James Rickards writes “the end is near” books. He writes about finance.
His latest potboiler is titled, The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites’ Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis.
When you read it, you will find that there actually is no secret plan. In fact, it’s the same old deal. He announces this in Chapter 2, which is titled, “One Money, One World, One Order.” Here, we read:
What is the elite agenda? The agenda is unchanging, pursued in centuries past by Caesar and Napoleon, and in the 20th century by the Rockefeller, Roosevelt, and Bush dynasties. The agenda thrives today in institutions with anodyne names like United Nations and international monetary fund. The agenda is simple: world money, world taxation, and world order (p. 58).
Ho . . .
Hum!
So, let me get this straight. Caesar developed this plan. Napoleon did. (Note: he offers no evidence for any of this.) Anyway, it’s the same old, same old.
Has this 2000-year-old plan ever worked? No. Rome never persuaded Persia. It never persuaded China, with which it traded. It surely never persuaded the Scots. Hadrian built a wall across northern England as a way to avoid having to impose it on the Scots. That was money well spent.
Has this plan ever come close to working? No.
Well, with respect to the international gold coin standard, yes: 1815-1914. It worked because the elite could not manipulate it. It was the product of market forces. That is why it was abandoned in 1914: fiat money inflation was easier for the governments to steal with.
There have been a few proposed plans for global taxation. He does not mention this, but one such plan stretches back to the League of Nations. Nothing has ever come of any of these plans.
What about a one-world order? This has been talked up ever since the Peace Conference at Versailles in 1919. The League of Nations was a bust. The United Nations is a tax-dodge that provides tax-free income for impotent bureaucrats. There have been other announcements of a New World Order. There are bits and pieces of it: uncoordinated international bureaucracies with no powers of enforcement. The European Union is part of it, but it is now in crisis. It is a regional political order.
Meanwhile, the euro is on the verge of falling apart. Second, there has never been any international taxation. Third, the New World Order is visibly falling apart in Europe. Think “Brexit.” Yet here is Rickards telling us that these visibly dying programs are in some way going to be imposed by a bunch of frantic elitists who have overseen the breakdown of their own unholy, half-baked system.
This comes to mind.
WHO IS JIM RICKARDS, AND WHAT HAS HE DONE?
We learn from Wikipedia:
As general counsel for the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), he was the principal negotiator in the 1998 bailout of LTCM by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
I see. He was the legal spokesman for the high-leverage firm that engineered the biggest bankruptcy of the 1990’s.
(For the rest of my article, click the link.)
