Book Review: The Death of Money-The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System by James Rickards

The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System is one of those topical books that come along every once in a while just at the time you are starting to think about the subject at hand.  I must admit that I probably have a little bit of confirmation bias in my review of this book because I was already thinking much of what he says, I just did not have the hard data to back it up as he does.

The book is 302 pages of text separated into three topical parts consisting of eleven chapters and a conclusion.  There are also 18 pages of notes and an 18 page bibliography.  The three parts are Money & Geopolitics, Money & Markets, and Money & Wealth.

The basic premise of the book is that central banks and the IMF have been playing extremely shady games with the dollar since the crash of 2008 and that it is inevitable that the dollar will lose its status as the reserve currency of the world because of this unless action is taken on several fronts.  The Fed has been largely responsible for much of this by its loose money policies in pursuit of inflation and the lingering effects of the successive rounds of quantitative easing that have occurred.

He also claims that the housing bubble that burst in 2008 has been replaced by a student loan bubble and that stock market gains since 2008 don’t represent wealth creation except for investment bankers and other finance professionals.  I thought that one of the more astute observation in the book is that Fed policies are making any eventual recovery worse by using a band aid on a chest wound.

The discussion of the Euro, the Yen, and SDRs from the IMF was especially illuminating.  He no doubt absolutely correct that only finance and news geeks have probably ever heard of SDRs.  I have heard of them but the explanation of what they are and how they are used in the book is the best explanation I have seen so far.  I also found that his discussion of gold and silver to be right on point.  His examination of sovereign metal purchases over the past view years and the way to view was excellent.  I think he is right that those of us buying metals will be very happy in a few years as fiat money goes away and we see our metal holdings revalued to where they should actually be.  Goldbugs will have the last laugh on that one, unless there is a governmental gold confiscation scheme as there was in the 1930’s, which is not outside the bounds of the possible in a dollar collapse situation

The central take-away from the book is that a correction is coming and it will make 2008 look mild in comparison.  He deploys a broad range of arguments and data to support his contention.  His prescriptions for how to put the dollar back on a sound footing are realistic and because of that highly unlikely to happen.  Absent radical action to put the dollar on a sound footing hard times are coming.  They might take 10-20 years to get here but when they do the wise will be prepared.  This book gives some ideas on how to be prepared and what is likely to occur.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who takes in interest in the sorry state of the economy and the ineffectual efforts thus far undertaken by the US Government to address the structural failures that led to the collapse of 2008 and are leading us to an even harder crash in the near future.