Addison Wiggin

Addison Wiggin
Wiggin in 2024
Born	(1969-03-04) March 4, 1969 Stratham, New Hampshire
Education	St. John's College (Annapolis, Santa Fe), Western Colorado University
Occupation(s)	Writer, publisher, filmmaker
Known for	Empire of Debt, The Demise of the Dollar, I.O.U.S.A.

Addison Wiggin is an American financial writer, publisher, and documentary filmmaker. He is the author or co‑author of several New York Times bestselling books, including Empire of Debt, The Demise of the Dollar, and Financial Reckoning Day. In 2008, he served as executive producer of the Sundance‑screened documentary I.O.U.S.A., which was ranked by Roger Ebert among the top five documentaries of the year for its explanation of the national debt, trade deficit, and declining U.S. savings rate.^[1]

Wiggin is currently the founder and editor of the Grey Swan Investment Fraternity, a research and editorial initiative focused on identifying financial threats to the market while equipping independent investors with strategies to navigate them. He also formerly hosted The Wiggin Sessions, a pandemic-era long-form interview series featuring economists, market contrarians, and financial historians.

Wiggin began his publishing career at Agora Inc., where he worked for nearly three decades. With Bill Bonner, he co‑founded The Daily Reckoning in 1999, one of the earliest financial newsletters delivered entirely by email. In one early essay, Wiggin warned that relying on technology to defy fundamental financial principles was misguided.

From 1999 to 2016, Wiggin served as editorial director of The Daily Reckoning, helping grow its readership to over one million. He also created The 5 Min. Forecast and Rude Awakening (2006–2018), which combined financial news with contrarian macroeconomic insights.

During the COVID‑19 pandemic, Wiggin hosted The Wiggin Sessions, a long‑form interview series on YouTube featuring investors and economists including Jim Rickards, Steve Forbes, and Bill Bonner. The show covered themes such as stimulus‑driven inflation, gold as an economic hedge, and the implications of digital currencies.^[2]

Wiggin has said that private investment, not government funding, is the crucial factor in advancing economic recovery.^[3]

In a 2005 article for The New York Times Magazine, Stephen Metcalf described Wiggin as bullish on gold and critical of the Federal Reserve and American indebtedness:^[4]

The narrative Wiggin spun out for me over lunch is repeated, nearly verbatim, by almost everyone in the gold community. "This is the blow-off phase for the Great Dollar Era. We're in an unsustainable trend right now," Wiggin told me, ticking off the miscalculations that have brought us to the brink of an economic apocalypse. To begin with, the U.S. has become the world's biggest debtor, with three outstanding obligations at alarming highs: consumer debt, or our mortgages and credit cards; the federal deficit; and our current account deficit with foreign countries. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Wiggin continued, has simply shifted one bubble -- the 90's bubble in stocks and bonds -- into another, in real estate and "overconsumption," or the American propensity to pay for an ever-more-lavish lifestyle on credit.

His early work concerned the fraud that came with the dot Com Bubble of the early 2000s. Later, he was identified as one of the people who forecasted the Financial Panic of 2008 when Time magazine named him part of “The Armageddon Gang”.^[5]

Economists, business executives and government officials make worried pronouncements about this very predicament from time to time. But they usually stop short of apocalypse. "There are a lot of people who get the analysis of the situation correct, but then they say the U.S. economy is very resilient and if we just fix a few structural flaws we'll be fine," explains Empire of Debt co-author Wiggin. "My view is that generally it takes a crisis to get people to act." If you agree with Wiggin, then former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's legendary ability to pilot us past market jitters and avert major economic dislocations is something not to be praised but to be condemned.

In a June 2011 interview with America's Radio News, Wiggin expressed concern about a series of asset bubbles and related trends in government spending.

...The financial markets in 2001 and 2002 got crushed because of the dot-com bubble, and then we saw that again in 2006 and 2007. Expected revenues from rising house prices never materialized, because the housing market fell apart. The country is addicted to these asset bubbles. And politicians, while making their budgets—it happens at all levels, at state, local, federal and with all the agencies—they kind of plan the spending based on anticipated revenues from these rising asset bubbles. But when the asset bubbles fall apart, when the housing bubble crashes, and when the stock market goes down, those revenues never materialize, but the spending continues.^[6]

Over the years, he’s lectured and developed business strategy across 6 continents. Millions of readers have followed his economic research, financial advice, and off-the-grid investment ideas. Notable interview subjects and associates have included Warren Buffett, Alan Greenspan, Robert Ruin, Arthur Laffer, Ron Paul, Steve Forbes, Jim Rickards, Alex Green, Porter Stansberry, Bill Bonner, and Martin Armstrong.

Wiggin served as executive publisher for Agora Publishing for 18 years. During his tenure he founded Agora Financial and Paradigm Press.^[7]

Another Agora Inc. subsidiary, Agora Entertainment, was created to finance the production of I.O.U.S.A., a feature-length documentary film directed by Patrick Creadon. Wiggin served as executive producer of the film and co-authored a companion book of the same title with Kate Incontrera.^[8] The documentary was entered in the Sundance Film Festival in 2008.^[9] Film critic Roger Ebert named I.O.U.S.A. one of the top five documentary films of 2008.^[10]

Wiggin’s books challenge mainstream economic thinking, particularly around debt, monetary policy, and financial cycles.

In Financial Reckoning Day (2003, with Bill Bonner), Wiggin and Bonner argued that speculative manias often collapse in panic and predicted a prolonged period of stagnation resulting from excessive consumer and federal debt.^[11]

In The Demise of the Dollar (2005), Wiggin described the long-term decline of the U.S. currency as both a challenge to American economic dominance and an opportunity for strategic investors.^[12]

In Empire of Debt (2006, with Bonner), the authors drew historical parallels between American fiscal policy and the decline of past empires, arguing that U.S. global influence was increasingly reliant on borrowed money.^[13]

Following the 2008 financial crisis, Wiggin co-authored I.O.U.S.A. (2008) with Kate Incontrera, presenting four areas of long-term imbalance in the U.S. economy—budget, savings, trade, and leadership—based on interviews with Warren Buffett, David Walker, and others.^[14]

Subsequent works including The New Empire of Debt (2009), Financial Reckoning Day Fallout (2009), and The Little Book of the Shrinking Dollar (2012) expanded on these themes. In his 2023 update, The Demise of the Dollar: From the Bailouts to the Pandemic and Beyond, Wiggin analyzed the long-term effects of 2008 bailouts and COVID‑era stimulus programs on U.S. monetary policy.^[15]