James Rickards: Next Crisis Will Be Worse Than Last One

James Rickards: Next Crisis Will Be Worse Than Last One
A trader on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange moments after the crash in New York, on Oct. 13, 2008. While most people suffer from asset price crashes, bears profit in different ways. Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Valentin Schmid
Updated:

James Rickards has predicted major changes in financial markets, and his latest prediction is his biggest yet. A lawyer, portfolio manager, government adviser, and lecturer, Rickards has foreseen changes like competitive currency devaluation, the rise of gold, and the plan to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, as written in his bestselling books “Currency Wars,” “The Death of Money,” and “The New Case For Gold.”

Epoch Times spoke to Rickards about his new book, “The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites’ Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis,” and about central banks’ inability to stop the next financial crisis, as well as a possible financial market lock down.

Epoch Times: Why will the next crisis be worse than the last one?

James Rickards: To analyze that, I use the two prior crises: the 1998 Long-Term Capital Management crisis and the 2008 banking crisis.

In 1998, I was a participant [in the crisis] as the general counsel of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management. I negotiated that bailout. We could see we were just hours away from the closure of every market in the world—that’s not an exaggeration.

The markets didn’t collapse in the end, but it came extremely close. In 2008, it was the same thing—we were days away from the sequential collapse of every bank in the world. Bear Stearns collapsed in March 2008. Then Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taken over by the government in early September and Lehman Brothers went bankrupt later in September that year.

They were falling like dominoes, and they all would have fallen: Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and JPMorgan Chase.

Best-selling author James Rickards argues in "The Road To Ruin" that central banks are tapped out, almost guaranteeing the next financial crisis will be larger than what came before. (Courtesy of James Rickards)
Best-selling author James Rickards argues in "The Road To Ruin" that central banks are tapped out, almost guaranteeing the next financial crisis will be larger than what came before. Courtesy of James Rickards
Valentin Schmid
Valentin Schmid
Author
Valentin Schmid is a former business editor for the Epoch Times. His areas of expertise include global macroeconomic trends and financial markets, China, and Bitcoin. Before joining the paper in 2012, he worked as a portfolio manager for BNP Paribas in Amsterdam, London, Paris, and Hong Kong.
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