James Rickards: The US Is the Biggest Currency Manipulator

Washington, D.C.'s efforts to "save" the United States are destined to destroy the wealth of millions. But there are some surprisingly simple steps you can take to protect yourself – and profit – from the government's misguided economic policies.

Interviewed by Alex Daley, Editor, Casey Extraordinary Technology

Alex Daley: Hello, I'm Alex Daley. Welcome to another edition of Conversations with Casey. Today joining us is the author of Currency Wars: the Making of the Next Global Crisis. Thanks for coming to the show, Jim.

James Rickards: Thanks, Alex; nice to be with you.

Alex: So Jim, this has been a tough crisis for us as a country. We have had trouble growing our economy, but through all of this, through all the debt problems America has faced, the dollar has held up very well. Do you see us being in the sort of footholds, maybe, of the initial recovery after this crisis, or maybe in the eye of the storm, depending on who you ask? What do you see forward for the dollar?

James: I think the dollar's strength is something that has happened in spite of – not because of – government policy. It's very clear that the Fed and the Treasury and the White House want a weaker dollar. But what's interesting is they're not getting it. They're trying as hard as they can to get a weaker dollar but it's not actually playing out that way. I think it will in time, but in the short run, you're right, the dollar has held up pretty well.

The President made this explicit – President Obama, in January 2010, in his State of the Union address. He said that it is the policy of the United States to double exports in five years. Well, that's a worthy goal – it would help the economy, it would help jobs – but how are you going to do that? How are you going to double exports in five years? We're not going to get twice as productive, there aren't going to be twice as many of us. The only way you can do that is to cheapen the currency, so that was really a very explicit way of saying that it is public policy of the United States to cheapen the dollar – not by five percent or ten percent but maybe by twenty percent.

But what's interesting is that it hasn't actually happened, despite QE and QE2 and massive borrowing and large fiscal deficits and a lot of the things that would normally cause people to lose confidence in the dollar. The fact is because of a flight to quality, because of fears in Europe, because of other concerns, the dollar has held up pretty well. What this tells me is that they're going to try harder, that you'll see more quantitative easing down the road and other measures designed to get the dollar lower.

Alex: They want to devalue the currency to help make our economy more competitive on the world stage, but what's the effect to the average American? Doesn't a weaker dollar mean more expensive goods?

James: It actually does. The theory is very simple, which is if you cheapen the dollar, you make our exports more competitive. I like to say if you have a small town with four stores and they all sell the same thing, and one of them has a half-off sale, everyone's going to go to the place with the half-off sale. So by the same token, if you have Europe, China, Brazil, and the US selling aircraft, and we have the cheap currency, they are going to buy our aircraft, because they're going to be a little less expensive if you're a buyer from Asia or India or anywhere else.

So that, in theory, creates exports, helps GDP, creates jobs. What's not to like? Well, there's a lot not to like, and the problem is one of the things you referred to, Alex. Yeah, it makes our exports cheaper, but it makes our imports more expensive. And the United States imports more than it exports, so all the iPhones, iPads, flat screen TVs, foreign vacations – all those things that Americans like are going to get more expensive. In effect, a cheap currency imports inflation from abroad in the form of higher import prices. That then feeds into supply chains and distribution chains in the United States. And that's exactly what the Fed wants. The Fed wants inflation. They want to hold nominal rates here, get inflation up here so you have these negative real rates to encourage borrowing and lending and spending. They usually try to get inflation by lowering interest rates, but rates are at zero. They tried to get it by quantitative easing, but it hasn't worked very well. The third way is the currency wars: cheapen your currency, import inflation from abroad. That's what the Fed is trying to do. It hasn't happened as successfully as they wanted, for the reasons that we mentioned: a lot of fear, money coming in from Europe. It happens with lags, but I do think 2013 is when a lot of this inflation will start to show up.

Alex: So the government's effectively been pursuing a policy to favor big business, to help them grow their exports, and really, to make the middle class, frankly struggle, and have to borrow and have to spend and not be able to save. Is that a fair characterization of the policy?

James: That's a very fair characterization. Who are the big exporters? We know who they are – it's Boeing, General Electric, Caterpillar to some extent, Hollywood, Microsoft. These are companies that sell massive amounts of goods overseas, so the cheap-dollar policy helps those big corporations, but it is devastating to everyday Americans, because of the inflation that follows. People with savings, with insurance policies, with annuities, with retirement, with any kind of fixed income – these are the losers in the currency wars. These are the people who basically see their savings depleted.

Estimates show that, basically, the Fed's zero-rate policy, compared to a normalized interest rate policy... If you had rates at a level that would be normal, historically, for this stage of recovery and this amount of economic growth, the difference between where they normally are and where they actually are, at zero, is taking $400 billion a year out of the pockets of savers and sticking it into the banks who are benefitting from this low cost of funds. So this is theft. This is Madoff on steroids. The Treasury and the Fed are basically robbing savers in the United States and handing the money over to banks and corporations in the form of a cheaper currency or a cheaper cost of funds. Cumulatively this is over $1 trillion. The Fed's trying to prop up the banks – that's sort of what they were designed to do – but it is coming at the expense of everyday Americans. So it's a form of wealth transfer, or as I call it, theft.

Alex: Obama said he was going to transfer wealth; I guess he kept that promise.

James: Yeah, but he transferred it from the middle class to the big corporations, not the other way around.

Alex: He never said which direction, did he?

James: Exactly.

Alex: Your book, Currency Wars – this sounds like a war on the middle class at some level in America, but I don't think that's what you're referring to. You're referring to a war between the currencies, between the nations, are you not? So is it just America pursuing this policy?

James: No; this is a worldwide phenomenon. America is the largest reserve currency in the world. You take all the countries in the world and look at their reserves. Reserves are like savings, so if you make a certain amount of money and you spend a certain amount, but you don't spend as much as you made, you've got some savings left over. Well, the same thing is true with countries. If they export more than they import, they're going to accumulate savings, but they call it reserves.

If you look at all the reserves of all the countries in the world, 60% of them are in US dollars. It wasn't that long ago in 2000 that 70% of the reserves were in US dollars, so the role of the dollar is declining; but when the US decides to cheapen its currency, it affects everybody in the world.

There's another good example of that, Alex. We focus so much on the China-US bilateral trade deficit. The US runs a deficit with China, and we buy a lot of iPads from China and iPhones. But the problem is the Chinese value added to the iPhone is only 6%. Ninety-four percent of the value added comes from South Korea, Japan, Germany. Toshiba makes the touchscreens, South Korea makes processors, Germany makes other components, and so forth. So taking the dollar down 50% against the yuan only changes the price of the iPhone by about 3%, because it's only 6% Chinese value added. You've got to devalue the dollar against everybody. You've got to devalue it against South Korea, the euro, Japan, Taiwan – all the other members of the supply chain – because supply chains are so much more complicated these days. So this is a worldwide phenomenon. I like to say that the Fed has declared currency war on the world.

Alex: With all these countries holding dollar reserves, don't they have it in their interest to hold up the price of the dollar? Is it just a fear-based rally that people are headed into the dollar and keeping it strong because it's the least bad of the global markets? Or is there actually some level of support from the countries holding so many reserves where they're holding up the price of the dollar?

James: Well, that's what the currency wars are all about. These countries would love to see a strong dollar. Of course they would. China is a good example. China has $3 trillion equivalent of reserves. Over $2 trillion of that is denominated in US dollars. Some of it's in euros and some of it's in hard assets and stocks and so forth; but over $2 trillion is in dollars, and the vast majority of that is in US Treasury obligations and other forms of government obligations. So imagine we devalue the dollar by just 10% relative to the yuan. Well, on $2 trillion of dollar-denominated assets, that's a $200-billion wealth transfer from China to the United States, so we're taking money right out of their pocket.

Of course, they're stealing it back in the form of intellectual property theft. Some estimates are that they steal $200 billion a year of intellectual property from us. We're stealing $200 billion of value from them in the form of the currency wars, so maybe we're just about even with China. It's nasty business and it is serious business.

So sure, those countries do have an interest in the strong dollar, or at least a stable dollar, but this is where push comes to shove. The US is trying to cheapen the dollar to get out from under its debt.

Alex: And all these other countries are trying to support a high dollar and cheaper currencies to support their own exports.

James: Sure.

Alex: Is there anything that could change this policy? Do you see anything on the horizon politically that could have the US going in the other direction, trying to support a strong dollar and support the middle class?

James: I really don't. Mitt Romney is a bigger currency warrior than Obama. Romney is the one of all the Republican candidates – and at this point it looks like Romney will be the nominee – Romney's the one bashing China, calling China a currency manipulator. Look, China is a currency manipulator, but there's no bigger currency manipulator than the United States. All countries manipulate their currencies. It's a policy tool. It's no different than interest rates, tax rates, budget deficits. Your exchange rate is just another policy tool. So all countries engage in this, but the US is the biggest and the best. We are the most aggressive currency manipulator in the world.

Bashing the Chinese only gets you so far, because, as I say, we do have very large gross trade deficits with them and trade relationships, but the Chinese value added is fairly small. Beating up the Chinese may be good politics, but it's probably lousy economics. But more to the point, Obama and Romney are on the same page. There's no difference between them, and so I don't see any return to the policies of Volcker and Reagan. Remember with Volcker and Reagan, we had "king dollar." It was a strong-dollar policy. After Nixon took us off the gold standard in 1971, we had about nine years of horrendous economic performance with the quadrupling of the price of oil, over 50% inflation, the stock market crashed, high unemployment – it was a disastrous period. How did we get back on track? How did we reestablish a strong growth path? Well, we did it with high interest rates and low taxes. Paul Volcker and Ronald Reagan. Today, unfortunately, we have low interest rates and high taxes – exactly the wrong medicine – and I don't really see any difference between Romney and Obama when it comes to that.

Alex: Yet Paul Volcker is a top aide to President Obama. What's changed with Volcker? Is he no longer a supporter of the strong dollar?

James: Volcker hasn't really had much to say about the dollar. Volcker's role has really had to do with the financial crisis and Dodd-Frank legislation and banking regulations. I'm sure he has opinions on the dollar, but his main role today has really had to do with the so-called Volcker Rule, which is a very worthy attempt to get the derivatives genie back in the box, make banks less risky, avoid the kind of catastrophe we had in 2008. But candidly, Volcker has been – he's a very important public figure; I think he deserves the respect of all Americans – but he's been marginalized by the White House. They don't really listen to him very much. I support the Volcker Rule, but I don't think the White House does, at least not in a very strong way.

Alex: So, very few sane voices out there that haven't been marginalized on moving us forward. It sounds like we're going to be stuck with this. How's this going to play out over the next five to ten years? What's the world going to look like in a decade?

James: Well, remember, these currency wars go back and forth, so the US may get the edge for a while with a cheaper dollar; then the Chinese will push back with a cheaper yuan, and then maybe it's the Brazilians cutting interest rates. What I see is that you sort of get two models. One is the 1930s, what I call in my book "Currency War One," and then the 1970s, what I call in my book "Currency War Two." They have a lot in common in terms of these competitive devaluations but the dynamics are quite different. The 1930s were predominately deflationary. The 1970s were predominately inflationary. It could play out either way.

What I expect right now is inflation. I don't think that any of these countries are backing off from the money-printing and the easing – the desire to import inflation. It sounds funny to say the Fed wants inflation, but they really do. They want to hold interest rates here. They want to get inflation up and have these negative real rates to encourage people to borrow, lend, spend, get velocity [of money] going. That's to turn over money and try to get the economy turning around again.

Remember, the nominal GDP – the number value of all the goods and services in the economy – is just the money supply times velocity. Well, the Fed can control the money supply without much difficulty. They can take it as high as they want. But they can't control velocity. I like to say "$3 trillion times zero is zero." In other words, you can have $3 trillion in money; but if you don't have any velocity, you don't have an economy.

So, the Fed's got to change behavior. They have to create inflationary fears. They have to have inflation that comes in above expectations. If the Fed sets expectations at 2% and they deliver 2%, there's no change in behavior – because we got exactly what we expected. We were already prepared for that. What they have to do is set expectations at 2% and deliver 4%. Then you have a shock effect, and that might begin to change behavior. So the Fed's trying as hard as they can to get inflation. They've done it with zero rates. They've done it with quantitative easing and now they're doing it with the currency wars.

Alex: So exactly at a time when most Americans are as scared as they've ever been to make major purchases, buy a home, spend a lot money on cars, the Fed is out trying to scare us, frankly, into spending our money just to keep the economy going.

James: That's exactly right. The portrait that you described, Alex, of "we're afraid, we just want to pay down debt and save money; we're worried about what comes next" – what economists call "precautionary savings" – that's the dominant mode. But it is highly deflationary because velocity drops. So what the Fed needs to do is change the psychology, but whenever you're trying to change mass psychology, by definition you're engaged in some kind of manipulation of propaganda and that's what the Fed does.

Alex: Yes, I think that's what they've been doing since 1913.

James: Right – on and off, right.

Alex: A little bit of the same. Not much changes in Washington, does it? The average person fighting inflation, higher prices, is starting to see it already. Gas prices are higher – and you've said if the dollar drops 50%, the iPhone goes up $3, but that means that gas just went up another dollar or two.

James: Correct.

Alex: We're definitely seeing the effects already. How does someone stay ahead? Can I invest in a particular way that's going to keep me ahead of inflation, where I'm going to end up better off than the average middle-class American who's not listening to you?

James: Absolutely. You know, when this inflation lets loose, when it really picks up, unfortunately the effects are not evenly distributed. There are winners and there are losers. The losers, sadly, are those who trusted the government – basically people with savings accounts, insurance policies, annuities, fixed income, retirement. They're going to see their values eroded. The winners are people who take some steps to hedge.

One of the best ways is to have some gold or silver. I recommend for the conservative investor 10% of your investable assets in gold and silver. For the aggressive investor, 20%. I don't recommend 50%. Some people have 50% or all in; that's fine but I don't recommend that. I mean, don't be a pig. If you get the kind of price action for gold and silver that I expect, 20% of your portfolio is going to do just fine. You're going to have very large gains there and that will offset some of the losses in the other part of the portfolio.

I actually recommend some cash. It sounds funny because I'm the one talking about the currency wars and the possible decline of the dollar. Why would you want cash? The answer is I might not want it in the long run, but in the short run it does preserve wealth. It gives you a lot of optionality. It allows you to pivot into other asset classes once you get a little more clarity.

Raw land has a place; fine art has a place. This is what I call "the 30 years' war portfolio." You look in Europe and some of these multibillionaire families actually have dynastic wealth that has lasted for not 200 years but 300, or 400, 500 years. When you ask them how they did it, they say, "A third, a third, and a third." What they mean is one-third gold, one-third land, and one-third fine art. Yeah, you need some liquidity, and you might have a little speculative portfolio off to the side, but gold, land, and fine art will serve you very well in the kind of uncertain inflationary times that are coming.

Alex: Though of course, fine art is a difficult business to get into, if you don't already know it, for the average retail investor. How about, if I've got my 10% gold or my 20% gold – my insurance policy, if you will, against a total crash of the monetary system – what other kind of investments you think might do well in the short run and the kind of things investors can pick up at a brokerage account or from an insurance vendor?

James: Fine art actually is not as difficult to invest in as you might think. Certainly, if you're going to go out and buy a Picasso, you need to be a billionaire to spend $100 million on a Picasso or a Renoir; I understand that. And you don't really want to go to galleries because the dealers are going to get huge markups, and you don't know what you're getting. Most people are not expert. But there are a small number of fine-art investment funds; they work with private-equity funds. You can put your money in – $200,000 or $300,000. Let's say you have, maybe, $2 million of investable assets. You can put $200,000 into a fine-art fund, so that's 10% of your investable assets; and then you have professional management and they will – along with others – build up a portfolio and sell them to museums. I'm actually invested in a fund like that right now. It has been my best-performing investment for the last four years. I have gold, and gold has done very well; but this fine-art fund has done a little bit better. There are assets like that out there.

Alex: Fascinating. Just when you think you know every investment out there, you find another one. That's very interesting.

How do you expect the stock market to do in this inflationary environment as the government's pushing for inflation, pushing for GE to do well? Does that mean I should be in the large-cap stocks?

James: Well, I have a funny forecast there. I think stocks are going up, but I wouldn't own them, and here's why. I think it's very risky. The stocks are going up in nominal space, so with every central bank in the world printing or easing one way or the other, stocks are going to go up because Wall Street loves free money. So that's kind of easy.

But the problem is when inflation kicks in, how much did you really make in real terms? If the Dow Jones goes to 20,000, let's say, but inflation takes off and runs at 10% for three or four years, it's going to cut the real value in half. I think stocks could go up in nominal space. I think they'll do fine in 2012, but over the longer term – meaning two or three years – it's a lousy investment on a risk-adjusted basis because you're very vulnerable to seeing your wealth erode in real terms. Or if it's a bubble you could get a crash. I don't like stocks for that reason, but I do think they'll go up in 2012.

Alex: I remember many stories, many cautionary tales in the investment community about how many millionaires were created in Mexico in the 1980s and '90s. The only problem was they were millionaires in pesos.

James: Exactly. We saw the same thing in Weimar Germany in the hyperinflation in 1921 and 1922. One of the reasons the German people were not more alarmed when the inflation started was because the stock market was doing very well – but of course, all the money ended up worthless. If you owned a whole company, that's one thing because you might have hard assets, bricks and mortar or railroad or... If you have tangible assets underlying the stock, that might be fine. But if you're counting on dollar appreciation and the dollar is going down, that can be very risky.

Alex: Okay, so it makes sense to not just look at your investments in terms of how they've done in nominal dollars, but how much money can that piece of stock buy – how much gold is that piece of stock worth?

James: Correct.

Alex: Understand your portfolio in real value and asset.

James: You always have to think about real value. It's very difficult to do because you have to subtract the negative, and you have to adjust for inflation; but yes, you basically have to take whatever nominal increase you're getting and subtract out the inflation, and then that's your real gain. You need to think about it that way.

Alex: And then when you say "subtract out inflation," these days the government claims CPI is at 1.8%. Who do you listen to when it comes to inflation?

James: Well, I think you have to look behind the 1.8%. It's a little bit of a barbell distribution. Yes, the average is 1.8%, but you've got some stuff going up six, seven, eight, nine percent and other stuff going down four, five, six percent. Now the average may be one or two, that's correct – but it depends where you are in that distribution.

If you're paying childrens' college tuition, you've got healthcare costs for your parents, you're putting gas in your car and driving to work, you're over where the stuff is going up maybe eight, nine percent. Maybe some things are going down. Maybe the iPad is going down but, as someone said to Bill Dudley (the president of the New York Fed), "You can't eat an iPad." And how many do you need at the end of the day? You buy one maybe, and that's about it. But you've got to put gas in your car every day or every other day. So I think that statistic masks a lot, but I also follow John Williams and his Shadow Statistics very closely. I think he does a very good job at picking that apart and showing that inflation is a lot higher than the government would have you think.

Alex: Yes, especially considering the CPI doesn't include the two things we all need – food and energy.

James: The core CPI does not include that. That's right.

Alex: So if stocks are going to be a weak investment, does that mean that bonds are going to be a good place to be?

James: Not necessarily. I think bonds will probably not move very much at all because there's not much of a bond market left. It's completely manipulated by the Fed. The Fed decides what the interest rate is going to be. The Fed decides what the price of bonds is going to be. A lot of people worry that if inflation takes off, interest rates will go up and then bond prices go down – that could be a very disastrous investment. That is possible, but I think the Fed has a very good ability to suppress that. I've spoken to people at some of the primary dealers and people on the Fed borrowing committee, and what they say is that they're very relaxed about it because the Fed has their back. They know the Fed has a bid if interest rates start to go up too much.

Now, on the other side, I do think there is room for interest rates to come down, and so bonds might be – contrary to what I said in the beginning – bonds might be a good investment if interest rates come down a little bit more. On balance, interest rates will probably be flat, but if they move at all I think they'll come down and bonds will go up.

Alex: That's a pretty good picture for the income investor that might be worried about their principal.

James: Right.

Alex: Even if their rates are low today, at least there's some stability to look forward to in that market, thanks to government backing.

James: Right.

Alex: I have to tell you, Currency Wars is a great book. It really paints an interesting picture of why these seemingly irrational actions of the government make sense on the global stage, why all governments are pursuing this devaluation policy with their currencies.

James: Right.

Alex: Thank you very much for speaking with us today.

James: Thank you, Alex. It's great talking with you.