James Rickards


James G. Rickards is an American lawyer, speaker, gold speculator, media commentator, and author on matters of finance and precious metals. He is the author of Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis and five other books.

Biography

Rickards graduated from Lower Cape May Regional High School in Cape May, New Jersey, in 1969. He graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 1973 with a B.A. 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 LL.M in taxation from New York University School of Law.
As general counsel for the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, Rickards worked on Wall Street for 35 years. Rickards was the senior managing director for market intelligence at Omnis, Inc., a consulting firm. On March 24, 2009, Rickards presented his view at a symposium at Johns Hopkins, 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.
On September 10, 2009, Rickards testified before the U.S. House Science Subcommittee on Oversight about the risks of financial modeling, VaR, and the 2008 financial crisis.

Publications

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, 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 five 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 propagates the idea which was first articulated by the Indian economist Arvind Kumar in the Indian newspaper Daily News and Analysis and which rang the alarm bells that the combination of negative interest rates and cashless currency was a design to destroy the savings of people. The book also promulgates the conspiracy theory that "global elites" are using the "hobby horse" of climate change to advance a "new world order" that includes a global currency.
;Selected articles