Currency Wars

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY OCT 24, 2011

In 2008, Rickards, an investment banker with extensive experience in hedge funds, was invited to participate in a seminar sponsored by the Department of Defense, which examined the safety of U.S. sovereign wealth funds in the case of economic warfare. As Rickards explains, "Sovereign wealth funds are huge investment pools established by governments to invest their excess reserves." He participated in further seminars that addressed the impact of futures markets, derivatives, and more, on strategic commodities such as oil, uranium, copper, and gold. Rickards's first book is an outgrowth of his contributions and a later two-day war game simulation held at the Applied Physics Laboratory's Warfare Analysis Laboratory. He argues that a financial attack against the U.S. could destroy confidence in the dollar. In Ricards's view, the Fed's policy of quantitative easing by lessening confidence in the dollar, may lead to chaos in global financial markets. Possible strategies for dealing with such a situation include a return to the gold standard. Though the book will no doubt interest policymakers, even non-experts will be rewarded for their efforts.