A global monetary crisis is “sneaking up on us,” according to New York Times bestselling author James Rickards, which could be dramatically intensified by modern markets no longer equipped to handle an AI-driven shock.

Speaking with Michelle Makori, President & Editor-in-Chief of Miles Franklin Media, on The Real Story with Michelle Makori, Rickards said the world faces a dangerous convergence of systemic financial fragility and automated trading systems that react faster than human intervention allows.

“A global monetary crisis is perhaps more likely and perhaps coming sooner,” Rickards said. “That’s sneaking up on us and people really don’t understand it.”

For the signals Rickards is keeping an eye on, watch the video above.

Rickards, a former advisor to the U.S. intelligence community and a principal negotiator in the Federal Reserve-backed rescue of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, said the next crisis may not resemble past financial panics. Instead, he warned that artificial intelligence could act as a force multiplier, accelerating market stress beyond the reach of traditional safeguards.

“In the age of AI, circuit breakers don’t work,” Rickards said. “In effect, the robots have taken over.”

On possible outcomes and how this scenario plays out, watch the video above.

Gold Outlook and the Absence of a Retail Frenzy

Rickards reiterated his view that gold could reach $10,000 an ounce by the end of 2026, a forecast he said would not surprise him given how price moves compound at higher levels.

“What they don’t realize, at least not right away, is that each thousand dollars increment is easier than the one before because you’re working off a higher base,” he said. “When you go from $2,000 to $3,000, that's a 50% increase. That's a heavy lift … But when you go from $9,000 to $10,000, that's only 11%. That's kind of like a good month the way gold's been going.”

Despite gold’s strong performance, Rickards said a key signal of market excess has not yet appeared.

“What we haven’t seen, and this is very bullish for gold, we haven’t seen the retail frenzy stage,” he said, recalling the late-1970s gold boom. “That was the retail frenzy stage. You had popular journalists saying, ‘sell everything and buy gold’.”

“We’re not at that stage,” he added.

AI, Deepfakes and Market Panic

An additional risk, Rickards said, lies in how artificial intelligence now dominates market decision-making. He described a scenario in which deepfake technology could fabricate statements from senior officials, triggering automated selling before verification is possible.

Bad actors could digitally clone the most powerful central banker in the world, giving a speech that he never gave, Rickards described in his latest book MoneyGPT. And within minutes, the markets are reacting. “The AI trading systems are trained to react to language cues,” he added. “They scrape headlines, they parse speeches, they respond milliseconds.”

According to Rickards, the speed and uniformity of AI-driven responses remove the stabilizing role once played by human discretion. “It’s full automation,” he said. “The market would go straight down in that scenario.”

Crisis Sequence: Monetary Stress First, AI Second

Pressed by Makori on which threat is likely to emerge first, Rickards said a traditional monetary crisis may precede an AI-driven collapse – though the two could feed on each other.

“But that could have actually happen before an AI collapse,” Rickards said. “Either one could happen. But they could exacerbate each other. In other words, the monetary crisis could come, banks could start to fail, and then AI could amplify the collapse,” he said. “So that would be a worst-case scenario.”

Rickards said investors should rethink diversification, arguing that owning multiple stocks does not protect against systemic collapse.

“You may have 50 stocks, but you have one asset class,” he said. “They will be highly correlated at exactly the time when you don’t want them to be.”

He reiterated his long-standing recommendation that investors hold physical gold as a form of financial insurance.

“That’s your reserve,” Rickards said. “It can’t be frozen. It can’t be locked in by the FDIC or the U.S. government or anybody else.”

Rickards’ latest book, MoneyGPT, examines how artificial intelligence, trust, and institutional breakdown could reshape markets and money itself. While the book outlines extreme scenarios, Rickards said its purpose is warning, not prediction. “All this technology exists. It’s being used,” he said. “This could happen tomorrow.”