Jim Rickards warns: Prepare for global gold confiscation and Orwell's 1984

Microchips embedded in the arms of citizens to track their activities, the total destruction of the middle classes and a cashless economy where an authoritarian state can freeze the accounts of dissenting citizens excluding them from all economic activity..... These are all part of the cheery scenario painted by the highly respected author and IMF-insider with connections to the Pentagon, Jim Rickards in his most recent article for

"In the year 2024″ as the article is called, capitalism and markets will have been abolished in favor of a Marxist dystopia managed by the "New World Order." The savings and assets of the middle classes will have been annihilated. This unfolds through a series of panics and shocks to the markets and hyper-inflation. As the hyperinflation takes hold there is a mass exodus out of paper currency and into gold. The G-20 arrange for the mass confiscation of gold, to be stored in an enormous vault in the Swiss Alps, in order to force the public back onto newly created digital currency. To ensure that the public cannot protect themselves from the profligacy of governments gold is taken out of circulation forever.

He references Naomi Klein's when explaining "how power elites such as central bankers, finance ministers and the ultra-rich work behind the scenes" to achieve this Orwellian vision.

"Shock doctrine is simple. Political leaders use crises to ramrod policies into place no one would accept in normal times." Using this model the elites simply wait for the next crisis to unfold and then use the fear and confusion ("people begin to value order over liberty") as cover for implementing anti-democratic agendas.

Rickards cites the USA Patriot Act which was passed by congress following the 9-11 attacks. In that highly charged atmosphere, reams of legislation - which had obviously been drafted before the attacks just waiting for the appropriate crisis - were rushed through congress. Privacy in the face of the state is now a thing of the past in the U.S. The private communication of all citizens are collected and stored on a database to be monitored at will by intelligence agencies who are not accountable to the public in any real way.

While we have more faith in humanity than Mr. Rickards, it is clear that the scenario he describes is not beyond possibility. The U.S. enjoyed the status of sole superpower for more than fifteen years after the fall of the Soviet Union. Naturally, it has attracted that element of humanity who crave power and control above all else. The Germans - arguably among the most sophisticated people in the world at the dawn of the twentieth century - still succumbed, following a series of crises, to a devious, vindictive, militaristic dictatorship by the 1930's.

On the flip side of that coin, average people have never had such ease of access to the information they want. So now, more than ever before in history, we can make informed choices. So the political outcome of the monetary crisis facing the world today is far from certain.

We find Rickards' description of how the current crisis facing the Central Banking establishment (damned if they do, damned if they don't) will unfold is more plausible. He takes the line that QE will be pursued until the system crashes, referencing QE-7 in 2018. When the public finally lose faith in paper money it will cause savers to gush out of paper currencies and into gold, silver, agricultural land and fine art. However, he warns that - before inflation takes hold on the wider economy - these safe havens will already have been bid up to extraordinarily high prices and will therefore be unattainable to those people wishing to protect their wealth from hyperinflation.

We do not believe Rickard's prognostications for a "New World Order" will come to pass. "How would that happen? The G-20 meetings struggle to agree on a final communique. How could they agree to something like that?" asks in their review of Rickards' article. We do see potential for a major crisis in the financial and monetary system along the lines that Rickards describes. And with this in mind we emphasize once again the prudence of storing gold and silver in fully segregated and fully allocated accounts in ultra-secure vaults in the safest jurisdictions in the world.