Free is the most expensive thing in this con world. The only possible outcome of a system lacking any discipline is self-destruction
The global elite have set their eyes and minds on three things: “world money, world taxation, and world order.” Since the last global financial crisis in 2008, which brought down Lehman Brothers and iconic banks, international monetary agencies have been issuing warnings, in their peculiar, secretive ways, to a small group of finance ministers, banks, and private funds. James Rickards, the best-selling author of The Death of Money and Currency Wars, hears a drumbeat that he has penned down in his book “The Road to Ruin.” The signs of a worldwide financial meltdown are unmistakable. This time, the elites have an audacious plan to protect themselves from the fallout: hoarding cash now and locking down the global financial system when a crisis hits.
Rickards shows in this frightening, meticulously researched book that governments around the world have no compunction about conspiring against their citizens, while describing the US government’s choice to inflate the economy with a trillion-dollar credit injection at zero rates, which is driving common people toward a cliff.
Whatever is free is squandered. When water is free, it’s wasted. When electricity is free, there’s no motivation to use it wisely. The same holds true for money. If money is free in the hands of politicians/bankers, there is no motivation to invest it wisely and productively. Money that can be borrowed for next to nothing or borrowed by governments in virtually unlimited quantity is essentially “free”. And when the time comes to pay up that debt, they invent ingenious ways. This time round, Rickards says, they will put the Ice-9 plan to work.
The author, an economist and lawyer, advises the US government’s intelligence community, arguing that the complex global financial system is now not understood by pursuing old economic thinking. “Complexity theory makes a mockery of plans. The most likely path is the one no one sees.”
From the Book
“We mastered the art of paying no taxes…There were many levers at our disposal… we used foreign tax credits, investment credits, and discretionary loan losses… to dial down tax liability… For large complex companies, paying taxes is not a requirement; it’s optional.”
“Corporate capacity to corrupt a country through lobbying is sufficient in the short run to fend off state power.”
“Capital markets are complex dynamic systems. Complex dynamics exhibit memory or feedback, called path dependence. Risk in capital markets is an exponential function of scale. Small changes in initial system conditions produce divergent results. System output can be orderly or chaotic.”
“One cause of the Great Depression was that banks in the 1920s originated weak loans and sold these as securities to unsuspecting retail investors. In 1933, Congress passed Glass-Steagall, which said that banks could either accept deposits and make loans, or underwrite and sell securities, but they could not do both.”
“If everyone were to be given the perfect prediction model, it would immediately stop being the perfect prediction model because of this strong feedback effect.”
“Today, the high-value jobs of the future are created in Asia. This is not due to an initial comparative advantage in Asia, but rather a created comparative advantage through the use of protectionism and currency manipulation.”
“The greatest deficiency in the theory of comparative advantage is that it fails unless everyone plays by the rules. The thrust of the Bretton Woods GATT (1947) and its successor, the WTO (1995), was to force adherence to free trade by the signatories.”
“Floating exchange rates enrich currency traders and speculators but add costs to commerce and impede capital flows. Exchange rates are ripe for manipulation.”
“Today globalisation’s triumph over nationalism is energising a nationalist revival as nations reassess their individual interests.”
“Inflationary and deflationary forces coexist today in an unstable dynamic tension with the capacity to snap in either direction like a fault line in an earthquake, and produce a price shock for which most investors are ill-prepared.”
