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.
