Global BUST Into Money Printing 'Like Never Before' - Then $20k Gold, $1k Silver: David Hunter

I’m calling for a global bust, which I believe is something bigger than 2008–09 in terms of a credit crisis. When the financial system is free-falling, you will see money coming out of every corner of every central bank, to the tune of, I think, maybe $20 trillion or more from the Fed. We’re going to see money like there’s never been money printed before.

I’m calling for silver to go to 200 this cycle, and I’m calling for gold to go to 7,000 this cycle. Then I’m calling for probably 20,000 in 2032 or 2033, because the demand for commodities is going to be huge. As that demand outstrips supply by a big amount, the only thing that can give is price, straight up.

Where would you be looking in the market today for potential opportunity?

There are still 2- and 3-year returns ahead of us that are going to happen in a matter of months.

David Hunter, great to have you back on Commodity Culture. Let’s start off with how you’re currently viewing the broad market, because you’ve been calling for a blow-off top followed by a major global bust. We’ve certainly seen the big indices continue to rise higher since our last conversation, continuing to hit new all-time highs. Valuations continue to look very stretched here. How much higher could we go before it all eventually falls apart, in your view?

1. The Blowoff Top Continues

Hi, Jesse. Great to see you again. I remain very bullish. Since we last talked—I guess it’s been several months—I’ve raised targets again. I’m at 10,000 on the S&P, 36,000 on the Nasdaq, 4,000 on the Russell, and I’m up to 70,000 on the Dow.

So there’s still a ways to go. I haven’t done the numbers lately, but you’re talking in the range of 25% or 30%, depending on the index, still to go. I think those are targets for this year. I don’t do year-end targets, but I think we’ll get there this year.

I think we’re probably in the parabolic phase. If you look at it on a monthly basis, we have gone more vertical. We won’t know until after the fact if this is indeed the parabolic phase or whether we consolidate again for a month or 2 and go higher, but I think there’s a pretty good chance we just keep going here.

There’ll be 1%, 2%, 3%, or 4% pullbacks, depending on the index. I’m not saying it’s straight up, but it’s pretty much clear sailing from here. As I’ve been saying for a long time, particularly institutional investors have fought this thing from the October 2022 low. They’ve remained skeptical, so there’s been a wall of worry to draw from. That’s the fuel for the next advance.

Each time we sold off, they got more bearish, and that just meant that as it turned back up, they’d be chasing. We’re at the point now where you’re starting to see targets raised more aggressively. There are 7 or 8 strategists out there over 8,000 now.

I’ve been way above the Street for a long time and remain way above the Street in terms of my targets, but you are seeing more catch-up now. You’re seeing, at least on the sell side, the strategists starting to realize this thing has legs. They’re still not at the point of understanding that the blow-off—the vertical part of this—can cover a lot of ground in a hurry.

You’re starting to see it. I think Denny’s got 8,400, and there are a couple of guys out there at 8,200. You’re starting to see it, and I think those numbers are going to continue to rise right into the fall and maybe a little beyond. To me, it’s as bullish as can be. There’s trouble on the other side of this, but for now, I think there’s very strong momentum ahead.

2. Why Markets Ignore Iran

If you had told most analysts before this war in Iran, before rumors of it starting were swirling and before, of course, it kicked off—let’s say we’re back in mid-2025—“Hey, there’s going to be basically a full-blown war in the Middle East, the Strait of Hormuz is going to be closed effectively, we’re going to lose 20% of the world’s energy supplies, and we’re going to lose fertilizer and fertilizer inputs,” I think most analysts would probably have said, “Well, we’re probably going to see a big correction in the broad market at that point.” Yet that hasn’t been the case at all. It’s been pretty surprising to a lot of analysts out there. What’s your take on why the market seems to be completely ignoring or discounting this conflict and the closure of the strait?

Not to mention that if somebody told you 2 years ago that we were going to have tariffs, and that they were going to be big tariffs, at least for a while, people—just as they did in April 2025—would have sold the market down and not expected it to go up. It continues to fight all these things that can cause a lot of concern and worry.

In this case, I think we entered this with oil. We were awash with oil around the globe, and inventories were pretty strong. Obviously, we’ve drawn down inventories, and you still hear a narrative out there that oil is going to go to 150 because there just isn’t enough out there. That’s all proving false. OPEC is having to constrain oil because prices go down.

I think, short-term, you can get oil up into the high 80s, but I don’t think it’s going much beyond that. Obviously, it’s down from 120 on the original spike. It’s amazing to me, and the media has a lot to do with this, to look at the annihilation that we carried out in terms of the military in Iran.

I realize they’ve got drones and cheap technology that can cause a nuisance, but we’ve taken out their air force and navy pretty much. We’ve eliminated an awful lot of their threat. People can argue that they’re rebuilding their nuclear capability while we sit here in a pause, but I have a hard time believing that.

I think people hear the media, which is very much anti-Trump and TDS and anti-American, and they just take it at face value. You don’t all of a sudden rebuild a nuclear capability in a matter of months while you’re fighting and trying to survive. It doesn’t make any sense, and yet people believe that. Even on Wall Street, you’ve got people believing those things.

I see that all as contributing to the wall of worry, and the market, in its aggregate and its infinite wisdom, continues to recognize the real truth, which is that Iran is becoming less and less of a threat. We’ve got the blockade in place. Their currency has been decimated. It’s hurting the whole country, and we don’t want to hurt the Iranian people, but they’re on board with this too because they want that regime gone.

I’m not nearly as bearish as everybody else about how this is being executed, or what it’s doing in terms of the Strait of Hormuz, or any of that. I really do think that if we’re patient and sit back here, it’s not going to be a long time before Iran has to, one way or the other, surrender.

How that all works out—in an agreement or through a takedown of the regime—I’m not sure. I’m not naive, and I do understand that people don’t want boots on the ground. It’s very hard to finish the job without boots on the ground.

More than anything, Trump doesn’t want to destroy the economy for the people, so he’s been a little more measured. Lots of armchair generals think we should just go in, bomb the hell out of them, and get it done. That’s nice to talk about or conduct in a video game. It’s just not reality. I think Trump is showing good restraint, not bad restraint.

3. Reading The Market Top

What are the signs you’ll be looking for that we are reaching the top? You mentioned a 10,000 target on the S&P. Also, how hard and how sharp could the drop-off be afterward? For those who are long the market, if you stay long for an extended period of time and don’t see the warning signs that the market is rolling over, you could get caught and end up having a lot of your capital wiped out. How do you mitigate that sort of risk?

Obviously, as a contrarian, and throughout my career, sentiment plays a big role. When you’re trying to time a top—which everybody is advised not to do by all of the financial industry—but if you are trying to figure out when the top is, it’s usually driven by sentiment.

You get to a point where people are over the top with bullishness. They aren’t being conservative with their money. They’re getting reckless because it’s easy money. That’s a little of what we saw earlier in AI and things like that.

Once it gets really heated, as I say, once the Street is all in and retail is all in, when everybody’s saying, “This thing has legs. It’s going to run for a year or 2 or 3,” you’re beginning to hear that. You do have some of the strategists out there talking about, “There’s nothing that can disrupt this for a while.”

They look at semiconductors and memory, and they say, “The demand is so strong, it’s not like past semiconductor cycles. It’s going to be a couple of years before they can come online with capacity to meet it.” Nobody’s talking about double-ordering. Nobody’s talking about the fact that it always gets like this, and people always assume it’s going to be extended. Then it all of a sudden stops short, and everybody scrambles for the exit.

So, not just in semis but in the market, I think you’ll see that again. Bear markets haven’t gone extinct. We will have a serious bear market, but we’re just not there yet.

Now, are there warning signs in the economy? Sure. I think the issue—and it’s funny because people are focused on interest rates—is that I think interest rates peaked yesterday. So I don’t think interest rates are the problem.

I think it’s more credit issues. There are a lot of things under the surface: beginning signs of trouble in private credit and private equity, and AI may be getting a little frothy. All those things are there, but they’re not at levels yet where you’ve got to worry that you could wake up tomorrow and things are crashing.

At least, I don’t think so. I think you’ve got months to run before you get to the real trouble spots. So I keep saying we could see a top this year and likely will see a top this year, but this thing has stretched and stretched, so I can’t say it’s impossible that it goes into next year. But I think we’re getting ever closer.

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I think you’ve mentioned before that you think we could see up to an 80% crash in the big indices when this thing does roll over. In the aftermath of such an event, could we experience the lost decades that happened in the Nikkei after the 1990 crash? It took over 20 years to get back to previous highs. Could we be looking at something like that?

That would present a scenario where you don’t necessarily want to be greedy when others are fearful. What is your strategy? How long do you think the bear market could last, and what is your strategy in the aftermath of that drawdown in terms of potentially picking up things on sale?

4. The Bust Rewrites Investing

Yeah, I do think that there are comparisons to 1989 Japan. I’ve said for a while that I think the highs of this market cycle could stand for decades, which is what happened in Japan.

That being said, because I’m calling for a global bust, which I believe is something bigger than 2008–09 in terms of a credit crisis, the one thing that’s the most predictable in my forecast is how central banks and policymakers will respond. They won’t have a choice. If you ask them today, they’d say, “No way. We’re not doing that.” But they won’t have a choice when the financial system is free-falling.

You will see money coming out of every corner of every central bank, to the tune of, I think, maybe $20 trillion or more for the Fed. If you truly have a free-falling financial system, we almost got there in 2008–09 and pulled back from the cliff just in time. If this time we go over that cliff, there’s only one thing that moves quickly, and that’s liquidity in the system—printing money.

I think the most predictable part of the forecast is that, ultimately, we’re going to see money printed like there’s never been money printed before, at least in the world. That means you will have a recovery on the other side. You will have a bull market on the other side, but it won’t be a secular bull market.

We will see a secular top this year, meaning highs for a long time. But if you go down 80% or anything close to 80%, and just using the S&P number I have, it’s 10,000 down to 2,000. That gives you a lot of room if they’re printing $20 trillion in the US. That gives you a lot of room for it to go from 2,000 back to, let’s say, 8,000. You’re still 2,000 short of where it topped out.

I think that might take a year and a half or 2 years, or less, depending on how fast it happens. Beyond that, you’ll see lower highs and lower lows—or at least lower highs, and then ultimately probably lower lows out in the mid-30s.

You can have a period where you can make a lot of money, but if you just buy and hold and follow the mantra that’s been in place since the mid-80s—that “it’s time in the market, not timing the market” is what makes sense—it’s been the correct mantra and the correct strategy for the last 40 years.

But if you follow that through this period, you’re digging out of a very big hole, and you may not get your money back. This idea that we always go to new highs and that if you just buy and hold, don’t worry about it, and passively invest, you’re going to benefit from constant higher highs—that’s not necessarily going to hold.

Secular bull markets, when they’re 40 years old—this one is going on 44 years now—are an eternity for most people in markets. Certainly, there are an awful lot of people in these markets who weren’t around 44 years ago, so it looks like you always have a bull market, a secular bull market. But I think it’s coming to an end, and if it is, and if we get that bear market that I’m talking about, that buy-and-hold strategy is going to fail you.

5. Commodities Lead The Next Cycle

The other piece of it is that every market cycle—not secular, but every cycle—has new leadership. This one has obviously been tech and AI and some other things, but it’s been very much tech.

The next cycle is going to be old industrials and commodities. The Caterpillars of the world will work, and the Deeres of the world will work, but so will silver, gold, copper, and their producers.

The reason for that is because all that money that gets pumped in will, with a lag of a couple of years, jump-start a very big inflation cycle, the likes of which we haven’t seen in 50 years—or 45 years, going back to the early 80s.

It will start gradually. I think the bust will be deflationary, so you’re going to come out of a year of deflation. From there, you’ll see low single digits and then high single digits. By the turn of the decade, in the early next decade, you’ll probably be in double digits, maybe moving up toward 20% or 25% inflation.

The only stocks that can outperform in that environment are stocks that have pricing power and can produce earnings that outstrip that inflation. It’s going to get harder and harder to own growth stocks or slow-growing, stable companies, and it’s going to behoove investors to be in those things that are really moving up with inflation.

I think silver can go from—I’m jumping ahead probably—but I’m calling for silver to go to $200 this cycle, fall back 50%, 60%, 70%, or 75% in the bust, and then go from there. Let’s say it falls back to $50; you could go from $50 to $1,000 in the next cycle.

Gold could fall. I’m calling for $7,000 gold this cycle. It could fall back to $3,500—a 50% retracement—or $4,000, and then I’m calling for $20,000 next cycle, probably in 2032 or 2033, somewhere out there. Those are the kinds of things I’m looking at. Copper could go to $20 or $30. Who knows?

The demand for commodities is going to be huge, and we don’t have the supply. There hasn’t been a lot of new greenfield production, so it’s going to be a case where demand far outstrips supply.

You goose the system with, let’s say, $50 trillion in global money. That produces demand in the areas that are being built out—power, AI, reshoring here in the US, and so on—and that demands commodities in big ways. As that demand outstrips supply by a big amount, the only thing that can give is price, straight up.

The point is that the next cycle will be a very different cycle in terms of leadership. Those who are able to be nimble and go from today’s leadership to the next cycle’s leadership will be in good stead.

Those who just sit passively in the S&P, for example, don’t realize that the old leadership dominates because it moved up so much for a decade or 2 decades. It becomes the highest percentage of the portfolio if you’re in the S&P.

Because of the price moves, tech is a much bigger percentage of the S&P than our commodity stocks, and certainly than our gold or silver producers. So, next cycle, if you just stay with the S&P, your weightings are all backwards.

You’re most heavily weighted—even with the correction and the bear market—in those things that are going to underperform, and most lightly weighted, generally, in those things that are going to become the leaders. So, again, it’s important to understand how the dynamics of a portfolio work and be structured for that.

Great thoughts overall. I just want to pull on one thread there. You mentioned we’ve been in a bull market for 44-plus years. So, are you looking at the dot-com bust and the Great Financial Crisis as more secular—or, sorry, cyclical—downturns within a longer secular bear market? And if so, how will this bear market differ from those 2, which were cyclical?

Yeah, good question.

Yeah, I think it has been a secular bull market going back to August 1982. That's why I say we're right at 44 years. The Dow, just to give people a perspective, was at about 780. I was running money at Textron at that time; I was new to them and had been hired 6 months prior. I said, “Keep your powder dry. We're in a bear market. We'll get a bottom.”

So in August 1982, I went to the investment committee, and the Dow was at slightly below 780—about 780. The Dow's now in the high 50,000s, so the moves are incredible in terms of how much it's advanced over that time. Obviously, the Nasdaq even more, and the S&P has advanced a lot.

That's where the secular bull started, and it was the beginning of disinflation. It was the peaking of inflation, and a lot of the secular bull was driven by P/E multiples expanding as rates went down. It's an inverse correlation.

We're at that point where, in the next year or 2, we're going to reverse that. Rates, I think, can get to 0 in the bust and then begin a long climb from 0. I'm talking about the 10-year—a long climb from 0 to almost 20% as inflation goes from negative to 25%, and T-bills probably go almost to 25%. So you'll get the exact opposite of what you've had the last 44 years, where P/E multiples get compressed. You capitalize the earnings at a much higher interest rate because of compressed P/E multiples.

That's why you have that 44-year secular bull market. Even though rates have 2 more years—maybe another 18 months to go, or more—to a new lower low, the equity market peaks out because it's driven by not just interest rates but also earnings. Earnings will roll over with the economy and the global bust.

The market cycle, the stock market cycle, peaks, I think, this year or certainly soon after that. The bond market secular bull market peaks probably late next year or early in 2028. In that secular bull market, you had many cycles. You did have the dot-com cycle, and you had the housing cycle into 2007 and 2008. We've had different leadership during different periods in there, but we had recessions. Certainly, 2008 and 2009 was a Great Recession. What I think we'll have here is a bust—something I call not a depression because it happens fast, but something bigger than a recession.

6. Silver Targets Keep Rising

Let's dive into commodities a little bit and your price targets there. You mentioned silver. There are only about 4 people on this show who've mentioned $1,000 silver that come to mind: Michael Oliver, Lynette Zang, Francis Hunt, and yourself. Michael Oliver was very bold with his call. He believes silver could go to $1,000 within 1 year. He didn't call for that; he said it wouldn't shock him, so I just want to clarify that for people who are piling on and saying, “This guy's crazy.” He said it wouldn't shock him, but he has pretty high targets.

Could you unpack that a little bit for us? You said you think it's going to go to $200 this cycle, eventually correct in the bust, and then rise again, potentially up to $1,000. Is that correct?

Yep. I can't get there myself to Michael's numbers, but I don't think he's crazy, and I certainly don't discount his experience and knowledge. It's certainly possible to exceed my expectation for this cycle, but right now, $200 is as high as I can get, and I'd raised it. I had it at $125, I think, going into January, then raised it to $170, I think, and then raised it again to $200 at the end of May.

I'm pretty confident with the $200. I just can't get to the $300s, $400s, or $500s that Michael's talked about, and certainly not $1,000. The $1,000 figure for me is probably a 2032 or 2033 type period, but you can drive a truck through how much you can miss that by. It could be 2 years either way.

But it's really the next cycle getting driven, and it comes from a lower level in the bust. I do think the metals will, as they always do, get hit in a big market correction, in a recession, or, in this case, a bigger-than-recession-type downturn.

Those who are very turned off by the fact that silver got to $122, rolled over, and has been down for months—it shook out a lot of weaker hands. As you know, because we've talked about this for years, I was bullish on silver and gold 2, 3, 4 years ago, and it took a while to get going. Gold got going before silver, but silver took a lot of heat because, when it was in the mid-20s, it just couldn't get out of its own way. It would trade, particularly in miners, between the mid-20s and the high teens, and then it got up to 30 and backed off again.

People just didn't believe that it had the kind of legs that I talked about. When it finally broke out and took off, that's when people jumped on the bandwagon. They didn't buy it at 30 or 40; they bought it at 60, 70, or 80. Now they're really upset because they lost money.

That's markets. Once things get too bullish, the market has a way of basically bringing back the discipline and shaking out the weak hands. Because the run from 50 to 122 was parabolic and happened so dramatically, it took months to correct. Looking back, I can say I didn't know that it was going to take 6 or 8 months to get going, but I'm confident now that the 55–56 level was the correct correction bottom and that we have begun the turn.

Obviously, today it's coming out of a little bit of a pullback from yesterday, and it looks like it can go higher. There are still going to be pullbacks. You have to be careful with it. But I do think once it breaks above a certain level—and I'm not sure whether that's it—I see 72 right now as the next stop. I know Michael's probably talking higher than that.

There will be corrections along the way, but I don't think they're going to be long-lasting. They might last days, but not months.

Yeah, and it's interesting to point out that back when silver was range-bound between around the $20–$30 level, people would call you crazy for saying silver would get to $50, let alone $100, let alone—

Right.

—$120.

People who are upset about the silver price today, I mean, what do you want? We're at $65 here. Tell somebody at the beginning of last year, “Silver is going to 65,” and they would've said, “You're either lying or it's life-changing.” But now everybody's crying, so I think that's funny.

Gold: how much of the gold story do you think is a currency-debasement story, and how much of the broad market rising do you think is a currency-debasement story? Obviously, the extreme example we could look at is in hyperinflationary environments, such as Zimbabwe—the stock market went absolutely ballistic. I believe the stock market in the Weimar Republic in Germany went ballistic because of currency depreciation at such a rapid scale.

Do you think currency debasement is behind the rise in gold and the broad stock market as well to some extent? If so, how much?

Yeah, for sure, it plays a role. If you price gold in various currencies, you'll see differences in returns because currency matters. Obviously, the dollar in the last year has been up, and yet gold had a nice run. So it hasn't been the case in the near term.

But I do think the big move from, you know, $4,500, $4,400 or $5,000 here to $7,000, a lot of that is going to be currency. I have the dollar going to 83, something like that, over the course of the next 6 or 9 months, or less. If that happens, it's a big part of the move to $7,000, I think.

It's more than that, though. Obviously, rates coming down—which, as I said, I think rates peaked yesterday. I don't usually try to call things to the day, and I didn't call it, but I don't usually pinpoint things like that. It looks to me like you finally got to max pain, max bearishness, and what Bessent announced today helps.

I have rates going down from here for the next 18 months. It'll start gradually, but ultimately, like I said, you could get the 10-year down to 0. That first move down, let's say from the 4.60%–4.70% area down below 4%, is going to help gold. Rates will be trading down well while gold's moving up and silver's moving up.

Then I think you can get a faster move from there down to 3% or even below. That will be that final move up toward those numbers. As I said, I can only get to $7,000 on gold and $200 on silver, but it won't surprise me if those numbers prove conservative.

7. Japan Becomes The Bust Wildcard

How much trouble is Japan in right now? We just saw the U.S. essentially intervene in the yen market. A lot of people are talking about how this was to stop Japan from selling off a bunch of its Treasuries, considering it's in a pretty precarious situation right now. It's a net oil importer. I think it imports the vast majority of its hydrocarbons, and it gets a lot of those—I believe most of them—from the Middle East, so it's been hit a little bit hard. Although I believe they have made some deals with Iran to get some oil through the Strait.

And then, of course, the yen is dropping and Japanese bond yields are rising to historically very high levels. How much trouble are they in? And if things really go wrong there, could it reverberate throughout the global economy as well?

Yeah. I have said they are kind of the wild card in the bust. We don't really know what's going to trigger the bust or what's going to be the most dramatic piece of the bust. But certainly Japan is right up there as a candidate. They have maintained zero interest rate policy forever, and it basically looked like you could make monetary theory extinct.

You could print money forever and not have inflation. I'm a monetarist, pretty much, and I just think what we're seeing now is what should have been expected. At some point, yes, they are a more homogeneous society, and they had lots of things that helped them keep inflation in check for a while, but now it's breaking out, and so will rates. Rates track inflation, and that's their problem: for decades, they maintained this policy and thought they could get away with it.

Well, guess what? You postpone the monetary response, but it's coming now. I think during the next year you will see rates keep pushing up there, and I don't think they have the leeway to deal with that. I have the yen going—and I do yen-dollar, not dollar-yen—to 0.0085, and it's down around 0.0063-something, 0.00635, say. So I have the yen going pretty high here over the course of the next 6–8 months.

The dollar is obviously going to be down against the euro, the yen, and even the other dollars—the Canadian dollar and the Aussie dollar, et cetera. But I do think that in the bust, Japan is probably going to be one of the places where it's just overleveraged, very overleveraged to that policy. As I have preached over and over, leverage works both ways. On the way up, it enhances returns. We're seeing that here in our markets, in everything we do. And leverage decimates you, as we found out in 2008–09, on the other side.

So that's basically my reason for having a bust: we've got 330 trillion-plus in global debt out there. Certainly China's a big part of that. Certainly the U.S. is part of that. Japan's part of that. All Western countries are part of that. I'm not calling for a sovereign crisis because they have the printing press, but there's a lot of private debt out there that I think is going to have a problem.

Certainly commercial real estate—we'll find out there's another shoe to drop there. Private equity, private credit, et cetera. There's just plenty of candidates where, once this thing rolls over, once something triggers, you're going to see an awful lot of things show up.

And given everything we’ve discussed so far, where would you be looking in the market today for potential opportunity? Because obviously we’re in a very uncertain market environment. You believe that the broad market’s going to continue rising. That could be difficult to time for your regular average retail investor who doesn’t know how to look at charts and doesn’t understand a lot of the macro behind it. That’s the issue we’ve come to in today’s investing world, is this passive investing, as you were speaking of. People now believe that the stock market is a high-interest savings account, that you put money in it, and then you just wait, and over time, you’re just going to keep making more and more money. And I think I agree with you that that paradigm is rapidly changing. So with all that in mind, where would you be looking to invest today? I know you mentioned long-dated U.S. Treasuries before. Is that an area you’re bullish on, and anywhere else where you’re seeing potential value?

Yeah, so it’s a little tricky, and people jump ahead because I do have my zero-percent Treasury call, but it starts very slow. So there’s a period in here, and again, everybody has to figure this out for themselves based on their own experience and risk tolerance, et cetera. But we’re in a funny place where I have a 90 number for XLF, the financial ETF, and I’m not sure where that is now, but that’s a more than a 50% move from here, I think. And so there are still—I mean, when you figure the numbers, there are 2- and 3-year returns still ahead of us that are going to happen in a matter of months. So you have to look at both time and what the upside is. And so I just caution people, even though—and again, some people should probably, because I could be wrong. Lots of the call could be wrong, so you have to understand the risk we’re at when we’re this late in the game.

However, if I’m right, and there are 30%, 40%, 50% returns left in some of these areas, you run the risk that you jump out now and say, “I’m just not smart enough to time the top, and I’m nervous,” as you’ve been nervous since 2020. A lot of these people have been nervous all along, particularly institutions.

But if you jump out now, you run the risk that if you get this final parabolic run, psychology being what it is, it will suck you back in for a lot of people. And they’ll end up getting out, understanding what’s coming, but then getting sucked in by the fact that, “Hey, how do I know this is the top? I was wrong. I missed 30%, 40%, 50% returns, and people are telling me there are 2 and 3 years to go on this. I’ve got to get back in.” And then you get back in at the top.

So I just caution people, and again, it’s not advice. Everybody has to figure it out for themselves. But just know, if you decide you’re getting out early, don’t get swept up into the emotion of it.

Secondly, Treasuries will be, I think, at the top of the list of things that will protect you in the bust. There are very few things that aren’t going to go down, and Treasuries, I think, are going to be one, and that’s both from the very short end all the way out. If in fact rates are falling during the bust, as they should, the long duration is where you’re going to make the most money, but it’s also the place where, if I’m wrong, you’re going to have more volatility.

But Treasuries, I think, will top the list. FDIC-insured savings, which means up to $250,000 per institution, should be safe. With the printing press, I can say with confidence that they will fund FDIC to whatever is necessary to meet their obligations, their liabilities. So you don’t have to worry about, oh gee, the government might fail, and they won’t be able to cover it. Not this cycle. Another cycle, yes, but not this cycle.

And that’s why I’m not so concerned about a sovereign debt crisis. We could have some sovereigns that are in trouble, but they have the printing press.

The other things—so those are really the things. Obviously people with more experience can think about shorts and things like that. But for the basic person out there that doesn’t have investment experience, Treasuries will stand up, I think, in the bust. Savings accounts will, as long as you don’t get beyond that.

Will there be bail-ins? Possibly in Europe. We’ve seen that before, meaning that the deposit holder in the banks has to eat the loss, suffers. Here, I think it’s far less likely. We saw in 2008–09 they’ll step up, and again, they’ll print money like there’s no tomorrow to make sure they can hold the consumer together.

If you’re in a pension fund that gets in trouble, we don’t know. If you’re in a money market fund, the precedent is there that they went to “we won’t break the buck” last time in 2008–09. I suspect we’ll see that again just because I suspect we’re going to be printing money and looking for any place we can put it to hold the economy up. But we don’t know that. It’s not anything we can say for sure.

But those are the places, I think. If you’re in junk bonds, if you’re in equities, just know what happens in these kinds of conditions. They can lose a lot of money for you.

Great thoughts overall, and excellent conversation today, David. Tell us about Contrarian Macro Advisors. That’s your letter. How can people subscribe, and what’s on offer there?

Sure. I write a quarterly macro letter. It’s basically my forecasting letter, and I am on Twitter all the time, or X all the time, so people can get a lot of my views there. The letter just allows me—it’s longer form, obviously—where I can explain my rationale better and people can better understand it. So it’s not for everybody. There’s a cost to it. I think it’s a pretty reasonable cost given my track record, but that’s for people to decide.

I’m more than happy to put out what I put out on X. I get people who subscribe once in a while saying, “You give away so much for free.” And I go, “Yeah...” But I will say my subscribers, basically quarter to quarter, I hold on to 75% to 80% of my subscribers. So, you know, it’s pretty good in that business, I think. It tells you that people do see value in it. I’ve got people who have been with me for 5, 6, or 7 years. But anyway, the letter is a macro letter. It doesn’t provide advice. As I say all the time, I don’t provide advice. I forecast the markets and the economy.

And then people can sign up by direct messaging you on X, correct? To inquire about it.

Yeah, thanks. If anybody has interest, all they have to do is send a direct message to me on what they call XChat now, and I will provide details on the subscription, what information I need from you, how much it'll cost, et cetera.

Great. Well, I will put a link to your X account in the description below. David, as always, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Jesse.

Thank you for joining us today. If you’re looking for great prices on gold and silver bullion products, look no further than ARC Silver Gold Osmium. Some of their prices are displayed on your screen right now. These are subject to change and while supplies last, so reach out to owner Ian Everard today at 307-264-9441 or by email at ian@arcsgo.com, and make sure to tell him that Commodity Culture sent you. And make sure to join the WhatsApp group for Commodity Culture. We’ve got a great community there, very active, discussing different mining stocks, investment ideas, sound money principles, and it’s a way to access me directly. I’m also active on there answering questions. The link is in the description below. I hope to see you there, and I hope to see you in the next episode. Commodity Culture is a series on commodities and natural resources. If you would like to see more, be sure to subscribe and hit the bell notification so you’re always up to date with the latest episodes.