JIM RICKARDS: I'm Jim Rickards, writer, author of number of books, all on the international
monetary system.
Currency Wars, The Death of Money, The Road to Ruin.
I have a new book coming out and of October called Aftermath.
And these four books together are what I call the International Monetary quartet, or almost
the four horsemen of the monetary apocalypse.
My view is that the world has been in a depression since 2007, and will remain so for an indefinite
period of time.
And when you say that people are, wait a second, we know the definition of a recession.
The technical definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of declining GDP,
rising unemployment.
There's a few other bells and whistles, there's a little bit of subjectivity to it.
The National Bureau of Economic Research are the unofficial but widely followed referees
on when you're in a recession and when you're not.
Well, we're in the ninth year of an expansion.
The expansion started in June 2009.
Here we are in the summer, 2018, nine years behind us, in our 10th year.
So wait a second, how can we be in a depression if we're in the 10th year of an expansion?
And the answer is, that people don't really understand the definition of a depression.
They assume intuitively, well, if a recession is two quarters of declining GDP, and a depression
sounds worse, it must be quarters of declining GDP.
Well, we haven't had that.
As I say, we're in the 10th year of an expansion.
But that's not the definition of a depression.
The definition of a depression is a sustained period a below trend growth with no particular
tendency to collapse or getting back to trend.
In other words, if trend growth-- I'll use the United States, but you can apply this
more broadly to the world-- if trend growth is three 3%, 3.5%, and that's probably the
long term potential of the United States, higher nominal growth with inflation, but
we're talking about real growth-- if trend is three 3%, 3.5%, and you're running at 2%,
that gap between say 3.5% and 2%, that's depressed growth.
So yes, you have growth, you're not in a technical recession.
But you're in a depression because you're not getting back to that trend.
And people say, well, 2%, 3%, 1 percentage point, who cares?
No, that gap is huge.
And because of the compounding effect, think of it as a wedge.
There's the trend line.
Here's the actual line.
That wedge gets bigger.
So we're 10 years out.
We've left $5 trillion of potential growth on the table.
That's the output gap or the growth gap, the difference between depressed growth and trend
growth.
That's how much wealth has been lost because of this depressed growth.
By the way, that definition I gave, a sustained period of below trend growth, that's not my
definition.
John Maynard Keynes came up with a definition in the 1930s.
It was good enough for him, it's good enough for me.
I think it's accurate.
But being objective using the numbers I mentioned, we're in a depression, we're going to stay
that way.
The United States is Japan.
You know, Japan had the famous lost decade.
Well, the lost decade was 20 years ago.
Started in 1990 through 2000.
Japan is now almost at the end of their third lost decade.
The United States has had a lost decade from 2007 to now 2018.
If something doesn't change either in terms of policy or a collapse, something gets worse,
but absent that, we're going to remain in this kind of pumped 2% growth as far as the
eye can see.
People say, well, second quarter GDP, Atlanta Fed predicts 4.5%.
Yeah, but we've had 4% and 5% quarters in the last nine years.
They don't last.
You get these spikes.
You get it real good you know 4% print, and then the next quarter's 2%, and the one after
that is 0.5% or maybe even negative quarter.
So a year and a half into the Trump administration, he's producing the same kind of growth as
Obama, and I don't think it's policy driven.
I'm not saying one guy is a good guy, one guy's a bad guy.
What I'm saying is that the headwinds, demographic, technological, productivity, psychological,
et cetera, haven't changed, and there's no reason to expect they'll change.
So combine this world depression, because what I just described is true of Japan, it's
true in Europe- - not so true in China, but China is a special case.
They cook the books.
Maybe we can talk about that.
Their 7%, 8% growth that they've been printing, cut that in half, because 45% of that growth
is infrastructure, most of which is wasted.
So if you apply generally accepted accounting principles, made them write off all that wasted
investment, they'd be a lot lower than it appears.
But the whole world is caught in this trap.
Meanwhile, debt is going up faster than the growth.
Is debt good or bad?
Well, it depends debt can be good, if you can afford it, if you can pay it off, and
you can use for productive purposes.
It's bad if you can't afford it, it's not sustainable, you're using it as a substitute
for real growth, and it's all going to crash and burn.
So you can't understand debt in isolation.
You have to understand debt relative to income.
And that debt to GDP ratio, which is something I spent a lot of time looking at, the GDP
is kind of chugging along, not going up very much.
But the debt is going like this, the debt to GDP ratio is getting worse.
It looks like we're heading for a global debt crisis.
Not quite there yet, but it could happen sooner than later.
Very little doubt that Fed is going to tighten in September.
The baseline scenario for the Fed is straightforward.
They're going to tighten four times a year, every March, June, September, and December,
25 basis points each time, until they get interest rates up to you know 3.75%, 3.5%,
somewhere in that range.
Unless one of three pause factors applies.
The pause factors are disorderly decline in the stock markets.
Employment starts to go down, they basically lose jobs, unemployment's going up.
The third one, disinflation or deflation spins out of control.
Meaning core PCE goes down to 1.4%.
Right now, it's at 2%.
Right now, none of those three pause factors applies.
The stock markets, they're going sideways, but they're not crashing.
The Fed doesn't care if the stock market goes down 15% in six months.
They do care if it goes down 15% in six days.
That's disorderly and that's the kind of thing where you would see the Fed pause, but that's
not happening right now.
Job growth is strong.
Inflation is ticking up.
I don't think it will spin out of control, but we're out of that disinflation danger
zone.
So none of the three pause factors applies.
Therefore, you should expect the Fed to just keep raising.
So my forecast for September would be yes, and then at this point, December, more likely
than not.
But there's no doubt that Fed is over tightening because in addition to trying to get interest
rates back to normal, they're also reducing the balance, they're trying to normalize the
balance sheet.
But now the Fed has a dilemma, which is, what are they going to do if the US economy goes
into a recession.
As I said, we're in the 10th year of an expansion.
The old cliche, expansions don't die of old age is true, but they do die.
And history shows that it takes about four percentage points of cuts, 400 basis points,
in other words, to put the Fed to get the economy out of a recession.
Well, how do you cut interest rates 4% if you're only at 2%?
The answer is, you can't.
You cut them to zero, and then you're stuck.
You're at that zero bound and the evidence is good that negative rates don't work.
So then what do you do?
Well, then you go to QE 4, we're going to print some money again.
But there, if you had the balance sheet at $4.5 trillion, how high can you go before
you destroy confidence?
$5 trillion, $6 trillion, $7 trillion?
Well, the modern monetary theorists would say, yes, I disagree, and I think the Fed
disagrees, as shown by their own actions in trying to reduce the balance sheet.
So what the Fed is doing.
They're trying to raise rates to 3% or 4%.
They're trying to get the balance sheet down to maybe $2 trillion, a little bit less so
that when the recession hits, they can run the playbook again.
They can cut rates, and if necessary, do QE.
But here's the dilemma.
Can you normalize interest rates and normalize the balance sheet without causing the recession
that you're preparing to cure?
That's the conundrum.
I think the answer is, no.
I think that actually in trying to tighten to get ready for the next recession, they're
probably going to cause the recession.
There's no data, no time series that tells you how this is going to play out.
Except during QE, what did we see?
We did not see a lot of inflation, but we saw asset prices blow up, stocks, real estate.
Other asset categories.
They all went up a lot.
So it seems at least the kind of first order intuitive that if you print money, asset prices
go up.
If you destroy money, asset prices are going to go down.
So what the Fed is doing, they're destroying money, reducing the money supply.
So they're really double tightening.
In addition to the four rate hikes a year, this reduction in the balance sheet is probably
equivalent-- this is an estimate-- probably equivalent to four more rate hikes per year.
So they're actually tightening on a tempo of about 2%.
Probably going to throw the economy into a recession.
The Fed has never forecast a recession.
They have a terrible forecasting record.
This will happen before they know it.
Of course, we all know that stocks go down.
So based on that, I'm not bullish on growth and bearish on stocks.
Bullish on the euro.
Gold is actually doing fairly well, considering the headlines.
People said, well, gold has gone up a lot.
It's true.
I'm surprised it hasn't gone down more given the tightening environment that we've described.
So gold has actually performed fairly well, given the environment.
Now what I do expect is in time, as the signs of a recession emerge, yield curve inverts,
growth slows.
Job creation slows down.
Not a full scale recession or crash, but just enough warning signs, and the Fed reverses
course, that all of a sudden, they do pause at one of these meetings, gold's going to
skyrocket.
Because that's an admission.
At that point, the Fed is throwing in the towel to say, you know, we really can't escape
the room.
We can't get back to normal.
Because when we try, we sink the economy.
And we have to back off from that.
And that's when gold will shine, no pun intended, because it'll be very clear that the Fed cannot
get out of this easy money mode.
One thing I never do-- I never make a forecast or make a claim without backing it up.
Maybe there are people out there that are a dime a dozen, this is going to crash, or
this is going to go up, or growth is great, or it's so whatever.
That's fine, but you need to back that up with some kind of analytics, some kind of
data, some kind of analysis that you can do.
And I always do that, I'm always happy to kind of drill down on that.
So the methodology I use is quite different from what Wall Street forecasters use.
But actually, recently, with some partners, and some scientists, and other investors formed
the company to do this.
This is a third wave artificial intelligence.
First wave is just big data crunching, correlations, and regressions.
That's fine.
Second wave is what they call machine learning.
So as the machine is running these, it actually gets data itself, and begins to, in effect,
reprogram itself based on what is learned from the correlations it's finding.
Third way.
So we do the first two.
Third wave, which is what we're doing, is actually closer to cognition.
It's teaching the computer to actually kind of think, use inferential method.
You know, the frequentist statisticians-- and Janet Yellen is a classic example-- they
say, more data, more data, more data.
Well fine, but what do you do when you don't have the data?
You're trying to solve hard problems.
You don't have the data.
You use various inferential methods, and machines can do that in what's called a fuzzy way.
People don't like the word fuzzy.
Cognition sounds soft, but I always say, I'd rather be approximately right than exactly
wrong.
So fuzzy is better than the alternative because it's at least pointing you in the right direction.
My company is called Meraglim, I'm the chief global strategist.
Our product is called Raven.
Raven is a little bit easier to say than Meraglim, but Raven is our third wave AI predictive
analytic product.
This has roots that go back to 9/11.
Tragic day, September 11, 2001, when the 9/11 attack took place.
And what happened then-- there was insider trading in advance of 9/11.
In the two trading days prior to the attack, average daily volume and puts, which is short
position, put option buying on American Airlines and United Airlines, was 286 times the average
daily volume.
Now you don't have to be an option trader, and I order a cheeseburger for lunch every
day, and one day, I order 286 cheeseburgers, something's up.
There's a crowd here.
I was tapped by the CIA, along with others, to take that fact and take it forward.
The CIA is not a criminal investigative agency.
Leave that to the FBI and the SEC.
But what the CIA said was, OK, if there was insider trading ahead of 9/11, if there were
going to be another spectacular terrorist attack, something of that magnitude, would
there be insider trading again?
Could you detect it?
Could you trace it to the source, get a FISA warrant, break down the door, stop the attack,
and save lives?
That was the mission.
We call this Project Prophecy.
I was the co-project director, along with a couple of other people at the CIA.
Worked on this for five years from 2002 to 2007.
When I got to the CIA, you ran into some old timers.
They would say something like, well, Al-Qaeda or any terrorist group, they would never compromise
operational security by doing insider trading in a way that you might be able to find.
And I had a two word answer for that, which is, Martha Stewart.
Martha Stewart was a legitimate billionaire.
She made a billion dollars through creativity and her own company.
She ended up behind bars because of a $100,000 trade.
My point is, there's something in human nature that cannot resist betting on a sure thing.
And I said, nobody thinks that Mohamed Atta, on his way to Logan Airport, to hijack a plane,
stopped at Charles Schwab and bought some options.
Nobody thinks that.
But even terrorists exist in the social network.
There's a mother, father, sister, brother safe house operator, car driver, cook.
Somebody in that social network who knows enough about the attack and they're like,
if I had $5,000, I could make 50, just buy a put option.
The crooks and terrorists, they always go to options because they have the most leverage,
and the SEC knows where to look.
So that's how it happens.
And then the question was, could you detect it.
So we started out.
There are about 6,000 tickers on the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ.
And we're talking about second by second data for years on 6,000 tickers.
That's an enormous, almost unmanageable amount of data.
So what we did is we reduced the targets.
We said, well, look, there's not going to be any impact on Ben and Jerry's ice cream
if there's a terrorist attack.
You're looking at cruise ships, amusement parks, hotels, landmark buildings.
there's a set of stocks that would be most effective.
So we're able to narrow it down to about 400 tickers, which is much more manageable.
Second thing you do, you establish a baseline.
Say, what's the normal volatility, the normal average daily volume, normal correlation in
the stock market.
So-called beta and so forth.
And then you look for abnormalities.
So the stock market's up.
The transportation sector is up.
Airlines are up, but one airline is down.
What's up with that?
So that's the anomaly you look for.
And then the third thing you do.
You look for news.
Well, OK, the CEO just resigned because of some scandal.
OK, got it, that would explain why the stock is down.
But when you see the anomalous behavior, and there's no news, your reference is, somebody
knows something I don't.
People aren't stupid, they're not crazy.
There's a reason for that, just not public.
That's the red flag.
And then you start to, OK, we're in the target zone.
We're in these 400 stocks most affected.
We see this anomalous behavior.
Somebody is taking a short position while the market is up and there's no news.
That gets you a red light.
And then you drill down.
You use what in intelligence work we call all source fusion, and say, well, gee, is
there some pocket litter from a prisoner picked up in Pakistan that says cruise ships or something
along-- you sort of get intelligence from all sources at that point drilled down So
that was the project.
We built a working model.
It worked fine.
It actually worked better than we expected.
I told the agency, I said, well, we'll build you a go-kart, but if you want a Rolls Royce,
that's going to be a little more expensive.
The go-kart actually worked like a Rolls Royce.
Got a direct hit in August 2006.
We were getting a flashing red signal on American Airlines three days before MI5 and New Scotland
Yard took down that liquid bomb attack that were going to blow up 10 planes in midair
with mostly Americans aboard.
So it probably would have killed 3,000 Americans on American Airlines and Delta and other flights
flying from Heathrow to New York.
That plot was taken down.
But again, we had that signal based on-- and they made hundreds of arrests in this neighborhood
in London.
So this worked perfectly.
Unfortunately, the agency had their own reasons for not taking it forward.
They were worried about headline risk, they were worried about political risk.
You say, well, we were using all open source information.
You can pay the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for data feed to the New York Stock Exchange.
This is stuff that anybody can get.
You might to pay for it, but you can get it.
But the agency was afraid of the New York Times headline, CIA trolls through 401(k)
accounts, which we were not doing.
It was during the time of waterboarding and all that, and they decided not to pursue the
project.
So I let it go, there were plenty of other things to do.
And then as time went on, a few years later, I ended up in Bahrain at a wargame-- financial
war game-- with a lot of thinkers and subject matter experts from around the world.
Ran into a great guy named Kevin Massengill, a former Army Ranger retired Major in the
US army, who was working for Raytheon in the area at the time was part of this war game.
We were sort of the two American, little more out of the box thinkers, if you want to put
it that way.
We hit it off and I took talked him through this project I just described.
And we said, well look, if the government doesn't want to do it, why don't we do it
privately?
Why don't we start a company to do this?
And that's exactly what we did.
Our company is, as I mentioned, Meraglim.
Our website, Meraglim.com, and our product is Raven.
So the question is, OK, you had a successful pilot project with the CIA.
It worked.
By the way, this is a new branch of intelligence in the intelligence.
I-N-T, INT, is short for intelligence.
And depending on the source, you have SIGINT, which is signal intelligence, you have HUMINT
which is human intelligence, and a number of others.
We created a new field called MARKINT, which is market intelligence.
How can you use market data to predict things that are happening.
So this was the origin of it.
We privatized it, got some great scientists on board.
We're building this out ourselves.
Who partnered with IBM, and IBM's Watson, which is the greatest, most powerful plain
language processor.
Watson can read literally millions of pages of documents-- 10-Ks, 10-Qs, AKs, speeches,
press releases, news reports.
More than a million analysts could read on their own, let alone any individual, and process
that in plain language.
And that's one of our important technology partners in this.
And we have others.
What do we actually do?
What's the science behind this.
First of all, just spend a minute on what Wall Street does and what most analysts do,
because it's badly flawed.
It's no surprise that-- every year, the Fed does a one year forward forecast.
So in 2009, they predict 2010.
In 2010, they predict 2011.
So on.
Same thing for the IMF, same thing for Wall Street.
They are off by orders of magnitude year after year.
I mean, how can you be wrong by a lot eight years in a row, and then have any credibility?
And again, the same thing with Wall Street.
You see these charts.
And the charts show the actual path of interest rates or the actual path of growth.
And then along the timeline, which is the x-axis, they'll show what people were predicting
at various times.
The predictions are always way off the actual path.
There's actually good social science research that shows that economists do worse than trained
monkeys on terms of forecasting.
And I don't say that in a disparaging way-- here's the science.
A monkey knows nothing.
So if you have a binary outcome-- up, down, high, low, growth, recession-- and you ask
a monkey, they're going to be right half the time and wrong half the time, because they
don't know what they're doing.
So you're to get a random outcome.
Economists are actually wrong more than half the time for two reasons.
One, their models are flawed.
Number two, what's called herding or group behavior.
An economist would rather be wrong in the pack than go out on a limb and maybe be right,
but if it turns out you're not right, you're exposed.
But there are institutional constraints.
People want to protect their jobs.
They're worried about other things than getting it right.
So the forecasting market is pretty bad.
The reasons for that-- they use equilibrium models.
The capital markets are not in equilibrium system, so forget your equal equilibrium model.
They use the efficient market hypothesis, which is all the information is out there,
you can't beat the market.
Markets are not efficient, we know that.
They use stress tests, which are flawed, because they're based on the past, but we're outside
the past.
The future could be extremely different.
They look at 9/11, they look at long term capital management, they look at the tequila
crisis.
Fine, but if the next crisis is worse, there's nothing in that history that's going to tell
you how bad it can get.
And so they assume prices move continuously and smoothly.
So price can go from here to here or from here to here.
But as a trader, you can get out anywhere in between, and that's for all these portfolio
insurance models and stop losses come from.
That's not how markets behave.
That go like this-- they just gap up.
They don't hit those in between points.
Or they gap down.
You're way underwater, or you missed a profit opportunity before you even knew it.
So in other words, the actual behavior of markets is completely at odds with all the
models that they use.
So it's no surprise the forecasting is wrong.
So what are the good models?
What are the models that do work?
What is the good science?
The first thing is complexity theory.
Complexity theory has a long pedigree in physics, meteorology, seismology, forest fire management,
traffic, lots of fields where it's been applied with a lot of success.
Capital markets are complex systems.
The four hallmarks of a complex system.
One is their diversity of actors, sure.
Two is their interaction-- are the actors talking to each other or are they all sort
of in their separate cages.
Well, there's plenty of interaction.
Is there communication and is there adaptive behavior?
So yeah, there are diverse actors, there's communication.
They're interacting.
And if you're losing money, you better change your behavior quickly.
That's an example of adaptive behavior.
So capital markets are four for four in terms of what makes a complex system.
So why not just take complexity science and bring it over to capital markets?
That's what we've done, and we're getting fantastic results.
So that's the first thing.
The second thing we use is something called Bayesian statistics.
It's basically a mathematical model that you use when you don't have enough data.
So for example, if I've got a million bits of data, yeah, do your correlations and regressions,
that's fine.
And I learned this at the CIA, this is the problem we confronted after 9/11.
We had one data point-- 9/11.
Janet Yellen would say, wait for 10 more attacks, and 30,000 dead, and then we'll have a time
series and we can figure this out.
No.
To paraphrase Don Rumsfeld, you go to war with the data you have.
And so what you use is this kind of inferential method.
And the reason statisticians dislike it is because you start with a guess.
But it could be a smart guess, it could be an informed guess.
The data may be scarce.
You make the best guess you can.
And if you have no information at all, just make it 50/50.
Maybe Fed is going to raise rates, maybe they're not.
I think we do better than that on the Fed.
But if you didn't have any information, you just do 50/50.
But then what you do is you observe phenomena after the initial hypothesis, and then you
update the original hypothesis based on the subsequent data.
You ask yourself, OK this thing happened later.
What is the conditional correlation that the second thing would happen if the first thing
were true or not?
And then based on that, you'd go back, and you either increase the probability of the
hypothesis being correct, or you decrease it.
It gets low enough, you abandon it, try something else.
If it gets high enough, now you can be a lot more confident in your prediction.
So that's Bayesian statistic.
You use it to find missing aircraft, hunt submarines.
It's used for a lot of things, but you can use it in capital markets.
Third thing, behavioral psychology.
This has been pretty well vetted.
I think most economists are familiar with it, even though they don't use it very much.
But humans turn out to be a bundle of biases.
We have anchoring bias, we get an idea in our heads, and we can't change it.
We have recency bias.
We tend to be influenced by the last thing we heard.
And anchoring bias is the opposite, we tend to be influenced by something we heard a long
time ago.
Recency bias and anchoring bias are completely different, but they're both true.
This is how you have to get your mind around all these contradictions.
But when you work through that, people make mistakes or exhibit bias, it turns out, in
very predictable ways.
So factor that in.
And then the fourth thing we use, and economists really hate this, is history.
But history is a very valuable teacher.
So those four areas, complexity theory, Bayesian statistics, behavioral psychology, and history
are the branches of science that we use.
Now what do we do with it?
Well, we take it and we put it into something that would look like a pretty normal neural
network.
You have nodes and edges and some influence in this direction, some have a feedback loop,
some influence in another direction, some are influenced by others, et cetera.
So for Fed policy for example, you'd set these nodes, and it would include the things I mentioned
earlier-- inflation, deflation, job creation, economic growth, capacity, what's going on
in Europe, et cetera.
Those will be nodes and there will be influences.
But then inside the node, that's the secret sauce.
That's where we have the mathematics, including some of the things I mentioned.
But then you say, OK, well, how do you populate these nodes?
You've got math in there, you've got equations, but where's the news come from?
That's where Watson comes in.
Watson's reading all these records, feeding the nodes, they're pulsing, they're putting
input.
And then we have these actionable cells.
So the euro-dollar cross rate, the Yuandollar cross rate, yen, major benchmark, bonds, yields
on 10 year treasury notes, bunds, JGBs, et cetera.
These are sort of macro indicators, but the major benchmark bond indices, the major currency
across rates, the major policy rates, which are the short term central bank rates.
And a basket of commodities-- oil, gold, and a few others-- they are the things we watch.
We use these neural networks I described, but they're not just kind of linear or conventional
equilibrium models.
They're based on the science I describe.
So all that good science, bringing it to a new field, which is capital markets, using
what's called fuzzy cognition, neural networks, populating with Watson, this is what we do.
We're very excited about it, getting great results.
And this is what I use.
When I give a speech or write a book or write an article, and I'm making forecast.
This is what's behind it.
So we talked earlier about business cycles, recessions, depressions.
And that's conventional economic analysis.
My definition of depression is not exactly conventional, but that's really thinking in
terms of growth, trend growth, below trend growth, business cycles, et cetera.
Collapse or financial panic is something different.
A financial panic is not the same as a recession or a turn in the business cycle.
They can go together, but they don't have to.
So let's talk about financial panics as a separate category away from the business cycle
and growth, which we talked about earlier.
Our science, the science I use, the science that we use with Raven, at our company, Meraglim,
involves complexity theory.
Well, complexity theory shows that the worst thing that can happen in a system is an exponential
function of scale.
Scale is just how big is it.
Now you have to talk about your scaling metrics.
We're talking about the gross notional value derivatives.
We're talking about average daily volume on the stock market.
We're talking about debt.
We could be talking about all of those things.
This is new science, so I think it will be years of empirics to make this more precise.
But the theory is good, and you can apply it in a sort of rough and ready way.
So you go to Jamie Dimon, and you say, OK, Jamie, you've tripled your gross notional
value derivatives.
You've tripled your derivatives book.
How much did the risk go up?
Well, he would say, not at all, because yeah, gross national value is triple, but who cares?
It's long, short, long, short, long, short, long, short.
You net it all down.
It's just a little bit of risk.
Risk didn't go up at all.
If you ask my 87-year-old mother, who is not an economist, but she's a very smart lady,
say, hey mom, I tripled the system, how much did the risk go up?
She would probably use intuition and say, well, probably triple.
Jamie Dimon is wrong, my mother is wrong.
It's not the net, it's the gross.
And it's not linear, it's exponential.
In other words, if you triple the system, the growth went up by a factor of 10, 50,
et cetera.
There's some exponential function associated with that.
So people think, well gee, in 2008, we learned our lesson.
We've got debt under control, we've got derivatives under control.
No.
Debt is much higher.
Debt to GDP ratios are much worse.
Total notional value, gross notional values of derivatives is much higher.
Now people look at the BIS statistics and say, well, the banks, actually, gross national
value derivatives has been going down, which it has, but that's misleading because they're
taking a lot of that, moving it over to clearing houses.
So it's never been on the balance sheet, it's always been off balance sheet.
But even if you use the footnotes, that number has gone down for banks, but that's only because
they're putting it over clearing houses.
Who's guaranteeing the clearing house?
The risk hasn't gone away, it's just been moved around.
So given those metrics-- debt, derivatives, and other indices, concentration, the fact
that the five largest banks in America have a higher percentage of total banking assets
than they did in 2008, there's more concentration-- that's another risk factor.
Taking that all into account, you can say that the next crisis will be exponentially
worse than the last one.
That's an objective statement based on complexity theory.
So you either have to believe that we're never going to have a crisis.
Well, you had one in 1987, you had one in 1994, you had one in 1998.
You had the dotcom crash in 2000, mortgage crash in 2007, Lehman in 2008.
Don't tell me these things don't happen.
They happen every five, six, seven years.
It's been 10 years since the last one.
Doesn't mean it happens tomorrow, but nobody should be surprised if it does.
So the point is this crisis is coming because they always come, and it will be exponentially
worse because of the scaling metrics I mentioned.
Who's ready for that?
Well, the central banks aren't ready.
In 1998, Wall Street bailed out a hedge fund long term capital.
In 2008, the central banks bailed out Wall Street.
Lehman-- but Morgan Stanley was ready to fail, Goldman was ready to fail, et cetera.
In 2018, 2019, sooner than later, who's going to bail out the central banks?
And notice, the problem has never gone away.
We just get bigger bailouts at a higher level.
What's bigger than the central banks?
Who can bail out the central banks?
There's only one institution, one balance sheet in the world they can do that, which
is the IMF.
The IMF actually prints their own money.
The SDR, special drawing right, SDR is not the out strawberry daiquiri on the rocks,
it's a special drawing right.
It's world money, that's the easiest way to think about it.
They do have a printing press.
And so that will be the only source of liquidity in the next crisis, because the central banks,
if they don't normalize before the crisis-- and it looks like they won't be able to, they're
going to run out of runway, and they can expand the balance sheet beyond the small amount
because they'll destroy confidence, where does the liquidity come from?
The answer, it comes from the IMF.
So that's the kind of global monetary reset, the GMR, global monetary resety.
You hear that expression.
There's something very new that's just been called to my attention recently, and I've
done some independent research on it, and it holds up.
So let's see how it goes.
But it looks as if the Chinese have pegged gold to the SDR at a rate of 900 SDRs per
ounce of gold.
This is not the IMF.
The IMF is not doing this.
The Federal Reserve, the Treasury is not doing it.
The ECB is not doing it.
If they were, you'd see it.
It would show up in the gold holdings.
You have to conduct open market operations in gold to do this.
But the Chinese appear to be doing it, and it starts October 1, 2016.
That was the day the Chinese Yuan joined the SDR.
The IMF admitted the Yuan to the group was four, now five currencies that make up the
SDR.
So almost to the day, when the Yuan got in the SDR, you see this a horizontal trend where
first, gold per ounce is trading between 850 and 950 SDRs.
And then it gets tighter.
Right now, the range is 875 to 925.
Again, a lot of good data behind this.
So it's a very good, it's another predictive indicator.
If you see gold around 870 SDRs per ounce, that's a strong SDR, weak gold.
Great time to buy gold, because the Chinese are going to move back up to 900.
So that's an example of science, observation, base and statistics, inference, all the things
we talked about that can be used today in a predictive analytic way.
A crisis is coming, because they always do.
I don't have a crystal ball, this is plenty of history to back it up.
It'll be exponentially worse.
That's what the science tells us.
The central banks will not be prepared, because they haven't normalized from the last one.
You're going to have to turn to the IMF, and who's waiting there but China with a big pile
of gold.