Jim Rickards: The Coming Crisis Will Be the Biggest Ever (Video)

Greg Hunter of USAWatchdog interview Jim Rickards, author of The Death of Money. While they began by talking about the Islamic State and United States foreign policy, they moved on to discuss the possible “black swan” events that could crash the global markets. Rickards prefers the metaphor of the snowflake and the avalanche to that of the black swan, because he believes it is very easy to understand that a collapse is inevitable. The foundation of the avalanche is already there, but the snowflake that will trigger that avalanche could come unexpectedly. His number one piece of advice for investors is to buy physical gold and silver.

Enjoy the video below, and scroll down to see read some highlights from the interview.

It’s always the thing you don’t see coming. Ebola could get a lot worse. It could have a large economic impact. But we see it coming. Anyone that doesn’t see it coming, that this could be a pandemic, that this could spread to Europe, to other parts of Asia, to the United States, is sort of not paying attention. Markets tend to discount that. The thing that could take down the markets is the thing we don’t see coming. What could that be? An assassination, a failure to deliver gold by a major bullion dealer, some financial collapse that no one saw coming… Markets may collapse on their own for reasons that are very hard to see, just because of changes in psychology and the adaptive behavior of investors. But to the extent that there’s a catalyst, it’s probably one that we won’t see coming.

Using the science, we cannot say very much about the timing [of the next crash], but we can say a lot about the magnitude. And what that reveals is that this will be the greatest financial collapse in history. So I feel quite sure about that, but we can’t be sure about the timing. What we say to investors is, ‘Why wait?’ What are you waiting for? … The time to act is now.

The problem in a boom and a bubble, which we’re in now – people think everything’s money. They think your stocks are money because you can sell them and get the cash in your account in a couple days. They think your money-market funds are money because you can call your broker and get the cash in your bank account tomorrow. You think your house is money because you can take a second mortgage or sell the house. What you find out in a panic is that all those things are not money. You’re locked in, locked down – the only thing that’s money is cash, if you happen to have it, or gold and silver if you have it in physical form, not paper.

I say maybe have 10% of your portfolio in gold, have it in physical gold. You know, then the price of gold goes down and these people on Twitter or whatever say, ‘You’re an idiot or whatever, because you recommended gold and gold went down.’ Well look, I recommend 10% of your portfolio in gold and gold goes down 20%, that’s only a 2% decline in your portfolio.

I absolutely do recommend [gold] for a part of your portfolio… Because the thing I like about physical gold… Number one, it’s not digital. You can’t wipe it out with a few keystrokes. It doesn’t get wiped out in a cyberwar. Number two, it’s not something where you’re depending on anyone else. In a financial panic, it would be very easy for the government to reprogram all the ATMs to limit you to $300 a day… By herding the savings of the United States into a very small number of banks, it makes it easier to lock down those banks so that people can’t get their money.

Look at what Warren Buffet’s actually doing. Forget about what he says on TV… He went out over the last several years and bought the hardest of the hard assets. He bought a railroad… He bought oil and natural gas. He bought a large network of auto assets… That’s getting ready for inflation… Most of us can’t afford to buy a railroad… But we can buy some gold and silver.”

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