The Road to Ruin
The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis
3 of 3 copies available
A drumbeat is sounding among the global elites. The signs of a worldwide financial meltdown are unmistakable. This time, the elites have an audacious plan to protect themselves from the fallout: hoarding cash now and locking down the global financial system when a crisis hits.
Since 2014, international monetary agencies have been issuing warnings to a small group of finance ministers, banks, and private equity funds: the U.S. government’s cowardly choices not to prosecute J.P. Morgan and its ilk, and to bloat the economy with a $4 trillion injection of easy credit, are driving us headlong toward a cliff.
As Rickards shows in this frightening, meticulously researched book, governments around the world have no compunction about conspiring against their citizens. They will have stockpiled hard assets when stock exchanges are closed, ATMs shut down, money market funds frozen, asset managers instructed not to sell securities, negative interest rates imposed, and cash withdrawals denied.
If you want to plan for the risks ahead, you will need Rickards’s cutting-edge synthesis of behavioral economics, history, and complexity theory. It’s a guidebook to thinking smarter, acting faster, and living with the comforting knowledge that your wealth is secure.
The global elites don’t want this book to exist. Their plan to herd us like sheep to the slaughter when a global crisis erupts—and, of course, to maintain their wealth—works only if we remain complacent and unaware. Thanks to The Road to Ruin, we don’t need to be.
"If you are curious about what the financial Götterdämmerung might look like you’ve certainly come to the right place... Rickards believes — and provides tantalizing snippets of private conversations with those who dwell in the very eye-in-the-pyramid — that the current world monetary and financial system is on the verge of insolvency and that the world financial elites already have a successor system for which they are laying the groundwork."
—Ralph Benko, Forbes
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
November 15, 2016 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780698198067
- File size: 780 KB
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780698198067
- File size: 780 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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October 15, 2016
Can owning a Chagall keep the wolf from the door? In a time of a predatory capitalism that is beginning to feed on itself, that and a knowledge of complexity theory might get you more than a cup of coffee.Granted, financial consultant Rickards (The New Case for Gold, 2016, etc.) has been crying Ragnarok for a long time. Even so, the subtitle of this latest may be a touch more breathless than the contents really call for. Never mind that the author does indeed urge on his readers the thesis that the elite, whoever they may be--George Soros, to be sure, but Christopher Dodd?--have three things on their agenda: "world money, world taxation, and world order." The conspiracy theory stuff never goes away, but when Rickards' text settles down into its nerdier tropes, it gets interesting, if a little daunting. The author argues that the complex global financial system is now largely immune to analysis by the static tools of classical economics; "complex systems," he rightly remarks, "behave in a completely different manner from equilibrium systems." Number crunching begins to look like a secondary tool to the wind-reading skills of psychological forecasting: who's going to freak out first, and when? Examining such things as Bayesian probability (the "theorem is messy, but it's still better than nothing"), scaling metrics, and density functions, Rickards makes a good case to get smarter to how people actually think, which is seldom logical and seldom smart. He concludes, in the more sober and less conspiracy-minded portion of this double-edged book, with a view of what a well-structured, wealth-preserving portfolio might look like in a time when wealth creation is ebbing but wealth extraction--from your pocket, that is--is rising. Among its components are bonds and land, of course, but also, not surprisingly, "physical gold and silver...(coins and bars, no numismatics)" and, more surprisingly, museum-quality fine art. There's much for the alarmist here but food for thought for the calm investor, too.COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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