TODAY’S CURRENCY AND FINANCIAL WARS 125The problem is, once one country tries to cheapen their
currency, another country cheapens its currency, and so on
causing a race to the bottom. It’s a kind of struggle that’s pri-
marily economic.
Financial wars are different. Financial war is just the con-
tinuation of traditional war by different means. Instead of
using missiles or ships or drones, you use stocks, bonds and
derivatives. Another difference is that the goal isn’t economic
gain; it’s economic advantage or political gain.
That means the goals of financial war include damaging
your enemies’ infrastructure, impairing their markets, increase
their costs or interest rates. In other words, the goal is to dam-
age your opponent’s economy.
What does warfare do? It damages the enemy’s’ economy. You
transfer wealth from them to you. Financial war is no different. If
another nation or group wanted to defeat the United States, they
can’t do it militarily. But they might do it economically.
■ Financial Wars Are Coming to the Fore
Financial warfare is not a metaphor — it’s real. There’s real
financial warfare going on now. It has been for years and will
continue in the future.
If you think of a traditional Venn diagram: one big circle
is the world of national security, intelligence and defense.
Another big circle is the world of capital markets, stocks,
bonds, commodities, derivatives, etc. Think of the intersection
of the two, that’s what we’re talking about.
That intersection is getting bigger, more important, and
there are very few people standing in the middle. There are
brilliant practitioners on both sides — on the military side and
on the financial side. But the number of people who are really
conversing with both worlds is few. That’s going to be more and
more important to you as an investor on a going-forward basis.