I watched the 2 hour Rickards video prorgram and it was 2 hours every well spent as he covered off on a myriad of macro economic topics dealings with threats to the US, etc. I like Rickards and consider him one of the smartest persons in the room plus he has a very analytical mind which I appreciate and a rare gift of being to drill down very complex subjects and make them better understood.

In his presentation he talked of gold pegged at around $7000 dollars per ounce to secure and back a new gold standard currency regime. This was arrived at by calculating the money supply changes, etc., since the 1971 Nixon closing of the gold window and was using a frantional banking system approach. Part of the Rickards scenario required the confiscation of the 6000 tonnes of gold stored at the NY Fed for other countries and giving them an IOU at today price and then re-valuing gold at the $7000 peg price. So the US would control over 14,000 tonnes of gold in total. BTW, the highest US gold inventory ever was about 18,000 tonnes sometime after WW2. It also required an open gold window purchase and sale program at the peg price.

No attempt was made to use the total valuation of derivatves as this has no relationship that I'm aware of to money supply. Keep in my that most of those derivatives in today's system are not liabilities as they have counter parties. He did quantify the US total public/private debt plus unfunded liablities at over $100 trillion. Rickards numbers made sense to me as he presented his approach and it will be the last recourse after QE2, QE3, and QE4 all provide sub-standard results which will all likely happen unless there are guargantuan changes in US policy which is highly doubtful.

For sure Rickards outlined the options and the US has options but they don't seem yet to have the will to chose or accept the pain that is required. They better not wait much longer though because the options decline and get draconian the longer they wait.