Since the release of his successful 2011 book, Currency Wars, Jim Rickards has gained considerable popularity among investors, libertarians, and conspiracy theorists. I personally liken him to a name-dropping version of Peter Schiff who can’t help but tell you what political celebrity he just had dinner and fancy wine with such as IMF chairwoman Christine Legarde or former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner. His latest book, Aftermath, is the forth in what he calls an “international monetary quartet”, and highlights the current state of the world economy and how his readers can plan ahead for the coming chaos.

To start, Rickards can’t help himself by promoting mercantilism and denigrating free trade in chapter one. This was a major theme in his last book, The Road to Ruin, and it became obvious at the time that he was appealing to a more populist crowd with the election of Donald Trump. The rest of the chapter is largely a waste to those interested in economics and finance. Rickards tells a somewhat aimless story about his interactions with numerous government agencies like the CIA, NCIX, and the CFIUS, and tops it off by mentioning a personal rendezvous he has with two Russian agents whom he likens to Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale from The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. It’s safe to say the reader can skip the first 50 pages of this book and not miss anything important.

Chapter 2 gives a brief history of the role of debt in the U.S. economy. From before it was even a nation until the 1980’s, The U.S. embraced a starve-the-beast, feed-the-beast style of government finance:

The beast is the U.S. government with its voracious appetite for tax-payer funds. Feeding the beast refers to huge deficits to support expanded spending. Starving the beast refers to spending cuts and fiscal prudence. These alternating bouts of spending increases and spending cuts amplified by tax increases or tax cuts make deficits larger or smaller than they would be based on baseline spending alone. The problem is that feed-the-beast, starve-the-beast strategies were used by successive administrations to tie the hands of their successors, with ruinous results. This recurring and destructive dynamic combined with the simple math of growth and deficits has lead the United States to the dolorous debt condition it finds itself in today.

This is the essential theme throughout the rest of Rickards’ book. He states that Reagan ended this cycle and started what has become a feed-the-beast, feed-the-beast mentality for the U.S. government. Looking at important figures such as the debt-to-GDP ratio as well as recent studies by economists, he shows how the ability of governments to increase deficits to spur growth is inhibited by high debt levels relative to the growth rate of the economy.

The most intriguing aspect of the book is chapter 3, “Find the Cost of Freedom.” In his previous books, Rickards has criticized economists for overlooking the behavioral aspects of psychology in their work on macroeconomics, emphasizing the rejection of what they call homo economus. While he still has that perspective, he finds that the work of behavioral economists such as Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein is quite suspect in its implementation. By administering “choice architecture”, intellectuals can alter consumers’ choices by presenting alternative choices in a multitude of ways. Using “nudges” and framing techniques, these elite minds can steer people towards making better economic and life decisions which, in the aggregate, will benefit society. What’s wrong with this? “Almost everything,” says Rickards.

He proceeds to point out the deficiencies in the behavioral perspective. One is its indifference towards learning. We learn by making errors, by failing. Pain, suffering, and disappointment are great teachers, and have lasting affects on people’s choices (which is the second point that nudging does not have these lasting effects). By not allowing individuals to learn from mistakes, Thaler and Sunstein prefer “automatons to autonomy.” Rickards is even s bold as to say that these intellectuals are suggesting a mechanism which could reach totalitarian levels if government gets involved. It’s ironic that they have criticisms of people’s imperfect knowledge of economic choices, yet bring their own biases and irrationality into the equation. The chapter is quite good and one of Rickards’ best in the entire series.

The rest of the book is precisely what you’d expect. The world of finance of is covered, and ever the contrarian, Rickards does not hesitate to make some spirited claims like there being a bubble in index funds due to certain flaws in passive investing such as hypersynchronicity. He wastes no time in advocating investment into gold and hard assets as a result of the “everything bubble”. He even states, “Bubble dynamics appear in stocks, bonds, real estate, auto loans, student loans, emerging markets, crypto currencies, and beyond. The result as no surprise to an Austrian school economist. The everything bubble is classic malinvestment – the misallocation of savings – that accompanies easy money. Rickards even hints at using Ludwig von Mises’ money relation concept several times throughout his writing.

Chapters five and six cover both the history of the major world monetary conferences in the last 200 years, and the current battle for power among different economic schools of thought. The neo-Keynesians, post-Keynesians, and modern monetary theorists all have their own opinions on how the U.S. monetary regime should operate, yet it is the neo-Keynesians who have the most influence. Rickards explains how the current debt problem and monetary causes of it are mostly to blame on the failure of past leaders, intellectuals, and economists who would occasionally gather for international monetary conferences when a central bank or government would print too much money or spend to much, resulting in recessions, depressions, bank crises, or potential default. Examples of this took place in Genoa (1922), Bretton Woods (1944), Washington (1971), New York (1985), and Paris (1987). Rickards states that every monetary system in recent memory has established “the rules of the game” which are quite often violated in one way or another. He sees the future in which there are no rules to the game, or the rules are greatly changed.

The end of the book is quite populist. Rickards once again speaks of tariffs, trade wars, income inequality, universal basic income (UBI), and currency devaluation. He seems to slightly change his mind in saying that long-term stagnation is a likely outcome of the global debt-to-GDP ratio of 225%, rather than hyperinflation. He lists several possibilities for a new monetary system (or several) that could occur during this period. The most interesting one is a crypto-gold system that Russia and China are attempting. They collectively own 15% of the world’s above-ground gold (5000 tons), and Rickards suspects they have the motive and the means to avert a dollar crises despite them being a large holder of dollar-denominated debt. Another possibility he lists is an SDR-based system that can be loosely linked to gold. This is not the first time he’s mentioned special drawing rights of the IMF. Whatever the possibilities, Rickards is correct to identify the global debt situation as a real problem in the long-run. In sum, Aftermath is a flawed but fascinating investigation into our debt-addicted, spend-crazed beast of a government which should be starved before it’s too late.