#062 Jim Rickards: ‘Are You Kidding Me? This Is The Biggest Bailout In History’

Best-selling author Jim Rickards (@JamesGRickards) returns to the podcast for the third time to share his views on the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and why the intervention — especially the Federal Reserve’s new emergency lending program, the Bank Term Funding Program — is the biggest bailout in history.

Rickards is a New York Times bestselling author of Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis and several other best-sellers, including The New Great Depression, Aftermath, The Road to Ruin, Death of Money, The New Case for Gold, and his newest book Sold Out: How Broken Supply Chains, Surging Inflation, and Political Instability Will Sink the Global Economy.

An investment advisor, lawyer, inventor, and economist, Rickards has held senior positions at Citibank, Long-Term Capital Management, and Caxton Associates. He is also the Editor of Strategic Intelligence, a widely-read financial newsletter.

0:00 Intro

1:00 Reaction to SVB, Signature Bank failures

1:54 The mistake Silicon Valley Bank made

4:12 Bond Math 101

4:45 The Fed is between a rock and a hard place

4:52 Huge unrealized losses on the bond portfolio at SVB

6:35 There already was leakage

9:33 Friday’s press release from the FDIC

12:50 Global ripple effects of SVB failure

14:50 Other banks had similar problems

17:08 Biggest bailout in history

23:00 Executive stock sales

24:11 There would likely have been lines at banks

25:00 The biggest crybabies were the billionaires

26:15 The banking system is effectively nationalized

32:00 This was risk management 101

39:46 The Volcker mistake

40:50 Inflation

42:30 You’ll see the Fed expanding the balance sheet

43:30 Name your poison

44:10 25bps at the next Fed meeting is the most likely scenario

44:55 This is the no-drama Fed

45:45 ECB

46:10 It’s a global economy

47:00 Panics have two stages

47:30 Credit Suisse

52:10 A road to ruin

54:35 Each bailout was bigger than the one before

55:30 A front based on confidence

58:30 Deteriorating trust in institutions

1:07:27 Gold