Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Depressions Are Structural Problems

People look at the system and they say that it really is not sustainable, it really is based on confidence, but we’re in the process of eroding confidence. There is no exit from quantitative easing. We should say there’s no good exit. You can back away from it, but then you’ll implode the economy in a deflationary crash.

Or you can keep going and eventually cause a loss of confidence in the dollar and then have a hyper-inflationary crash, so you got a crash either way. One looks like the Great Depression, one looks like the late ’70s but worse. Those are the only two paths, but there’s no other path. There’s no way we can just sort of taper, reduce it, finesse it, try to get growth on a self-sustaining path.

The reason for that is we’re in a depression. And depressions are structural problems; they require structural solutions. You cannot use a liquidity solution for a structural problem. You need a structural solution.

- Jim Rickards via a recent Future Money Trends interview: