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In virtually every airport bookstore in America right now you will find a little sleeper of a book in the business section which is as riveting as a thriller and as hard to put down. James Rickards Currency Wars made this reader remember what Secretary of the Navy John Lehman so vividly told Tom Clancy after reading his multi-million-seller Hunt for Red October: “Who the hell cleared this?”
At the end of the Cold, and Middle East, wars, we have entered a perilous new world. Currency Wars is as relevant as tomorrow’s headlines. No sleepy tome on monetary policy, Currency Wars is a white-knuckle exercise. It begins three years ago with a war game carried out by the Pentagon in a secret facility just outside of Washington DC.
Shades of Dr. Strangelove! But is it just … a videogame on steroids? Rickards:…
“The rectangular room has four wall-sized screens at the front end and banks of smaller fifty-inch plasma video screens mounted on the walls along both sides to patch in additional participants from remote locations or to display additional graphics. The seating is tiered with a central trapezoid-shaped table for twelve on the lowest level closest to the wall screens; the trapezoid is flanked by four banks of long tables, two on each side, at a slightly higher level laid out in a chevron pattern around the center.”
Nothing virtual about that skirmish. Rickards then walks his readers through a simple history of monetary policy. It starts with the prosperous “Golden Age” of the classical gold standard, proceeds through Currency War I (1921 – 1936), Currency War II (1967 – 1987) and Currency War III (2010 – ). Rickards then takes us inside the “G20 Solution.” This proves a fascinating guide to “what do they really do there,” concluding “Now, in addition to China, the United States and Europe all wanting to weaken their currencies, Japan … found itself in the cheap-currency camp too. Not everyone could cheapen at once; the circle still could not be squared.”“On September 7, 2010, a Chinese trawler collided with a Japanese patrol ship in a remote island group in the East China Sea claimed by both Japan and China. … When the release and apology were not immediately forthcoming, China went beyond the July reduction in exports and halted all rare earth shipments to Japan, crippling Japanese manufacturers. On September 14, 2010, Japan counterattacked by engineering a sudden devaluation of the Japanese yen in international currency markets. The yen fell about 3 percent in three days against the Chinese yuan.”
Then welcome to Rickards’ chessboard for “The Next Global Crisis.” He first gives “a new version of seventeenth-century mercantilism in which corporations are extensions of state power.” Then he takes his readers on a whirlwind world tour through Dubai, where “Espionage, assassination, gold, currency and an international mix of actors at the crossroads of the world give Dubai its standing as the new Casablanca;” Moscow, from which “energy is a wedge used to forge a regional economic bloc with a regional reserve currency, the ruble;” and Beijing, where “China’s hard asset endgame is one more ticking time bomb for the dollar.”
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