Financial crisis tells us there has “never been a more dangerous time.”
It was Stockhouse member gabrielgray who called Jim Willie, Ph.D. the “Stephen King of newsletter writers,” and he his not wrong. At the Cambridge House Resource Investment Conference in Toronto last weekend, Willie was in fine form as he addressed an audience of two hundred listeners Saturday morning: “Many people think I’m crazy. I. Don’t. Care.”
There wasn’t much new in Willie’s presentation for those who are familiar with his work. He said that the inflation/deflation debate is “moronic,” and that inflation is “absolutely staggering.” There is “mammoth price inflation coming” because of the monetary policy of the U.S. Fed and the Treasury, organizations which, in Willie’s words, are “stupid.”
He argued that it is “not hard to forecast if you give up all your assumptions.” Start with a clean slate, observe the situation, and make your case. Willie is calling the US dollar rally the ultimate bull trap “before it gets crunched,” and even more ominously, he’s calling down the road for a U.S. Treasury bond default. The “dollar will vanish, gold will reign supreme.”
Willie believes that all of the bank mergers going on right now are like “the dead marrying the dead;” even the supposedly sound ones are insolvent because “fractional banking doesn’t work.”
In interesting side note, Willie said that his research has turned up that Canadian banks are exposed to $800 billion worth of credit default swaps (CDS), and that of the Big Five Banks, Royal Bank (TSX: T.RY, Stock Forum) is the most at risk. In comparison, U.S. institutions have $16 trillion worth of exposure. He didn’t state his source.
Willie also briefly mentioned that there is talk of a U.S. “bank holiday,” something that Thom Calandra also caught wind of and reported on yesterday in the Stockhouse exclusive Odds say a bank break.
His insistence that everything going on in the financial system right now is somehow tied to organized crime and narcotics trafficking certainly pushes Willie’s argument toward the who-is-this-joker threshold, and more than one person in the audience was observed shaking a head or stifling a smile.
That didn’t stop Willie from taking his argument all the way to the endgame: “I’m calling for death on the streets, that’s what I’m calling for!”
Oh, and buy gold.
