Sunday, March 2, 2014

The International Monetary System has Already Collapsed Three Times Within the Last 100 Years

It’s both a prequel and a sequel to “Currency Wars,” my first book. It’s a prequel in a sense that “Currency Wars” opened with two chapters that describe a financial war game that took place in a top-secret weapons laboratory in 2009.

That was the first time the Pentagon had ever done a war game where the only weapons could be financial instruments—stocks, bonds, derivatives, currencies.

How did I get involved in it? I start out talking about earlier involvement in national security matters and that led up to the war game. That part is the prequel.

The sequel is that in “Currency Wars” I also had a lot of history. There were five chapters of history and I thought that was very important.

If you are going to talk about gold with the reader, a lot of times if you jump right into gold, people think you are sort of a nut. I find if you tell the story through history people can see gold in a context, and when you talk about it, it doesn’t seem quite so strange.

In my new book, “The Death of Money,” there is no reason to repeat the history—that’s all in “Currency Wars”—so it’s more forward leaning, and talks more about the future of the international monetary system, a coming collapse.

And not just a collapse, because a lot of people are running around talking doom and gloom, the end of the dollar and all that. I might even agree with that, but I don’t think it has a lot of content.

What I try to do is provide a more in-depth analysis describing what will come next, what the future international monetary system will look like.

I point out that the international monetary system has already collapsed three times within the last 100 years—1914, 1939, and 1971—and that another collapse would not be at all unusual. But it’s not the end of the world. It’s just that the major powers sit down and reform the system. I talk about what that reformation will look like.

So that’s the sequel or the continuation of the story looking over the horizon. Some stuff that is before “Currency Wars” and some stuff that is after. And other content on the contemporary situation in Europe and China, so I hope people enjoy it.

- Source, Jim Rickards via: