Who is Jim Rickards

James Rickards (or Jim Rickards) is a veteran investment analyst who worked on Wall Street for 35 years. He is a distinguished name in the financial newsletter circles having held positions as portfolio manager, lawyer, and economist. He has also worked in senior positions at major institutions like Citibank, Long-Term Capital Management, and Caxton Associates, to name a few.

In this piece, we will take a closer look at who Jim Rickards is, his accomplishments, his investment philosophy, and career.

Who is Jim Rickards?

Most online profiles describe Jim Rickards as an American lawyer, investment advisor, speaker, media personality, economist, investment banker, and writer who focuses on matters of finance and precious metals. He lives in New Hampshire.

Mr. Rickards is on the Board of Advisors of the Center on Economic and Financial Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He is also the director of The James Rickards Project, which has been running an inquiry into the complexities of geopolitics and global capital

He is a prolific author with seven books to his name. That includes three New York Times best sellers. For example, he’s published a book called Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis that is critically acclaimed in the financial industry. He is also an Op-Ed writer for the Evening Standard, New York Times, The Financial Times, and Washington Post.

Jim Rickards also edits newsletters via a publishing company called Paradigm Press. He is the editor of Strategic Intelligence, a financial newsletter through which he shares his predictions regarding the capital market and the economy. His 2022 predictions have been discussed at length by NoBSIMReviews and other stock investment review sites.

Education

Jim Rickards attended high school at Lower Cape May Regional High School in Cape May, New Jersey, where he graduated in 1969. He got his Bachelor of Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1973 and in 1974, got his M.A. in international economics from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. He got his Juris Doctor from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and an Master of Laws in taxation from New York University School of Law.

Wall Street Career

Jim Rickards worked on Wall Street for 35 years. He worked for companies like Citibank, Long-Term Capital Management, and Caxton where he held senior positions. At one point, he was the senior managing director at Tangent Capital Partners LLC, a New York City-based merchant bank. He also worked for Omnis, Inc., a technical, professional and scientific consulting firm in McLean, VA as the senior managing director for market intelligence.

Investment Strategy

Precious Metals

Jim Rickards has always had a fascination with precious metals and in particular, the role that they have in the broader financial market. For example, in 2009, he talked at a symposium at Johns Hopkins University where he asserted that the U.S. dollar was likely to witness hyperinflation and that it was vulnerable to attack from foreign governments through the accumulation of gold and the establishment of a new global currency.

The Federal Reserve

Jim Rickards has always had reservations about the Federal Reserve. In one of his presentations, he alleged that the Fed was perpetuating “the greatest gamble in the history of finance.” He insisted that by easing financial conditions through lowering long-term interest rates the Fed was “essentially a program of printing money to spur growth.”

Books

Currency Wars

Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis was published in 2011. Rickards argued that currency wars were happening throughout the world and he wanted people to take the matter seriously because it wasn’t just an economic or monetary concern but a national security concern. In the book, he insists that the United States faced serious threats from clandestine gold purchases by China. He is also alert to the hidden agendas of sovereign wealth funds, and claims that their actions could lead to the collapse of the dollar itself.

The Death of Money

The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System was released in 2014 and was seen on the New York Times Best Seller list.

The Road to Ruin

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites’ Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis perpetuates the conspiracy theory that “global elites” are using the “hobby horse” of climate change to push for a “new world order” which will include a global digital currency that is easily traceable and controllable for the mass subjugation of the citizenry. The main Rickards propagates in the books were first pushed by an Indian economist called Arvind Kumar who wrote in the Indian newspaper Daily News and Analysis that the combination of negative interest rates and cashless currency was a design to destroy people’s savings. Rickards has used this argument to urge people to invest in precious metals (in various forms) because they are a better store of value during periods of uncertainty.

Other Books

• The Big Drop: How To Grow Your Wealth During the Coming Collapse (2015)
• The New Case for Gold (2016).
• The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites’ Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis (2016).
• Aftermath: Seven Secrets of Wealth Preservation in the Coming Chaos (2019)
• The New Great Depression: Winners and Losers in a Post-Pandemic World (Jan 2021)

Advisory Work

James Rickards counts institutional investors and government agencies among his clients. One of the most significant contributions Jim Rickards has made to the history of the financial system was working as general counsel for the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM). He was involved in negotiations that culminated in the US$3.6 billion rescue of the firm by the US Federal Reserve back in 1998 because it was deemed too big to fail. LTCM collapsed later on nonetheless.

Rickards testified before the U.S. House Science Subcommittee on Oversight in 2009. He highlighted the risks of financial modeling and talked about value at risk. He also talked about the origins of the 2008 financial crisis. Jim Rickards has been called upon to advice the U.S. intelligence community, the U.S. Department of Defense, and major hedge funds on global financial issues. He was on the Advisory Board of the Center on Sanctions & Illicit Finance. It was an organization within the Right-Wing think-tank and lobbying organization, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) in Washington DC. He was also a facilitator of the first ever financial war games conducted by The Pentagon.

Rickards guest-lectures at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and The Kellogg School at Northwestern University. He has also presented papers about risk at Singularity University, the Applied Physics Laboratory and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Press and Op-Eds

Jim Rickards regularly shares his insights concerning the capital markets and the global economy through Op-Eds. He is a contributor to Evening Standard, The Financial Times, Washington Post, and The New York Times. He has been featured on The Wall Street Journal and made appearances on Fox, CNN, CNBC, Bloomberg, BBC and NPR.