Jim Rickards agrees with Peter Schiff – the United States is already in a recession. However, the Federal Reserve and Wall Street economists won’t realize this until long after the fact, because the models they use to forecast are deeply flawed. Rickards predicts that the Fed will begin another round of monetary easing in March of 2016. What form will it take? Rickards isn’t sure, but he lays out five options:

Even at zero [percent interest rates], there are five ways to ease. They can do QE4. They can do helicopter money. They can do currency wars – cheapen the dollar. They can do negative interest rates. The other way to do it is forward guidance, which is just talking. I actually expect they’ll reintroduce forward guidance. So gold is just a cross trade. If the dollar gets weaker, then the dollar price of gold is going to go back up again…”

(Video length 00:05:36)

Highlights from the interview:

“This is a very big deal. We are inside the second recession inside the new depression. You know my view. We’ve been in a depression since 2007. People say, ‘How can it be a depression? Growth isn’t declining around the world.’ That isn’t the definition of a depression. You can be in a depression when growth is below trend. Trend is 3.5-4%. You’re growing about 1 or 2. That’s depressed growth – lost output and enormous lost wealth. So we’ve been in a depression, by that measure, since 2007. But now we’re in the second technical recession within the depression. It’s just starting. The official referee – The National Bureau of Economic Research – they usually call it a year after it starts. So don’t wait for them to tell you it’s a recession; you can see it today…

“Clearly, [the Federal Reserve] is not going to raise rates. I said a year ago in November 2014 that they were not going to raise rates in all of 2015. Wall Street was saying March, then they said June, then they said September, now they’re saying December. The Fed’s not going to raise rates. The Fed can’t raise rates, because the economy is weakening. You don’t raise rates in a recession. The time to raise rates was 2010, maybe 2011, when the economy had a little more strength. The Fed missed an entire cycle. But two wrongs don’t make a right. The fact that they blundered then doesn’t mean they should blunder again now, raising rates in a recession. They’ve got to ease at this point…