Currency Wars Quotes

“A prohibition on the hoarding or possession of gold was integral to the plan to devalue the dollar against gold and get people spending again. Against this background, FDR issued Executive Order 6102 on April 5, 1933, one of the most extraordinary executive orders in U.S. history. The blunt language over the signature of Franklin Delano Roosevelt speaks for itself: I, Franklin D. Roosevelt . . . declare that [a] national emergency still continues to exist and . . . do hereby prohibit the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the . . . United States by individuals, partnerships, associations and corporations.... All persons are hereby required to deliver, on or before May 1, 1933, to a Federal reserve bank . . . or to any member of the Federal Reserve System all gold coin, gold bullion and gold certificates now owned by them.... Whoever willfully violates any provision of this Executive Order . . . may be fined not more than $10,000 or . . . may be imprisoned for not more than ten years. The people of the United States were being ordered to surrender their gold to the government and were offered paper money at the exchange rate of $20.67 per ounce. Some relatively minor exceptions were made for dentists, jewelers and others who made “legitimate and customary” use of gold in their industry or art. Citizens were allowed to keep $100 worth of gold, about five ounces at 1933 prices, and gold in the form of rare coins. The $10,000 fine proposed in 1933 for those who continued to hoard gold in violation of the president’s order is equivalent to over $165,000 in today’s money, an extraordinarily large statutory fine. Roosevelt followed up with a”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“It is one thing when prices drift downward over time due to innovation, scalability or other efficiencies. This might be considered “good” deflation and is familiar to any contemporary consumer who has seen prices of computers or wide-screen TVs fall year after year. It is another matter when prices are forced down by unnecessary monetary contraction, credit constraints, deleveraging, business failures, bankruptcies and mass unemployment. This may be considered “bad” deflation. This bad deflation was exactly what was required in order to return the most important currencies to their prewar parity with gold.”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“Printing dollars at home means higher inflation in China, higher food prices in Egypt and stock bubbles in Brazil. Printing money means that U.S. debt is devalued so foreign creditors get paid back in cheaper dollars. The devaluation means higher unemployment in developing economies as their exports become more expensive for Americans. The resulting inflation also means higher prices for inputs needed in developing economies like copper, corn, oil and wheat. Foreign countries have begun to fight back against U.S.-caused inflation through subsidies, tariffs and capital controls; the currency war is expanding fast.”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“University biologists working with infectious viruses have airtight facilities to ensure that the objects of their study do not escape from the laboratory and damage the population at large. Unfortunately, no such safeguards are imposed on economics departments.”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“There is hardly a part of the United States where men are not aware that secret private purposes and interests have been running the government.” President Woodrow Wilson”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“Higher prices are the symptom, not the cause, of currency collapse.”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“A country running deficits under the gold exchange standard could find itself like a tenant whose landlord does not collect rent payments for a year and then suddenly demands immediate payment of twelve months’ back rent. Some tenants would have saved for the inevitable rainy day, but many others would not be able to resist the easy credit and would find themselves short of funds and facing eviction.”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“Devaluation and currency wars never produce either the growth or the jobs that are promised, but they reliably produce inflation.”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“If the dollar falls, America’s national security falls with it.”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“Worse yet, when the public realizes that it is being deceived, a feedback loop is created in which trust is broken and even the truth, if it can be found, is no longer believed. The United States is dangerously close to that point. ■”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“From its creation in 1913, the most important Fed mandate has been to maintain the purchasing power of the dollar; however, since 1913 the dollar has lost over 95 percent of its value. Put differently, it takes twenty dollars today to buy what one dollar would buy in 1913.”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“broad-based tax cut . . . accommodated by a program of open market purchases . . . would almost certainly be an effective stimulant to consumption.... A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous “helicopter drop” of money.... Of course . . . the government could . . . even acquire existing real or financial assets. If . . . the Fed then purchased an equal amount of Treasury debt with newly created money, the whole operation would be the economic equivalent of direct open market operations in private assets.”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“Regulators and bankers were using the wrong tools and the wrong metrics. Unfortunately, they still are.”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“America has, in fact, run trade deficits large enough to wipe out its gold hoard under the old rules of the game. Still, the idea of the gold standard was not to deplete nations of gold, but rather to force them to get their financial house in order long before the gold disappeared. In the absence of a gold standard and the real-time adjustments it causes, the American people seem unaware of how badly U.S. finances have actually deteriorated.”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“Hyperinflation produces fairly predictable sets of winners and losers and prompts certain behaviors and therefore can be used politically to rearrange social and economic relations among debtors, creditors, labor and capital, while gold is kept available to clean up the wreckage if necessary.”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“It is time to diminish the role of finance and empower the role of commerce.”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“the future of geopolitics might not be the benign multilateral ethos of Davos Man but a rather more dark and dystopian world of resource scarcity, infrastructure collapse, mercantilism and default.”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“The lesson that a nation cannot devalue its way to prosperity eluded Nixon, Connally, Peterson and the stock market in late 1971 as it had their predecessors during the Great Depression. It seemed a hard lesson to learn.”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“If the price of gold was too low, the problem was not a shortage of gold but an excess of paper money in relation to gold. This excess money was reflected in rising inflation in the United States, the United Kingdom and France.”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“In an economy where individuals and businesses will not expand and where government spending is constrained, the only remaining way to grow the economy is to increase net exports (X − M) and the fastest, easiest way to do that is to cheapen one’s currency.”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“Currency wars begin in an atmosphere of insufficient internal growth. The country that starts down this road typically finds itself with high unemployment, low or declining growth, a weak banking sector and deteriorating public finances. In these circumstances it is difficult to generate growth through purely internal means and the promotion of exports through a devalued currency becomes the growth engine of last resort.”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“Agents that are diverse, connected, interdependent and adaptive are the foundation of a complex system.”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“the Knickerbocker Trust and the Panic of 1907 in”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“In 1922, the inflation turned to hyperinflation as the Reichsbank gave up trying to control the situation and printed money frantically to meet the demands of union and government workers. A single U.S. dollar became so valuable thatAmerican visitors could not spend it because merchants could not locate the millions of marks needed to make change. Diners offered to pay for meals in advance because the price would be vastly higher by the time they finished eating.”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis

“On the whole, it is difficult to think of another government agency that has failed more consistently on more of its key missions than the Fed.”
― James Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis