Jim Rickards: The Man Behind the AI Black Paper

Jim Rickards is not a typical newsletter publisher. He served as an advisor to the CIA and Pentagon, and he was called in to help negotiate the bailout of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) in 1998. As he tells it, they called me in to help negotiate a bailout with the Fed. In fact, in the book When Genius Failed they detail the whole story, plus the five long days I spent on the phone with the Federal Reserve. We likely saved the U.S. economy that day.

His track record includes sending a warning to intelligence officials in Washington in 2006, two years before the subprime meltdown. The CIA circulated his thesis among its senior staff, and it appeared in the CIA’s official journal, Studies in Intelligence. He then testified before Congress in 2007 and supplied the Treasury Department with a plan to avert the crisis. Three weeks later, Lehman Brothers collapsed. His team claims to have helped subscribers achieve gains as high as 468% during the 2008 financial crisis.

Rickards founded Strategic Intelligence roughly 15 years ago, focusing on complexity theory, geopolitical shifts, and capital flows. He claims fewer than 10 people in the world know how to properly apply complexity theory to financial markets, which positions his analysis as genuinely unique. His political track record includes predicting Brexit in 2016, Donald Trump’s victories in both 2016 and 2024, and the Ukraine war. His team also says it warned readers about the Covid crash three weeks before it began and published a pandemic thesis four months before the first reported case.

Rickards’ current work at Strategic Intelligence focuses on the AI bubble. His AI Black Paper presentation argues that AI is in a Minsky Moment bubble that is 17 times larger than the dotcom bubble. The scale of the AI bubble is staggering. Rickards cites JP Morgan’s Chair of Investment Strategy, who noted that three-quarters of gains in the S&P 500 since the launch of ChatGPT came from AI-related stocks. Without those AI-driven gains, the S&P 500 would be worth roughly half what it is today. AI expenditures accounted for 92% of GDP growth, meaning AI-related spending now contributes more to the nation’s GDP growth than all consumer spending combined.

Nvidia, which designs the advanced chips at the heart of the AI boom, became the first company in history worth $5 trillion. That single stock represents almost 20% of all U.S. GDP. As Rickards points out, Nvidia does not even manufacture its own chips. Taiwan Semiconductor and other manufacturers build them. Nvidia just draws up the designs.

Rickards pinpoints August 26th as the date the final domino could drop. This is when AI companies like Nvidia, Meta, and Coreweave release their earnings statements. He argues that a single earnings miss could be the pin that pricks the bubble. He draws a historical parallel to March 20, 2000, when Barron’s published an article called Burning Up warning that at least 50 dotcom companies would run out of money within 12 months. Within a week, stocks began to crater. Pets.com, which had IPO’d just one month earlier, plummeted 67% within a month and was bankrupt within nine months.

Rickards also points to September 28, 2007, when NetBank collapsed, marking the beginning of the subprime mortgage cascade. The Minsky Moment always takes everyone by surprise, he says. One day the market is beginning to soar. The next day, a single sobering report comes out and reality sets in.

Some of the most successful investors in the world are already exiting AI stocks. Stanley Druckenmiller, who predicted the 2008 financial crisis, has sold all his Nvidia and Palantir shares. Peter Thiel, a techno-optimist and venture capitalist, sold his entire Nvidia stake. Michael Burry made a $1.1 billion bet against AI. Paul Tudor Jones has said this is so much more potentially explosive than 1999. Jeremy Grantham, who once managed over $118 billion in assets, stated: This is obviously a bubble. The probabilities it doesn’t bust are slim to none. Former SEC Chairman Gary Gensler said AI will be the center of the future financial crisis. Even Sam Altman has admitted: A lot of people are going to lose a phenomenal amount of money.

The AI Black Paper presentation promotes Strategic Intelligence, Rickards’ monthly newsletter from Paradigm Press. The price is $49 for 6 months, originally $299, an 83% discount that works out to about $8 per month. The guarantee is 3 months: subscribers can request a full refund for any reason within that window and keep all reports.

The package includes six months of Strategic Intelligence plus six special reports: AI Fallout (the biggest AI losers to remove from your portfolio immediately), The AI Black Paper Blueprint (his personal million-dollar roadmap), AI Meltdown Insurance (how to profit from the coming crash), Trump’s AI Arsenal (how investing in AI superweapons could turn $1,000 into $162,000), The Perfect Physical Gold Portfolio, and How to Make Your Home Your Personal Fortress.

Where to Learn More

For the complete analysis, read our AI Black Paper review covering Jim Rickards’ full thesis on the AI Minsky Moment.

Read our guide to portfolio protection strategies for the AI age.

Learn more about the AI Minsky Moment framework in our dedicated explainer.

Ready to explore Jim Rickards’ full research? Learn more about Strategic Intelligence here.

This is not financial advice. Always do your own research before investing.