In 1971, President Nixon imposed national price controls and took the United States off the gold standard, an extreme measure intended to end an ongoing currency war that had destroyed faith in the U.S. dollar. Today we are engaged in a new currency war, and this time the consequences will be far worse than those that confronted Nixon. Currency wars are one of the most destructive and feared outcomes in international economics. At best, they offer the sorry spectacle of countries' stealing growth from their trading partners. At worst, they degenerate into sequential bouts of inflation, recession, retaliation, and sometimes actual violence. Left unchecked, the next currency war could lead to a crisis worse than the panic of 2008. Currency wars have happened before-twice in the last century alone-and they always end badly. Time and again, paper currencies have collapsed, assets have been frozen, gold has been confiscated, and capital controls have been imposed. And the next crash is overdue. Recent headlines about the debasement of the dollar, bailouts in Greece and Ireland, and Chinese currency manipulation are all indicators of the growing conflict. As James Rickards argues in Currency Wars, this is more than just a concern for economists and investors. The United States is facing serious threats to its national security, from clandestine gold purchases by China to the hidden agendas of sovereign wealth funds. Greater than any single threat is the very real danger of the collapse of the dollar itself. Baffling to many observers is the rank failure of economists to foresee or prevent the economic catastrophes of recent years. Not only have their theories failed to prevent calamity, they are making the currency wars worse. The U. S. Federal Reserve has engaged in the greatest gamble in the history of finance, a sustained effort to stimulate the economy by printing money on a trillion-dollar scale. Its solutions present hidden new dangers while resolving none of the current dilemmas. While the outcome of the new currency war is not yet certain, some version of the worst-case scenario is almost inevitable if U.S. and world economic leaders fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors. Rickards untangles the web of failed paradigms, wishful thinking, and arrogance driving current public policy and points the way toward a more informed and effective course of action.

Currency War is an international thriller that only Lawrence B. Lindsey – economist, adviser to presidents, and Washington insider – could tell. Is it possible to wage war without weapons? Is it possible to win a war without firing a shot? These are the questions facing Ben Coleman after he finds himself a first-hand witness to a bank run in Beijing that ends up being brutally suppressed by the Chinese military. Coleman, chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve under President Will Turner, realizes this is a harbinger of things to come… a suspicion confirmed by Li Xue, his counterpart in the Chinese gov-ernment. Li is part of a modernizing movement that is locked in confrontation with a hardline fac-tion headed by General Deng Wenxi. Deng sees the U.S. in a weak economic position and plans to make China the global superpower by replacing the U.S. dollar with the yuan as the world's reserve currency. So begins a currency war between the United States and China – a war fought in dollars and yuan against a landscape of shifting international alliances and political infighting on both sides. Coleman's marriage is even compromised when his wife – a beautiful, retired MI-6 agent from England – is drawn back into the game of spycraft and intelligence gathering. As the bloodless war rages, readers are taken on a roller coaster ride through the inner sanctums of power in the world – from the upstairs residence of the White House to the board room of the People's Bank of China; from a high society dinner party in London to the birth of a Political Action Committee at an exclusive Virginia resort; and from the bedrooms of the elite to the forbidden fleshpots of Laos.

The world's quietest weapon of mass destruction is 75 percent cotton, 25 percent linen, and 100 percent fake. The amount of counterfeit money in circulation is unknown, but hundreds of millions of bogus U.S. dollars are seized each year. Mass counterfeiting is not just organized crime, it can also be aggressive economic warfare waged by states to destabilize enemy governments, and it is reaching epidemic proportions. Forgery provides cash for states like North Korea and Iran in their pursuit of weapons—a fact publicly unacknowledged, even as fears grow over their nuclear ambitions. In Currency Wars, John Cooley maps this dirty matrix of war and politics, sabotage and subterfuge, with new evidence and recently disclosed documents. With sound grounding in current affairs and history alike, Cooley demonstrates that the machinations of today's states echo attempts in antiquity by Persia, Greece, Rome, and China to use and defend against forgery and currency debasement. Counterfeiting remained a high crime throughout medieval and Renaissance Europe; played a key role in the American and French Revolutions; and was used by the British, Germans, and Soviets in two World Wars. Bad money mixed with post-war dictatorships, and was a tool of the KGB, CIA, Stasi, Hezbollah, the Medellín cartels, and the Chinese Triads. This compelling, accessible account reveals grand-scale forgery's corrosive implications for global economic, political, and social stability. It is essential reading for anyone concerned with the complications and consequences of increasing and inevitable globalization, and it serves as a provocative reminder of the ways in which human greed and fear act as catalysts in world economics.

The next financial collapse will resemble nothing in history. . . . Deciding upon the best course to follow will require comprehending a minefield of risks, while poised at a crossroads, pondering the death of the dollar. The U.S. dollar has been the global reserve currency since the end of World War II. If the dollar fails, the entire international monetary system will fail with it. But optimists have always said, in essence, that confidence in the dollar will never truly be shaken, no matter how high our national debt or how dysfunctional our government. In the last few years, however, the risks have become too big to ignore. While Washington is gridlocked, our biggest rivals—China, Russia, and the oil-producing nations of the Middle East—are doing everything possible to end U.S. monetary hegemony. The potential results: Financial warfare. Deflation. Hyperinflation. Market collapse. Chaos. James Rickards, the acclaimed author of Currency Wars, shows why money itself is now at risk and what we can all do to protect ourselves. He explains the power of converting unreliable investments into real wealth: gold, land, fine art, and other long-term stores of value.

People's ability to think is often paralyzed in the face of overwhelming information and a myriad of opinions. Critical data is drowned out by noise data, important details are confused by minutiae, deeper pathologies are confused by superficial pathologies, core reasoning is tied up in trivial logic, analysis loses its bearings and judgment goes astray. Ultimately, the illusion displaces the truth. This is particularly true in the economic sphere. Five years after the end of the financial crisis in 2008, views on the future course of the world economy are still divided. Has the U.S. quantitative easing been effective or not? Is the global currency overshoot a blessing or a curse? Are financial markets becoming safer, or more dangerous? Has the economic recovery been steady or short-lived? In short, is the world gradually moving away from the last recession, or is it accelerating its slide to the next crisis? All the activities that mankind has ever engaged in have always revolved around two most basic tasks, one of which is the creation of wealth and the other is the distribution of wealth, from which all other activities are derived. Whether creating wealth or distributing it, human greed has been the source of their ultimate energy since the beginning. The "good in greed" drives technological advances that save energy, reduce time, reduce intensity, and increase pleasure, resulting in a continuous increase in productivity and more prosperous wealth creation. However, the insatiable greed of greed can inspire trickery, speculation, fraud, quick gains and extravagance, which in turn stifle productivity progress, lead to a distorted distribution of wealth and reduce the economic vitality of society.

Why the dollar is—and will remain—the dominant global currency The U.S. dollar's dominance seems under threat. The near collapse of the U.S. financial system in 2008–2009, political paralysis that has blocked effective policymaking, and emerging competitors such as the Chinese renminbi have heightened speculation about the dollar’s looming displacement as the main reserve currency. Yet, as The Dollar Trap powerfully argues, the financial crisis, a dysfunctional international monetary system, and U.S. policies have paradoxically strengthened the dollar’s importance. Eswar Prasad examines how the dollar came to have a central role in the world economy and demonstrates that it will remain the cornerstone of global finance for the foreseeable future. Marshaling a range of arguments and data, and drawing on the latest research, Prasad shows why it will be difficult to dislodge the dollar-centric system. With vast amounts of foreign financial capital locked up in dollar assets, including U.S. government securities, other countries now have a strong incentive to prevent a dollar crash. Prasad takes the reader through key contemporary issues in international finance—including the growing economic influence of emerging markets, the currency wars, the complexities of the China-U.S. relationship, and the role of institutions like the International Monetary Fund—and offers new ideas for fixing the flawed monetary system. Readers are also given a rare look into some of the intrigue and backdoor scheming in the corridors of international finance. The Dollar Trap offers a panoramic analysis of the fragile state of global finance and makes a compelling case that, despite all its flaws, the dollar will remain the ultimate safe-haven currency.

"This is a very important book."--Martin Wolf, Financial TimesA provocative look at how today's trade conflicts are caused by governments promoting the interests of elites at the expense of workers Longlisted for the 2020 Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award "Worth reading for [the authors'] insights into the history of trade and finance."--George Melloan, Wall Street Journal Trade disputes are usually understood as conflicts between countries with competing national interests, but as Matthew C. Klein and Michael Pettis show, they are often the unexpected result of domestic political choices to serve the interests of the rich at the expense of workers and ordinary retirees. Klein and Pettis trace the origins of today's trade wars to decisions made by politicians and business leaders in China, Europe, and the United States over the past thirty years. Across the world, the rich have prospered while workers can no longer afford to buy what they produce, have lost their jobs, or have been forced into higher levels of debt. In this thought-provoking challenge to mainstream views, the authors provide a cohesive narrative that shows how the class wars of rising inequality are a threat to the global economy and international peace--and what we can do about it.

World War I created a set of forces that affected the political arrangements and economies of all the countries involved. This period in global economic history between World War I and II offers rich material for studying international monetary and sovereign debt policies. Debt and Entanglements between the Wars focuses on the experiences of the United States, United Kingdom, four countries in the British Commonwealth (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Newfoundland), France, Italy, Germany, and Japan, offering unique insights into how political and economic interests influenced alliances, defaults, and the unwinding of debts. The narratives presented show how the absence of effective international collaboration and resolution mechanisms inflicted damage on the global economy, with disastrous consequences.

This book explores China's currency wars with its trading partners in four Western newsmagazines: Time, The Economist, L'Express, and Der Spiegel. Based on both quantitative and qualitative approaches, the interdisciplinary approach adopted in the research draws on two analytical frameworks from the realm of critical discourse analysis; van Leeuwen's socio-semantic inventory of social-actor representation, and van Dijk's concepts of macro-rules as the overarching approaches to understand the changing dynamics of international relations and the global economy through Western media. The sample in this study consists of 160 texts, half of which are focused on China and the other half on Japan, across a period of 12 months in 2010 (China) and in 1987 (Japan). Through the comparison of Western representation betwen China and Japan, the similarities and differences in their coverage have been revealed as even more striking, with regards to global politics and the international economy. The findings obtained from the empirical research have revealed that China was not only reported more unfavourably than Japan in terms of depth, but also across a broader range of areas spanning economics, politics, and military affairs. It has also emerged that all the four Western newsmagazines tended to centre their coverage on the United States and China in 2010, and the United States and Japan in 1987, although they did not speak in one collective voice with regard to their coverage of China and Japan.

The bestselling author of The Death of Money and Currency Wars reveals the global elites' dark effort to hide a coming catastrophe from investors in The Road to Ruin, now a National Bestseller. 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