce caused by hyperinflation, or even an economically caused sharp rise in the death rate and perhaps even a decline in population. Often economic collapse is accompanied by social chaos, civil unrest and a breakdown of law and order.
The Russian financial crisis began in Russia on 17 August 1998. It resulted in the Russian government and the Russian Central Bank devaluing the ruble and defaulting on its debt. The crisis had severe impacts on the economies of many neighboring countries.
An international monetary system is a set of internationally agreed rules, conventions and supporting institutions that facilitate international trade, cross border investment and generally the reallocation of capital between states that have different currencies. It should provide means of payment acceptable to buyers and sellers of different nationalities, including deferred payment. To operate successfully, it needs to inspire confidence, to provide sufficient liquidity for fluctuating levels of trade, and to provide means by which global imbalances can be corrected. The system can grow organically as the collective result of numerous individual agreements between international economic factors spread over several decades. Alternatively, it can arise from a single architectural vision, as happened at Bretton Woods in 1944.
The subprime mortgage crisis reached a critical stage during the first week of September 2008, characterized by severely contracted liquidity in the global credit markets and insolvency threats to investment banks and other institutions.
Currency war, also known as competitive devaluations, is a condition in international affairs where countries seek to gain a trade advantage over other countries by causing the exchange rate of their currency to fall in relation to other currencies. As the exchange rate of a country's currency falls, exports become more competitive in other countries, and imports into the country become more and more expensive. Both effects benefit the domestic industry, and thus employment, which receives a boost in demand from both domestic and foreign markets. However, the price increases for import goods are unpopular as they harm citizens' purchasing power; and when all countries adopt a similar strategy, it can lead to a general decline in international trade, harming all countries.
This article details the history of banking in the United States. Banking in the United States is regulated by both the federal and state governments.
{{cite web}}: Missing or empty |url= (help)
Media related to Jim Rickards at Wikimedia Commons| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
