Mr. James G. Rickards is Senior Managing Director for Market Intelligence at Omnis, Inc., an applied research organization. He is also Co-Head of the firm’s practice in Threat Finance & Market Intelligence and a member of the Board of Directors.
James Rickards, an expert in the emerging field of “threat finance,” is advising the director of national intelligence.
‘A Pearl Harbor On The Dollar’
The concern now is not the gross size of countries’ economies, but how money moves between countries, and the way those movements can turn into a kind of financial warfare. Take China and the United States. The Chinese now hold about $1 trillion worth of U.S. debt, including Treasury notes and other securities. That gives them enormous power over the U.S. economy. Were they to suddenly sell those securities, the U.S. dollar would tank.
Rickards said China could set out to conquer the United States this way. Or it could simply decide that such a move made good economic sense.
“You can envision scenarios where they launch a financial attack, you know — a Pearl Harbor on the dollar, if you will,” he said. “And those are the things that I think national security professionals rightly think about. But it doesn’t even have to be that. It could just be China acting in its own best interests, in a way that causes interest rates to go up, the dollar to go down.”
If the Chinese were to dump their U.S. dollar notes all at once, they would hurt themselves almost as much as they hurt the Americans, because the value of those assets would drop so sharply. But Rickards said China could take a halfway step — exchange long-term U.S. debt for short-term notes.
“Don’t think the Chinese aren’t sophisticated about this,” he said. “There are plenty of economists in China who went to MIT and Harvard and the University of Chicago who know more about this than anyone. Those are the kinds of little plays within the bigger picture that I think people are not paying attention to, and they’re potentially threatening.”
Time-relative value
The table shows the equivalent amount of goods, in a particular year, that could be purchased with $1.
Purchasing Power of Money in the United States from 1774 to 2008
Trillions of dollars in government spending might stabilize the economy, but for now it may have weakened some U.S. Security interests abroad and hampered the nation’s ability to respond financially to an attack at home. (Feb. 25)
When sales were tepid, he replaced his Brazilian born vocalist Wanda de Sa with the distinctive voice of Chicago native Lani Hall (who learned Mendes’ Portuguese material phonetically), switched to Herb Alpert‘s A&M label, and released Herb Alpert Presents Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66, an album that went platinum based largely on the success of the single “Mas Que Nada” (a Jorge Ben cover) and the personal support of Alpert, with whom Mendes toured regularly.
Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66. Top row, left to right: Laudir DeOliveira, Sebastiao Neto (middle row) Rubens Bassini, Claudio Slon (bottom row) Lani Hall, Sergio Mendez, Karen Philipp.
American Defense Secretary Robert Gates told Rzeczpospolita that if the threat from Iran disappeared there would be no need to base an anti-missile shield in Central Europe. This is another signal from Washington that if Russia puts pressure on Iran, then the US could withdraw from the shield.
The defense secretary said during the NATO summit in Kraków that the USA needs time to reach a final decision over the shield. Robert Gates is the only member of George Bush’s staff who kept his post after Barack Obama became president.
In Gates’ opinion the new administration stands better chances of convincing Russia to its point of view. Washington’s representative claimed that even if the US resigned from its shield plans in Poland, it would keep its promise to base Patriot missiles here.
“Within the next few weeks consultation teams for strategic cooperation will hold joint meetings,” said Gates. The main topic of the two-day NATO defense summit in Kraków was the mission in Afghanistan.
Lease Termination Complicates International Effort in Afghanistan
With support from new signing Esmée Denters and Alesha Dixon and, the tour promises to be a pop extravaganza. Dutchwoman Esmée was discovered by Justin Timberlake singing covers on Youtube, and became the first signing to JT’s Tennman records label.
Since being signed she spent the last year working with Justin on her debut album and has already performed at the Superbowl and appeared on Oprah Winfrey.
Perhaps the most profound words I have ever uttered to a very special young woman on the occasion of her being the valedictorian at her high school graduation who is about to enter Yale Law, one of fifty.
Albert Einstein remarked in 1932 that “there is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable.” Thomas Edison thought alternating current would be a waste of time. Franklin Delano Roosevelt once predicted, when he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, that airplanes would never be useful in battle against a fleet of ships. There’s nothing like the passage of time to make the world’s smartest people look like complete idiots. So let’s look at a few more. In 1883 Lord Kelvin, president of the Royal Society and no mean scientist himself, predicted that “X rays will prove to be a hoax.” When Gary Cooper turned down the Rhett Butler role in Gone With the Wind, he is said to have remarked, “I’m just glad it will be Clark Gable who’s falling flat on his face and not Gary Cooper.” “Everything that can be invented, has been invented,” announced Charles H. Duell, commissioner of the U.S. Patents Office, in 1899.
Why is predicting the future so difficult? After all, if history is just one damn thing after another, shouldn’t the future be more of the same? But over and over again, even our most highly educated guesses go disastrously wrong. (Here’s Coco Chanel on the miniskirt, in 1966: “It’s a bad joke that won’t last. Not with winter coming.”) Of course, the smart play would be not to try to guess what’s coming next. But that’s not how we’re wired. Trapped as we are in the one-way flow of time, not predicting the future would be like driving a car without bothering to glance through the windshield from time to time. We desperately need prophets, even false ones, to help us narrow the infinity of plausible futures down to one or at least to a manageable handful. We look at the present and see the present; they see the seeds of the future. They are our advance scouts, infiltrating the undiscovered country, stealing over the border to bring back priceless reconnaissance maps of the world to come.
There’s Hiroshi Tsutsumi, who tries to predict the behavior of one of the most fickle, most influential demographics in the world: the Tokyo hipster. Former jazz musician (and current Federal Reserve Chairman) Alan Greenspan has been staring the future in the face for years and has to put our money (and his) where his mouth is. Peter Schwartz is the man whom Senators, ceos and movie directors go to for previews of the future. He predicted the rise of opec in the 1970s and the fall of the WorldTradeCenter in 2001.
Sherri Lansing picks blockbusters for Paramount Pictures—she has scored in the past with big bets on Forrest Gump, Braveheart and—maybe you’ve heard of it?—Titanic. And mathematical geophysicist Vladimir Keilis-Borok comes into the office every morning to try to work out where the next major earthquake is going to strike. He’s had a few notable successes and one recent, prominent failure. No pressure there, Vladimir.
You have to feel for them. If the recent debates over the service records of our presidential candidates are any indication, we can’t even agree on stuff that has already happened, let alone on what’s next. But thank God some people are willing to put themselves out on a limb, even at the risk of being made fun of by future generations of smart-aleck writers.
We humans are gamblers by nature, incorrigible ones, but we’re not stupid gamblers: we need to know what the odds are and when the fix is in. So let’s extend our posthumous thanks to poor fools like Albert Einstein—as well as to Einstein’s high school teacher, who once made the following immortal prediction to Einstein’s father: “It doesn’t matter what he does—he will never amount to anything.”
In this fascinating Documentary, we follow Brad on a sojourn to Berlin where he is taking a break from the trio to work on his elegies and solo piano performance.
Upstarts RocketShip Tours and XCOR Aerospace say that the price of their flights, slated to begin as soon as 2010, will be $95,000, about half that of the ones being offered by Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, which also hopes to launch as early as 2010.
“Our goal is to make space travel accessible and affordable to those who aspire to experience the ultimate adventure, said Jules Klar, CEO and chairman of RocketShip in a statement.
First, what do you get for your $95,000 from RocketShip (which has signed up about 22 people so far)? It begins with a five-night stay at Sanctuary Camelback Mountain Resort and Spa in Arizona for training, medical screening, and other flight preparation (including some R&R), according to Klar.
When your flight date nears, the company will put you up for another three days in Southern California, near the takeoff site in Mojave. You’ll get a preflight refresher course and a final once over.
Atwo-seat space vehicle called Lynx. Photo illustration of Lynx courtesy of XCOR Aerospace
When the day for your hour-long odyssey arrives, you’ll don a pressurized spacesuit and helmet and climb into a two-seat space vehicle called Lynx (you get to fly shotgun with the pilot), which will take off“with a powerful ascent” reaching Mach 2 on its way to 200,000 feet, or nearly 40 miles up, according to the company.
That is a much higher than the cruising altitude of nearly 7 miles typically achieved by commercial airliners but a good bit shy of where space begins, generally agreed to be around 62 miles up.
By comparison, if you go with Virgin Galactic, the tab will be $200,000 — and at that price Virgin says on its website that it has signed up “around 250.”
There will be six passengers and two pilots on each two-and-a-half-hour flight, preceded by three days of preflight training and screening at Spaceport America, a publicly-funded project 45 miles south of Las Cruces that the state of New Mexico hopes will be completed in late 2010.
Groups will stay at a hotel that Virgin plans to build nearby, said Graham Whyte of Virtuoso Ltd., sales distributor for Virgin Galactic.
Instead of flying “direct” a mothership, which will launch from Spaceport, will take you to 50,000 feet and your space ship will separate and climb to a maximum altitude of at least 68 miles, according to the company. So unlike the RocketShip flight, you will actually go into space.
Perhaps the biggest difference between the two offerings seems to be that the Virgin folks plan to let passengers leave their seats for a bit to experience weightlessness, said Catherine R. Wygant of Hurley Travel Experts of Portland, an accredited space agent for Virgin.
If you fly RocketShip you get to experience significant G forces, wear cool gear, and get a great view of the geography of parts of the big blue marble, but you’re pretty much strapped in for the flight. No floating around the cabin.
