Jim Rickards: The Economic Collapse WILL NOT Happen Overnight!

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Over the coming months, I believe we could see an economic meltdown at least six times the size of the 2007 subprime mortgage meltdown.

This time, however, there will be several crucial differences that will leave investors and regulators unprepared.

The next financial collapse, already on our radar screen, will not come from hedge funds or home mortgages. It will come from junk bonds, especially energy-related and emerging-market corporate debt.

 

The Financial Times recently estimated that the total amount of energy-related corporate debt issued from 2009-2014 for exploration and development is over $5 trillion. Meanwhile, the Bank for International Settlements recently estimated that the total amount of emerging-market dollar-denominated corporate debt is over $9 trillion.

Energy-sector debt has been called into question because of the collapse of oil prices. And emerging markets debt has been called into question because of a global growth slowdown, global deflation, and the strong dollar.

The result is a $14 trillion pile of corporate debt that cannot possibly be repaid or rolled over under current economic conditions. Not all of this debt will default, but a lot of it will. Most of the energy related debt was issued in the expectation that oil would remain in the $80 to $130 dollar per barrel range. 

Most of the emerging markets debt was issued with the expectation that the dollar would remain at its weak 2011 levels. Instead oil is down, and the dollar is up, which capsizes these expectations. The moves have been swift and dramatic. Over the past six months, oil has crashed 52%, while the U.S. Dollar Index rose 15%.
 

If default rates are only 10% — a conservative assumption — this corporate debt fiasco will be six times larger than the subprime losses in 2007. The world is looking at a debt catastrophe much larger than LTCM in 1998 and the mortgage market in 2008. Regulators are completely unprepared for this because they have been busy fighting the last war.

The good news for investors is that this fiasco will not happen overnight. It will take a year or two to play out. The panic of September 1998 started a year earlier, in Thailand in June 1997. The panic of September 2008 also started a year earlier, in August 2007, when CNBC commentator Jim Cramer screamed, “They know nothing!!” on live television in reference to the Federal Reserve.

This new junk debt fiasco started in the summer of 2014 but will not reach its peak until 2016 or later. Even companies and countries with dim prospects often have enough cash on hand to make payments for a while before they actually default. In the meantime, you can profit.

The bond defaults have not happened yet, but our intelligence triggers are already visible in the form of lower oil prices and the strong dollar. In intelligence analysis, we don’t wait for disasters to happen. We look at today’s information, what we call “indications and warnings,” and use inferential techniques such as inverse probability to see the future.

The strong dollar is deflationary. This means oil prices will likely remain low. This means much of the energy-sector debt cannot be paid off and will default. The defaults have not happened yet, but you can see them coming. There is still an opportunity for you to profit from the coming collapse in junk bonds, but the time to act is now.

Excerpts from an article written by Jim Rickards.

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