Jim Rickards Warns: The New Great Depression is Coming (What He Recommends You Do)

There will be more deficit spending, but they're not spending it, they're saving it. They're either paying down debt, which economically is the same as saving, or they're actually saving. And look, if you lost your job, of course you're going to save money.

You're not going to, you know, you'll pay the rent or whatever, but you're.

Not going to go spend it on.

A, you know, vacation or whatever.

But even people who haven't lost their jobs worry that they might be next. Maybe their neighbor lost.

So. So they're more. They're raining and they're pulling in their horns.

Correct.

There's a name for that.

It's called precautionary savings. Savings, just in case.

Well, so if you get savings, you're.

In a liquidity trap. Nobody's spending the money.

It is my great pleasure to welcome someone who I've been following for many, many years, and that is none other than Jim Rickards. I'm sure you have seen his work out there. Maybe you've read his books. I've read several of them. He is the editor of the Strategic Intelligence Newsletter, the best selling author of several books including Seven Secrets of Wealth Preservation and the Coming Chaos Currency wars, the Making of the Next Global Crisis, the Death of Money, the Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System, the New Case for Gold, the Road to Ruin, the Global Elite's Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis, and the new books, the New Great Depression Winners and Losers in a Post Pand and the how to Prepare for and Profit from the Turbulent Times Ahead. And he co authored that one with Robert Kiyosaki, who's been on the show a couple of times. Jim Rickards, welcome. How are you?

I'm fine, Jason, thank you. Great to be with you.

It's good to have you on. You know, by the way, I'm curious, I don't know where you're based. Where are you located?

I live in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. So that's our motto here, is Live free or die.

Excellent. Well, that's a good libertarian motto. I like it a lot. And you know, when I see your interview, sometimes you're in a different, different environment. Do you have like a cabin somewhere or something where I. Yeah, I have.

A farm in the mountains. We go back and forth.

Excellent. Good stuff. Well, just give us your overall kind of macro view, if you would, Jim, as to what is going on in the world. It is certainly a turbulent time. No one would deny that. You know, every crisis leaves open many opportunities at the same time. We'll take a deep dive into that today, I hope. Sure.

Well, that's exactly what the book's about, the new Great Depression. And when I was first discussing it with my publisher, my editor, last April, when the idea came up, and of course by then we were in the lockdown, the economy was collapsing, the stock market had just dropped 30%. They said, Jim, we want a book on this. There'll be a lot of interest in it. You know, the economy, you know markets, you know, capital market, you're just the guy to do it. And I said, thank you. And we got going on that. And they said, but, you know, keep away from the pandemic and the epidemiology because you're not a doctor. And I said, no. I said, that's what gets me to write about property damage in New Orleans in 2005 and not mention Hurricane Katrina. I said, you cannot understand the economy, you cannot dive into the new Great Depression without looking at the pandemic and what caused it. So they agreed that that made sense. No, I'm not a doctor. But I said kind of jokingly, I did go to Johns Hopkins, so I'm not intimidated by natural science. And I was able to read, I did over 100 peer reviewed academic papers on the immunology, the epidemiology and the virology. That doesn't make me a doctor, but the science is very accessible. You know, when I started, I thought to myself, well, you know, there's going to be a whole bunch of like conspiracy theories and fringe theories and everything over here, and there's going to be good science over here. So all I need to do is keep away from this and focus on the science. The first part was easy. You can discard the fringe theories, but when I got into the science, what I discovered is that the scientists don't agree, agree with each other. And that's a much bigger challenge because, you know, you hear certain politicians and it's a shame the way this has all been politicized. That's really unfortunate. But politicians will say, you know, believe the scientists. Well, anyone who says that doesn't know anything about science. I mean, scientists argue with each other all the time. They debate, they challenge each other's assumptions. New research comes along and the science as such evolves. But it's never settled.

By the way, just to comment on that, you're so right, Jim, because if we believed the science in the old days, we would still think that everything revolves around the earth. You know, I mean, that was the science of the Day.

Exactly. The sun revolves around the Earth. It took even when Copernicus said that wasn't true, that the Earth revolves around the sun, that it took Kepler and Tycho Brahe and others 100 years to change the consensus. So yeah, even bad science, and there's a lot of it around doesn't change overnight. Exactly the issue I was confronting, and I can show you PhD peer reviewed articles to say you have to wear a mask. You're a fool if you go out without a mask. It's the only way we're going to stop the disease, et cetera. I can show you other PhDs who say, no, masks don't work if you understand the virus particle. The virus itself is smaller than the weave. And the mask. Masks are not well constructed. People don't wear them correctly. They're mostly for show. So take your pick. I lean a little bit too, you know, look, I wear a mask. I'm not going to fight with the greeter at Walmart. If he says, you got to wear a mask, I'll put a mask on. But I think we are right to be skeptical that they do very much good at all. Washing your hands helps, social distancing helps, but. So I spent several chapters on that including the origin of the virus and the effect of the lockdown. But the lockdown was the segue into the economy because the evidence is very clear that lockdowns don't work. I know that may not be a popular view, but that's been true, the scientific consensus around that has been true.

For a long time.

Lockdowns are what politicians do when they don't know what else to do. This guy Fauci, I don't have a lot of time for him. He's a, he's an over the hill bureaucrat. You know the old saying, if you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right? If you're an immunologist, everything looks like a lockdown. But the fact is lockdowns don't work. If you have an island someplace and you can only get there by boat and you close it off and nobody.

Can come and nobody then, then a lockdown works.

That'll work. But try the United States of America or North America, America or Europe with 300 million people or 400 million people in the case of Europe, it simply doesn't work.

One thing I want to say though on this is if we try to put this video on YouTube, there is a high likelihood it will be taken down. Having this blasphemous conversation. I just, you Know, want to.

Well, no, you're right about that. I always hope you can fly under.

The radar screen a little bit.

It's one of the reasons I like writing books.

I think books are the last thing that are not being censored. You're right.

YouTube will take it down. Twitter will take it down.

Facebook will take it down.

I applaud my publisher and my publisher may have other authors who disagree and.

They'Ll publish them also.

And that's the way it should be.

But Jim, we should be outraged at this. This is insane. I mean, yesterday the president of the United States was banned from social media. It's, this is. I mean, I, I can't believe we're living in these times. It's like, well, in nightmare.

Imagine, imagine you were in the Soviet union in the 1960s.

It was the same thing, but here we are.

Well, in some ways. And that. And, but they survived. They had samizat, which were, you know, the kind of handwritten manuscripts, and they would secretly copy them on a Xerox machine and pass them around in envelopes at cafes or whatever they, you know, Boris Pasternaka, Dr. Zhivago out and turned into a pretty good movie. So. But you have to fight back. I agree with you. The censorship is oppressive. It's not scientific based. It has nothing to do with civil liberties or the First Amendment. It's just Silicon Valley trying to control the dialogue. And you know, when they ban somebody and it's kind of high profile, of course you've shut down one voice. But that's not, that's not the worst part of it. The worst part of it is millions of other people who are intimidated say, oh, gee, I better say the right thing or I better not speak up.

Because they'll do, or I'm going to get sent to a re education camp, which means I'll be banned from Facebook.

Yeah. And by the way, in China, they're doing that. They have concentration camps in China, real ones, and they're removing organs from political dissonance without anesthetic and then cremating the body. So where are we seeing that? So, but we're, you know, we're not that far from China. I agree that we're heading in the, in the wrong direction. You know, as far as what went on in Washington, it's interesting. I absolutely, unconditionally condemn the violence. I don't think there's a place for violence, property damage, you know, et cetera. But having said that, the behavior, just as an analyst, leaving aside the politics that is very much the kind of behavior to be expected as a result of the lockdown. And I would say the same thing about the riots last summer. You know, a lot of people condemning the attack on Capitol, and they should. I don't disagree with that. But they were pretty silent all summer when people were burning down Kenosha, Portland, Seattle, parts of New York, Brooklyn, et cetera. If you're going to be against violence, be against all the violence, not just the ones you agree with or disagree with. But the point I make, and this is in chapter five of the book. There's been enough talk and some science and publicity has said around the physical effects of the virus and the pandemic. But I don't underestimate the mental health aspects of this. And this, by the way, this is another reason lockdowns don't work. Lockdowns kill more people than they save. You could probably find somebody who got locked down and say, well, she'd be dead today if she wasn't locked down. I mean, that person probably exists. But what about the fact that the suicide rate has tripled, the murder rate has doubled, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, domestic abuse, people who skipped cancer treatments and heart treatments died of heart attacks because of the lockdown. So the evidence is, and this is not just speculation, a lot of data is out there. We didn't necessarily. I didn't have the data, not all of it anyway, last April and May when I started writing the book. But over the course of the summer, the data came in and it bears out what I'm saying. So the lockdowns have killed more people than they've saved. They have not stopped the spread of the virus. And what you do, you lock. You lock the place down, maybe for a very short period of time, you contain the spread a little bit. But then what do you do? You're going to. You got martial law. You're going to be locked down the rest of your life. So then they. They ease up and all of a sudden there's this huge outburst and explosion of the virus and you're back where you started from, probably worse. And then you lock it down again. You know, like wash, you know, rinse and repeat. So.

And you didn't mention that people's immune systems become weaker, too. That's another part.

That's right. I mentioned that in the book. You're right.

You're right.

I haven't mentioned that yet. But, you know, we. There's more than one virus and bacteria floating around. And by just going outside, interacting, going to a bar or whatever, we get exposed to those other viruses and bacteria. And of course, they're not as lethal as coronavirus, but they can make you sick and you build up immunities to those.

Well, we.