Gold At ‘Extreme Price’ Warns Economist, What’s Next After Bubble? | Mark Skousen
Summary
Gold's Performance: Gold has significantly outperformed Bitcoin and the S&P 500, driven by factors such as persistent inflation, central bank buying, and geopolitical instability.
Investment Strategy: While gold prices are high, Mark Skousen suggests potential in mining stocks like Kinross Gold due to their leverage and rising profit margins.
Economic Concerns: The U.S. faces challenges with business sentiment and spending, highlighting a decline in B2B spending and potential risks from tariffs affecting the supply chain.
Market Dynamics: Despite a strong stock market performance, Skousen warns of overvaluation, particularly in tech stocks, and the potential for a correction due to unforeseen events.
Central Bank Influence: Central banks' consistent gold purchases and the lack of selling are significant factors supporting gold prices, alongside concerns about national debt and government spending.
Sector Opportunities: Skousen identifies uranium and biotech as promising sectors, with uranium benefiting from nuclear power growth and biotech offering potential through drug development.
Trade and Policy: Skousen criticizes current trade policies, advocating for reduced trade barriers and a liberal immigration policy to enhance economic growth and innovation.
Market Outlook: While Skousen remains fully invested, he advises caution and the use of stop orders to protect against potential market downturns.
Transcript
We don't have any kind of discipline left. And what is gold if not a discipline on the marketplace and basically it's it's yelling have some discipline folks? I wouldn't be surprised to see some kind of correction due to a black swan event. How do you explain as an economist something like gold outperforming Bitcoin and the S&P 500? Why is it outperforming risk assets when the economy is still just chugging along and not in a recession? Uh it it is baffling to me to be honest with you. >> Mark Scowin returns to the show. He is the editor of forecast and strategies and uh he is also the presidential fellow uh at Chapman University. We'll be talking about his views on the economy revisiting some of his views and calls that he made the last time he was on the show in June. They've turned out to be correct. Spoiler alert. Mark, welcome back to the show. >> Glad to be here. I'm actually in Chicago famous for the Chicago commodity trading pits and they used to have outcry, you know, where they would they would uh do bid and ass spreads very loudly and all of that's gone. Everything's done by computer. So, it's not even worth going down to visit the Chicago Board of Trade anymore. It's just all computers. >> It's a bit more tame now. It's uh there's no more shouting on the floor. >> There's no more shouting at all. It's all history. And it's too bad because I always enjoyed the the warlike environment at the end of the trading sessions. >> I always wondered how people could hear um a trade being made where an order being placed amidst the chaos. >> They don't they used they used finger mo motions and uh you know it was either this way uh or that way if you're selling or this way you're buying. So it was all visual. >> Another thing that's been very visual is the parabolic move in the precious metals. So, in June, you were uh on the show and you said that you're recommending clients and uh your associates to go long on GLD, the gold ETF. And since then, gold's been up about uh 60s something%. Hold on. No, that's not right. Uh that's Ken Ross. Kin Ross is something else that you've talked about. Gold has been up since June. I'll get you the number about uh 25%. Very good for a couple months. And let me just show you this chart here. Uh this is what it's done just in the last couple weeks. Nine consecutive weeks of up upward move. This is a weekly chart. And so yeah, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9. What happens when we get this much upward movement in a short amount of time consecutively? Mark, what is this signaling? >> That's a good question because, you know, really haven't had a a sharp sell-off in the dollar. I mean, the dollar's been somewhat weak, but uh since Trump became president, but in the last couple of months, it's been fairly steady. Uh so, what is the difference? Well, I think it's that inflation is stubbornly with us. The Trump tariff tariffs have not helped. The uh instability being created in the trade war with China is a key factor. And also central banking. central banks are buying uh consistently more gold than they're selling and that wasn't the case uh a few years ago. So, I think there's a lot of factors here that you have to take into account, but to be honest with you, I'm really surprised on how dramatic the rise has been in both gold and silver. And silver's right now uh London market is talking about a short squeeze. And that that reminds us of the old bunk u uh bunker hunt days uh you know where you had uh a short squeeze in 1980 on silver and pushed it up to $80 and now it's pushing it up beyond $80 or sorry $50. So that's quite a uh there's a lot of action going on here and it's it's a hot market now and tech technicians love hot markets. they get in them. And so I'd like to see a pullback here and see take a little breather if we could. >> The index of consumer sentiment um is uh currently uh right above 55. It's been trending lower since the beginning of 2025. If you overlay this chart with gold there, there has been slightly well there has been somewhat of an inverse correlation with consumer sentiment dropping while gold has been rallying. I wonder if that's related at all. People are concerned. We're becoming a little bit more concerned about economic growth and the prospects of of of wealth and prosperity. And so they're they're hoarding a hard asset or an alternative asset for safety. Is that what's happening? >> Yeah. Because there was this debate that was going on for a while about was it Bitcoin or was it gold that would be the best uh inflation hedge or hedge against crisis and so on. And uh the clear advantage has been back to the traditional commodity of gold uh the yellow metal and silver. Uh I mean Bitcoin is up this year and certainly the Bitcoin the blockchain technology stocks have up but they're moving with technology not with what is going on with sentiment. I do think we've overdone the uh uh the consumer sentiment argument. In fact, the questions that consumers are asked is more about their job situation, about the economy rather than their own spending habits. They've actually been spending, consumer spending has actually been steadily moving higher throughout all of this. So, I think business sentiment is much more important and uh business spending has been in a decline. It's either slowed down or in a decline uh over the last year. So that's a that's a much more serious concern that uh that I see. >> Do you think that uh gold at $4,200 at some point 4122 right now on my screen is still a reasonable buy right now. In other words, back in June you said, you know, I'm recommending people to stock up on GLD. Are you making the same kind of recommendation or or strategy now at current levels still? Well, uh, not not especially. >> I do think that, uh, there's better potential in the mining stocks because they have that leverage and they're still catching up with the, uh, difference between the price of gold and the cost of mining gold, which hasn't really gone up that much. So, the uh, profit margins are rising rather dramatically. King Ross gold was the one I'm recommending. KGC is the symbol. uh it could be a triple this year. Uh and even then it's selling at 17 times earnings and the PEG ratio is less than one which indicates that it has more upside potential. But gold itself at $4,200, oh my gosh, that seems to be uh extreme extreme uh uh high price. Uh it's more of a speculation at this point than just a sound investment that you buy and squirrel away. I would like to think that uh whatever is causing gold and silver to move up dramatically, let's hope that a correction takes place and gives us a better opportunity to actually buy gold. I mean, gold up 55% this year. >> That's uh that's way uh more than I expected. So, when people ask me, should I buy gold? Uh might be a good time to be selling some gold. Before we continue with the video, let's talk about our sponsor today, ODU. ODU is an all-in-one business management software that helps entrepreneurs streamline their operations from accounting and inventory to websites and project management. Today, I want to focus on their project app. It gives you a clear overview of all your projects. You can create custom stages, assign tasks, set deadlines, and even add checklists. Everything's customizable. You also collaborate in real time. Tag teammates, comment, attach files, and manage everything in one place using the built-in chatter. And the best part, you can choose from different views. Canban for board style view, Gant for timeliness, or list for detailed data. Like all of ODU, it's built to scale. Click the link in the description and get one app for free with unlimited users. No credit card required. How do you explain as an economist something like gold outperforming Bitcoin and the S&P 500 and to a certain extent the NASDAQ? I mean, not I'm not talking about individual stocks, but the whole index overall at a year when the economy isn't imploding. We're not officially in a recession. The dollar, as you know, is down, but it hasn't collapsed. Inflation is not running out of control. Why is it outperforming risk assets when the economy is still just chugging along and not in a recession? Uh it it is baffling to me to be honest with you. Go gold and and silver have both outperformed the stock market in the entire 21st century uh including NASDAQ uh in indexes. Um so uh that that I'm I'm rather dismayed by the whole phenomena. Maybe there's an element of catching up here because uh from the 1970s to the year 2000 Warren Buffett was correct. the stock market to way outperformed uh gold. Uh but since uh two the year 2000, we've had a series of uh uh insta unstable events. We've had 911. We've had the Iraqi uh war. We had the Afghan war. We've had Middle East trouble. We've had the Ukraine war. We've had the financial crisis of 2008. We've had the pandemic of 2000. Lots of new money was pumped into the system. uh easy money policies adopted during this time period and gold gold did recover but didn't really grow dramatically like it is now. So maybe it's just a catchup period of time >> and once it catches up uh things will stabilize. The other issue is central bank buying. I think there's an element there that we cannot ignore. the central no central bank is selling gold now. Uh and and so that's uh that has to be a a major factor as well because the na we've forgotten one other issue the national debt out of control government spending. The Keynesian model is that when we're at full employment we should have balanced budgets and even running surpluses. The last time that we did that was the 1990s under Bill Clinton and Nuke Gingrich. uh the there's total outofcontrol government spending. Even with the Trump administration coming in with Doge and and uh having this argument about closing down the government, uh it just seems like uh we're we we don't have any kind of discipline left. And what is gold if not a discipline on the marketplace? And basically it's it's yelling have some discipline, folks. And until you have discipline, we're going to continue to buy gold even though it doesn't pay any interest. >> On the economy, you are the author of a book called The Greatest American, Benjamin Franklin, the world's most versatile genius. You've in this very detailed and thorough book. You've covered his entire life, everything from his uh philosophy, some free trade to his uh personal life. I wonder before we get into the details of the book, I wonder if if Benjamin Franklin were alive today. Actually, you know what? Forget that. If we were to transport him from the past to the present with a time machine, how do you think he would advise the current Trump administration to run the economy now, given what you know about uh Ben Franklin? So I would say Ben Franklin actually wished he had been born two to 300 years uh later in life and he would love today's society in terms of technological advances, the higher standard of living, the the ability to transport yourself uh to get on the cell phones. He would be a AI supporter and all these new technological advances. he'd be using the cell phone and the text texting, but he would be appalled at the size and scope of government. Uh he was uh very much an advocate of limited government, lazy fair, uh republic, if you can keep it. And he actually warned against the possibility that a king would rule over us, that monarchy would return. And of course with Trump and these strong men, she and others around the world who are single-handedly making decisions through executive orders, uh this is a very dangerous precedent and you certainly be appalled at the size of government spending and the huge deficit. Of course, he was a firm believer in thrift and he often said uh uh revenue no revenue is sufficient without economy. Uh so those would be some indications that they would be uh uh that he would he would be he'd have a mi mixed feelings about today's uh world invent. So this is the book called uh the greatest American uh Ben Franklin the world's most versatile genius and uh it's been a uh it's in his second printing and it's not by the way a reg a a typical biography. There's 80 short chapters on how to apply Franklin today. So I I would recommend that people uh get a copy of it on Amazon or Barnes & Noble and I look forward to uh getting response from people. So far the response has been very positive. Five stars on in almost every case. >> Do you think Alyssa fair economy is even possible today with the US population well over 300 million? And I mean at the time of independence at the time of Franklin um what the population of the 13 colonies was what roughly 2 to 3 million people and so maybe a limited government was possible with a much smaller population. What about now? >> Uh so Franklin had a great quote. He said a a virtuous and industrious people may be cheaply governed and the system of America is commerce with all and war with none. So these are very idealistic views that uh that Franklin had a limited government, a small government, cheap government, cheaper and better would be his formula for success. And u I think the economic freedom index that the Fraser Institute puts out in Canada and the Heritage Institute here in the United States indicates that there are countries that do have relatively cheap government and had high economic growth rates and certainly uh Singapore is number one uh country with relatively low size of government and high economic growth and higher standards of living. Even Hong Kong for many years uh had a very limited lazair policy up until the uh Chinese government decided to take it back back. So yes, most countries u are bloated in terms of their government, welfare state, big government, but they have rejected totalitarian government in large measure. I mean there's a few exceptions but overall capitalism has expanded its uh its arm out and more and more countries are privatizing and limited government and decentralizing the whole Trump movement. Malay in Argentina there are countries where there's an attempt to pull back the size of government. So we need to support that as much as possible. What would Ben Franklin think of Trump's trade policies today? >> Well, he said, "No nation was ever ruined by trade, even the most disadvantaged." And Trump himself kept saying, "Oh, how we've been ripped off this and that." Well, just ask consumers if they've been ripped off when they can get uh cheap products from China, from uh Latin America, from Mexico. Our products are much better because of trade. I mean, look at automobiles, the Fords and the GM cars. They're so much better today because of competition uh from uh from Toyota and Mercedes and uh Kia and all of these other foreign competition. It improves the quality, quantity, and variety of goods and services. and Trump's making a big mistake uh engaging in a trade war if the result is higher tariffs and higher barriers to trade. That's not good for uh America or anywhere else. So, I would like to see uh Trump uh long-term goal to be to reduce trade barriers. And if he can do that, I'm all in favor of it. But the evidence seems to be that he favors a fortress America, closing the borders. uh xenophobia in many ways in that $100 fee, $100,000 fee for foreigners uh coming in on H1B u uh v work visas. Uh these are these are not good policies. But uh again, if it's a trade negotiation, maybe the end result would be good, but I'm not holding my breath. Well, America already has one would argue energy independence with its fracking of uh oil and um if it were to increase its refining capacity as well, we'd have full energy independence. Uh there's food independence, there's an abundance of food supplied in the US um relative to its demand. What happens if we have in the US manufacturing independence as well? meaning everything the Americans consume is made domestically. I mean what does economic theory tell us about that kind of society and economy? Is it better or worse off? >> Well, the Nobel Prize was given to some economists today uh on the whole uh issue of economic growth and particularly economic development and in economic development you start off with agriculture. We were an agricultural country for many years and then we became a manufacturing giant and then we got into services and technology and the knowledge economy as Peter Ducker calls it. So there's a natural evolution away from these areas and you need in order to benefit globally manufacturing needs to be global. It can't be just domestic. We have 500,000 jobs that are going unfulfilled right now in manufacturing and technology. And look at look at who's running the uh uh some of the biggest firms in in the country. They're they're foreign uh uh foreigners who were born outside the United States like Elon Musk uh and others that have come in and made all the difference. Why would we close our borders to the best and the brightest from around the world? If there's one thing economics has won up until now in terms of this uh fight is for free trade and a liberal immigration policy. And no, we we we can fight against illegal immigrants. I understand that. That's perfectly it makes perfect sense. But only if you have a liberal legal immigration system so that Canadians and and uh Europeans and uh Latin Americans and people from all over the world from Asia and so forth can come into the US go to our colleges and universities uh get a good training and then use their bright minds to perform well. So Americans cannot do it all. In fact, the other thing is America, we've forgotten this in this de whole debate. What about all the jobs that Americans don't want to do in the hotels uh in the uh construction business uh in agriculture? Uh you need to have people coming across even on a short-term basis to do a lot of this work that Americans don't want to do. So, uh, Trump is, uh, I think he fell asleep at the Wharton School when when we were teaching sound free market, free trade economics. >> Do you think in the distant or perhaps even near future when robots, I'm just thinking hypothetically, robots with advanced AI could do some of these jobs in construction and hotels like you mentioned, would that give the government more incentive to close off borders at that point? Theoretically speaking, the country no longer needs immigrant workers to fulfill a slack in demand for labor. >> It's really impossible. One of the great things about uh the dynamics of any economy is that it's really hard to see into the future 3 years from now or even 10 years from now. Uh but artificial limitations on immigrants is not a good policy. You want to have the flexibility of of bringing in the best and the brightest from all over the world. Uh so yes, ro robots can play a major role and are playing a major role in the production of products and so forth. But imagine if every country closed their borders uh and nobody let anybody in in other countries. I mean I I if if if you don't have people coming across I mean imagine the animosity and and the disparity between standard of living creating tremendous envy and perhaps war and conflict as a result of that our liberal very Christian if you will policy of opening our doors to people who who are less fortunate than us. That's the greatness of America. We are a melting pot. Are we going to end our melting pot that was so successful? There's an old there's an old saying in the business that if if everything is working well, don't change it. And of course there are problems with illegal immigrants and these gangs that are coming in. And I I support efforts to eliminate uh the criminal element uh there. But as far as illegal immigrants who have come across the border to better their lives, they're often low profile. They work hard. Uh they pay their taxes. They're not on welfare and so forth. And we need to look critically at this whole problem. But the the real solution is to maintain a liberal immigration policy. And we'll see what happens. But I think it's a big mistake to just hope that robots and AI is somehow going to keep us from from hiring uh foreigners and so forth. It's hard enough right now, by the way, for standard American citizens to get a job. I mean, I teach at Chapman University and my seniors, they're having a hard time finding jobs right now. I want to touch on the labor market in just a minute. Let's finish off on trade. Just over the weekend on Friday in particular, uh specifically Trump announced an additional 100% tariff on China markets, stock markets and uh crypto markets fell in the news. In fact, crypto markets saw the biggest single day selloff uh measured by market capitalization in history. We've seen we're seeing a bit of a rebound today on Monday. Now, according to this article on Reuters, uh these uh fresh levies are spooking retailers. They should take effect November 1st, assuming no additional deal um is reached before then and assuming this is not repealed. I Well, first of all, let me just ask you for your speculation. Will this actually go through? Do you think? Huh? Well, hopefully none of this will go through and this is simply two strong men going at each other to say who who's going to blink first. Uh I I don't know the answer to that question, but I suspect that uh they're going to meet and agree to some type of an agreement. I mean, that's the way this game is played. The art of the deal, the the art of war, if you will. Uh that's that's what's going on here. And um so I think the market this is very typical of the market that the first day this is announced the market uh sells off and then recovers when um more stable minds are at work here and saying well this is just a negotiation. We'll see what happens. But certainly 100% tariff on Chinese goods would be devastating to consumers. It's one of the reasons Trump has to has to resolve these issues before the midterms because I I'm going to tell you uh the midterms. Uh look, the Democrats are going to take over the House at least and maybe even the Senate the way Trump is dealing with these issues. He has a window of two years to accomplish his goals. Then he has to back off. He has to show his success in what he's doing. And if he doesn't and Americans feel like prices are too high, job market is really bad, that we're in a recession, and even if the stock market starts selling off, that's really bad news for the Republicans. And you're already seeing it in these various elections. There's very few examples where Republicans have maintained control. They're they're losing elections right now. So, it's not unlike what's happening in Argentina. Malay is under tremendous pressure to be successful in Argentina, but the Pedonistas and the opposition are winning in the elections and this is not a this is not a good situation for Malay. >> So, just back to uh the tariffs. This is from um the budget lab at Yale estimates that tariffs will reduce household incomes by about $2,400 a year. Since Mr. Trump staggered rollout spreads. The increases have over several quarters. What might have been a one-off shock risks become becoming persistently higher inflation. Now, uh this se segus into your work, which is gross output. Can you just evaluate how the performance of uh the uh the consumer today in 2025 October compares to that of a year ago 2024 before the election? Well, one of the misnomers the one of the most significant misnomers in today's economy is that consumer spending drives the economy that it's it's 2/3 of total economic activity. Well, it is 2/3 of GDP, but GDP leaves out the supply chain. All the B2B spending at the various stages of production and it's bigger than GDP itself. When you look at the total spending at all stages of production, total economic activity, it's called gross output. the government, the federal government measures it every quarter along with GDP. Unfortunately, it comes out two months later, so it's kind of buried in the data and people don't look at it, but they should. I wrote a Wall Street Journal column just a couple weeks ago, two weeks ago uh on what gross output is telling us and it's been slow. It grew at 1% or less in the last year compared to uh 3% in GDP. So that's a danger sign. In particular, B2B spending, business spending at all stages of production was down 5.6% in real terms. B2B spending has been very slow since the U and the supply chain is very very slow to to get back to normal. Uh while consumers continue to spend. So consumers are spending. Everything's fine with the consumer at this point. But it's business spending that is a uh a pre uh indicator that uh we're headed for some kind of trouble and the supply chain in particular. Businesses are being hit with higher expenses with these tariffs. And I think it's affecting the supply chain and it'll eventually cause I mean if you go into Target uh into the grocery store, you look at these prices and they are starting to move up. uh business can't just absorb these uh p uh these higher tariffs continually. At some point they're going to pass them along to consumers and then we're going to finally see the end result of uh perhaps a recession. Certainly we're suffering from a slowdown right now. >> Do you think the labor market is at risk from entering a labor market recession? You know, see this is another example where GDP there's this disconnect between GDP that's up three 3% and job growth is not growing hardly at all. And it's not all due to AI. I mean there's some element involved with that I suppose. Uh but I I think a lot of it has to do with the uncertainty that Trump has created with his trade war and people are reluctant, businesses are reluctant to hire. Uh, I mentioned that my seniors at Chapman University, I mean, Goldman Sachs comes to Chapman University and they're only interviewing 1% of the applicants. That's what I was told by one of my students. And that's not what it had was in the case. And Goldman Sachs is booming in in terms of its stock market performance. It's done really well this year. You'd think they'd be hiring right and left, but they're not. So I think the gross output statistic, the go statistic that I put out and the B2B spending is a better indicator uh linking the slow job growth that's uh that you're finding in the economy and you're not seeing it in the GDP statistics unfortunately. >> What are the biggest differences between your measure of output, gross output versus GDP? >> Well, the big difference is the supply chain. GDP leaves out the supply chain and uh the supply chain is bigger than GDP itself. So it's natural that consumer spending is the big sector, the big elephant in the room when you look at GDP statistics. Uh and GDP uh I mean consumer spending is doing just fine. It grew at 3 or 4% a year and did well. Government spending is now in decline under the Trump administration. Doge is having its effect and then private fixed investment was basically flat for the year and then B2B spending in the supply chain uh actually declined uh in the last quarter. Now part of that may be due to the tariffs because in the previous quarter uh you had businesses bulk up on inventories. So that caused GDP to uh and investment to B2B spending to rise. But then it it stopped. Uh business has decided not to do that. Now they want to pair down inventories. Uh they built up these inventories and now they're pairing down the inventories and so uh B2B spending is declining. So there are a lot of differences in GDP and GO. people can go to grossoutput.com my website uh and get I have a press release that comes out every quarter with when the geo statistics are released. >> I want to finish off in the markets now scout uh Mark uh we we we know you as the economist who had correctly called the 1987 uh black Monday market crash. You have been warning your clients for several months about valuations being unreasonable leading up until October. I'm not seeing you making similar warnings now, Mark. Um, any parallels now to 1987? We're seeing the word bubble pop up on mainstream news quite a lot, but I'm not seeing you warning about something similar. Yeah, ever since the 87 crash, which was a prediction that I made uh back then, government has changed its policies. You know, you have a lot of well and and so have the the markets themselves. Uh they will stop trading uh if the market drops 10% or more. Uh they have these circuit breakers in place. Also they have the uh the emergency powers that uh the government has a organization that they put together and they bring uh uh they get together the treasury, the SEC, the Fed chairman and so on. They meet privately whenever there's a threat of a crisis and they can intervene and the Fed is going to aggressively intervene if there's a stock market crash. So I don't predict crashes necessarily, but bare markets uh they're they're still very real. So a bare market is still very possible. Uh we've seen it a number of times over the last uh uh since the 87 crash. You've had significant bare markets, but no total crash or the market drops 20% in a day. Individual stocks, yes, but not the market as a whole because of all these intervening factors. So, a bare market, yes, the market is overvalued. I've said over and over again, the tech stocks could fall in half and still be overvalued. That's uh that's the possibility of a of a major bare market occurring, but it would require a Fed to raise interest rates dramatically. would maybe a some kind of a black swan event uh war unex pandemic uh they close this market they close down the economy those kind of things can cause severe bare markets uh the uh PE ratio of the stock market is uh at close to an all-time high so there are some similarities between that and 1929 the technology is real the AI revolution is real. It's causing stocks to rise. But my understanding 50 uh uh revenue from AI stocks is 50 uh50 billion dollars a year and you have a AI trillion trillion dollar market. Uh so uh there is a bit of a disconnect there and overvalue. So there's a lot similarity between the dot uh craze of the late 1990s and the AI boom of today. So, I wouldn't be surprised to see some kind of correction due to a black swan event. I don't know what it'll be. Maybe maybe the Treasury will have an impossible task with central banks buying up all this gold and dumping their treasuries. We could have a no bid situation on the Treasury market. I mean, they're they have to refinance $7 trillion this year. I mean, that's that's a heck of a lot of money. and suppose uh nobody shows up to buy the treasuries that could cause the stock market to uh go into a crash or a bare market. So uh there are some warning signs out there that this is a speculative bubble even in gold and silver. We haven't talked about uranium man uranium stocks have really taken off >> and I think they have much more potential. I like the uranium area as a much better way to invest right now because of the growth in nuclear power. There's just a lot of benefits to nuclear power as an alternative energy. >> Do you think that with the advent of technology and how ubiquitous information is, the markets are a lot more efficient now than in ' 87? And so large volatile corrections or even an upward move um are less likely today because of higher efficiency. Does that make sense? >> Yes, it's more efficient, but that also means that uh emotions can also play a much bigger role because all you have to do is click on a button and you sell, right? And so numerous people can all start selling all at once. And how do you control that? it it's going to require government intervention uh in in order to do that. So efficiency can work both ways and I do think you have not eliminated human behavior and uh you know it's it's something that has existed forever. The plungers and the peacocks as they say right the plungers and the peacocks have not gone away. What is your outlook for um for the stock market into the end of the year and perhaps to 2026 given everything we've talked about and given uh what the Fed may do? We haven't talked about monetary policy in detail uh yet, but maybe let's factor all this together. >> I think the Federal Reserve has actually done a fairly decent uh uh approach here. I I was really expecting a bare market this year. the first year of the pre presidential term tends to be rather bearish uh not not performing as well as it has in the past and Trump has certainly disrupted the whole system over and over again. So you really wonder how I mean I'm I'm really quite pleased of course with the total returns of in my portfolio. It's the best returns we've ever had in 45 years of writing forecasts and strategies. Uh, so I hope it continues to the end of the year. I think the all bets are off as we enter 2026. Uh, it is going to be midterm election year. Uh, Trump may have to play some more games. I don't know. It's really hard to say, but we've done so well. It's hard for me to be uh optimistic uh as I was uh at the beginning of the summer, especially with, you know, we've added gold and silver and uranium plays and stuff like that. But uh you know, there's an old saying from my book, The Maximums of Wall Street, that it's not a stock market, it's a market of stocks. And uh if you can pick and choose some winners out there, uh things might might look up. But uh overall you need a portfolio that's well diversified and at some point the establishment firms are going to start taking profits these huge profits that they've had this year. So it'll be interesting to see if uh we can escape the o the the october bare market. We ex escape the September one. Uh so uh I'm fully invested still at this point, but I'm moving my stop orders up and protecting myself on the downside in case we do have a sharp selloff. Uh we did have a selloff by the way in the business development companies, the BDC's, my main street capital symbol main AI. It's my oldest longest position. They are the best performing private investment firm uh in the country with small to medium companies. Uh, Main Street Capital went through a 20% correction in the last month. They're recovering today, but 20% decline. Why? Because the Fed lowered interest rates, so investment income would may not do as well. But the private credit market which now now reaches$ two trillion dollar $2 trillion private credit market looks really frost like it's overvalued at this point and there could be some trouble down the road for some of these companies and so that's why the selloff that took place. Main Street I think will be fine because it's so well managed. But uh that can that can be an indication of how sell-offs can happen rather rapidly and you you you have to meet alert to them. >> Anything in particular or sectors in particular that look undervalued to you? We're relatively cheap right now. >> Oh boy. Well certainly biotech. >> You mentioned uranium. >> Yes. Go ahead. Well, uranium has uh has taken off over the last uh three months and I still think has further to go for sure. Uh I really think that's that's a go-to place to go on a short-term speculative basis. Uh but biotech is an area that I think has great promise. I mean, I have Amgen in my portfolio and it's break even over the last year, but it has some lots of uh good drugs coming down the pipelines. There's always some interesting plays in the biotech sphere and and uh that that might be advantageous and maybe even some of the bank stocks and so forth that really haven't done much uh recently uh could be a conservative way to play that market. So uh it's it's really hard to find these uh these really cheap stocks that uh that haven't had a a nice runup. So, uh, a little bit cautious making specific recommendations at this point. >> Tell us where we can find you and read your work. >> Well, I'm at markscowzin.com and that's my main website. Uh, and also, of course, I do my annual conference every year called Freedomfest. Uh, we're calling it uh the World's Fair of Liberty and we're celebrating the 250th anniversary of our nation. We are going to have a record crowd, I'm hoping, in Las Vegas at the Caesars Forum uh convention center July 8th through the 11th. So if people go to freedomfest.com, they can find out all about that. And the first 400 who sign up get a nice discount. So uh that's filling up pretty quickly. So it's going to be a really fun event. I'm looking forward to seeing a lot of people there. And I hope David, you will be there as well. It's a great place to interview great people. We have Steve Forbes and John Mackey, a former CEO of Whole Foods Market. Kennedy from Fox News will be back. We'll have a host of probably 200 plus speakers and exhibitors and so forth. We're really excited about the World's Fair of Liberty called Freedom Fest. >> Yeah, I was there a few years ago when it was held at Memphis. Uh very good conference. Had a lot of fun there. So, thank you again for hosting another wonderful event. So, we'll look forward to that next year. We'll follow up closer to uh the conference, I'm sure. And uh yeah, do follow Mark at his website link down below as well. Thanks Mark. It's good to catch up with you and I'll speak with you again. >> Pleasure. Be as Ben Franklin would say, be free. >> Be free. Easier said than done these days. We'll try our best Mark. And uh thank you for watching. Be free and be subscribed. Link down below.
Gold At ‘Extreme Price’ Warns Economist, What’s Next After Bubble? | Mark Skousen
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We don't have any kind of discipline left. And what is gold if not a discipline on the marketplace and basically it's it's yelling have some discipline folks? I wouldn't be surprised to see some kind of correction due to a black swan event. How do you explain as an economist something like gold outperforming Bitcoin and the S&P 500? Why is it outperforming risk assets when the economy is still just chugging along and not in a recession? Uh it it is baffling to me to be honest with you. >> Mark Scowin returns to the show. He is the editor of forecast and strategies and uh he is also the presidential fellow uh at Chapman University. We'll be talking about his views on the economy revisiting some of his views and calls that he made the last time he was on the show in June. They've turned out to be correct. Spoiler alert. Mark, welcome back to the show. >> Glad to be here. I'm actually in Chicago famous for the Chicago commodity trading pits and they used to have outcry, you know, where they would they would uh do bid and ass spreads very loudly and all of that's gone. Everything's done by computer. So, it's not even worth going down to visit the Chicago Board of Trade anymore. It's just all computers. >> It's a bit more tame now. It's uh there's no more shouting on the floor. >> There's no more shouting at all. It's all history. And it's too bad because I always enjoyed the the warlike environment at the end of the trading sessions. >> I always wondered how people could hear um a trade being made where an order being placed amidst the chaos. >> They don't they used they used finger mo motions and uh you know it was either this way uh or that way if you're selling or this way you're buying. So it was all visual. >> Another thing that's been very visual is the parabolic move in the precious metals. So, in June, you were uh on the show and you said that you're recommending clients and uh your associates to go long on GLD, the gold ETF. And since then, gold's been up about uh 60s something%. Hold on. No, that's not right. Uh that's Ken Ross. Kin Ross is something else that you've talked about. Gold has been up since June. I'll get you the number about uh 25%. Very good for a couple months. And let me just show you this chart here. Uh this is what it's done just in the last couple weeks. Nine consecutive weeks of up upward move. This is a weekly chart. And so yeah, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9. What happens when we get this much upward movement in a short amount of time consecutively? Mark, what is this signaling? >> That's a good question because, you know, really haven't had a a sharp sell-off in the dollar. I mean, the dollar's been somewhat weak, but uh since Trump became president, but in the last couple of months, it's been fairly steady. Uh so, what is the difference? Well, I think it's that inflation is stubbornly with us. The Trump tariff tariffs have not helped. The uh instability being created in the trade war with China is a key factor. And also central banking. central banks are buying uh consistently more gold than they're selling and that wasn't the case uh a few years ago. So, I think there's a lot of factors here that you have to take into account, but to be honest with you, I'm really surprised on how dramatic the rise has been in both gold and silver. And silver's right now uh London market is talking about a short squeeze. And that that reminds us of the old bunk u uh bunker hunt days uh you know where you had uh a short squeeze in 1980 on silver and pushed it up to $80 and now it's pushing it up beyond $80 or sorry $50. So that's quite a uh there's a lot of action going on here and it's it's a hot market now and tech technicians love hot markets. they get in them. And so I'd like to see a pullback here and see take a little breather if we could. >> The index of consumer sentiment um is uh currently uh right above 55. It's been trending lower since the beginning of 2025. If you overlay this chart with gold there, there has been slightly well there has been somewhat of an inverse correlation with consumer sentiment dropping while gold has been rallying. I wonder if that's related at all. People are concerned. We're becoming a little bit more concerned about economic growth and the prospects of of of wealth and prosperity. And so they're they're hoarding a hard asset or an alternative asset for safety. Is that what's happening? >> Yeah. Because there was this debate that was going on for a while about was it Bitcoin or was it gold that would be the best uh inflation hedge or hedge against crisis and so on. And uh the clear advantage has been back to the traditional commodity of gold uh the yellow metal and silver. Uh I mean Bitcoin is up this year and certainly the Bitcoin the blockchain technology stocks have up but they're moving with technology not with what is going on with sentiment. I do think we've overdone the uh uh the consumer sentiment argument. In fact, the questions that consumers are asked is more about their job situation, about the economy rather than their own spending habits. They've actually been spending, consumer spending has actually been steadily moving higher throughout all of this. So, I think business sentiment is much more important and uh business spending has been in a decline. It's either slowed down or in a decline uh over the last year. So that's a that's a much more serious concern that uh that I see. >> Do you think that uh gold at $4,200 at some point 4122 right now on my screen is still a reasonable buy right now. In other words, back in June you said, you know, I'm recommending people to stock up on GLD. Are you making the same kind of recommendation or or strategy now at current levels still? Well, uh, not not especially. >> I do think that, uh, there's better potential in the mining stocks because they have that leverage and they're still catching up with the, uh, difference between the price of gold and the cost of mining gold, which hasn't really gone up that much. So, the uh, profit margins are rising rather dramatically. King Ross gold was the one I'm recommending. KGC is the symbol. uh it could be a triple this year. Uh and even then it's selling at 17 times earnings and the PEG ratio is less than one which indicates that it has more upside potential. But gold itself at $4,200, oh my gosh, that seems to be uh extreme extreme uh uh high price. Uh it's more of a speculation at this point than just a sound investment that you buy and squirrel away. I would like to think that uh whatever is causing gold and silver to move up dramatically, let's hope that a correction takes place and gives us a better opportunity to actually buy gold. I mean, gold up 55% this year. >> That's uh that's way uh more than I expected. So, when people ask me, should I buy gold? Uh might be a good time to be selling some gold. Before we continue with the video, let's talk about our sponsor today, ODU. ODU is an all-in-one business management software that helps entrepreneurs streamline their operations from accounting and inventory to websites and project management. Today, I want to focus on their project app. It gives you a clear overview of all your projects. You can create custom stages, assign tasks, set deadlines, and even add checklists. Everything's customizable. You also collaborate in real time. Tag teammates, comment, attach files, and manage everything in one place using the built-in chatter. And the best part, you can choose from different views. Canban for board style view, Gant for timeliness, or list for detailed data. Like all of ODU, it's built to scale. Click the link in the description and get one app for free with unlimited users. No credit card required. How do you explain as an economist something like gold outperforming Bitcoin and the S&P 500 and to a certain extent the NASDAQ? I mean, not I'm not talking about individual stocks, but the whole index overall at a year when the economy isn't imploding. We're not officially in a recession. The dollar, as you know, is down, but it hasn't collapsed. Inflation is not running out of control. Why is it outperforming risk assets when the economy is still just chugging along and not in a recession? Uh it it is baffling to me to be honest with you. Go gold and and silver have both outperformed the stock market in the entire 21st century uh including NASDAQ uh in indexes. Um so uh that that I'm I'm rather dismayed by the whole phenomena. Maybe there's an element of catching up here because uh from the 1970s to the year 2000 Warren Buffett was correct. the stock market to way outperformed uh gold. Uh but since uh two the year 2000, we've had a series of uh uh insta unstable events. We've had 911. We've had the Iraqi uh war. We had the Afghan war. We've had Middle East trouble. We've had the Ukraine war. We've had the financial crisis of 2008. We've had the pandemic of 2000. Lots of new money was pumped into the system. uh easy money policies adopted during this time period and gold gold did recover but didn't really grow dramatically like it is now. So maybe it's just a catchup period of time >> and once it catches up uh things will stabilize. The other issue is central bank buying. I think there's an element there that we cannot ignore. the central no central bank is selling gold now. Uh and and so that's uh that has to be a a major factor as well because the na we've forgotten one other issue the national debt out of control government spending. The Keynesian model is that when we're at full employment we should have balanced budgets and even running surpluses. The last time that we did that was the 1990s under Bill Clinton and Nuke Gingrich. uh the there's total outofcontrol government spending. Even with the Trump administration coming in with Doge and and uh having this argument about closing down the government, uh it just seems like uh we're we we don't have any kind of discipline left. And what is gold if not a discipline on the marketplace? And basically it's it's yelling have some discipline, folks. And until you have discipline, we're going to continue to buy gold even though it doesn't pay any interest. >> On the economy, you are the author of a book called The Greatest American, Benjamin Franklin, the world's most versatile genius. You've in this very detailed and thorough book. You've covered his entire life, everything from his uh philosophy, some free trade to his uh personal life. I wonder before we get into the details of the book, I wonder if if Benjamin Franklin were alive today. Actually, you know what? Forget that. If we were to transport him from the past to the present with a time machine, how do you think he would advise the current Trump administration to run the economy now, given what you know about uh Ben Franklin? So I would say Ben Franklin actually wished he had been born two to 300 years uh later in life and he would love today's society in terms of technological advances, the higher standard of living, the the ability to transport yourself uh to get on the cell phones. He would be a AI supporter and all these new technological advances. he'd be using the cell phone and the text texting, but he would be appalled at the size and scope of government. Uh he was uh very much an advocate of limited government, lazy fair, uh republic, if you can keep it. And he actually warned against the possibility that a king would rule over us, that monarchy would return. And of course with Trump and these strong men, she and others around the world who are single-handedly making decisions through executive orders, uh this is a very dangerous precedent and you certainly be appalled at the size of government spending and the huge deficit. Of course, he was a firm believer in thrift and he often said uh uh revenue no revenue is sufficient without economy. Uh so those would be some indications that they would be uh uh that he would he would be he'd have a mi mixed feelings about today's uh world invent. So this is the book called uh the greatest American uh Ben Franklin the world's most versatile genius and uh it's been a uh it's in his second printing and it's not by the way a reg a a typical biography. There's 80 short chapters on how to apply Franklin today. So I I would recommend that people uh get a copy of it on Amazon or Barnes & Noble and I look forward to uh getting response from people. So far the response has been very positive. Five stars on in almost every case. >> Do you think Alyssa fair economy is even possible today with the US population well over 300 million? And I mean at the time of independence at the time of Franklin um what the population of the 13 colonies was what roughly 2 to 3 million people and so maybe a limited government was possible with a much smaller population. What about now? >> Uh so Franklin had a great quote. He said a a virtuous and industrious people may be cheaply governed and the system of America is commerce with all and war with none. So these are very idealistic views that uh that Franklin had a limited government, a small government, cheap government, cheaper and better would be his formula for success. And u I think the economic freedom index that the Fraser Institute puts out in Canada and the Heritage Institute here in the United States indicates that there are countries that do have relatively cheap government and had high economic growth rates and certainly uh Singapore is number one uh country with relatively low size of government and high economic growth and higher standards of living. Even Hong Kong for many years uh had a very limited lazair policy up until the uh Chinese government decided to take it back back. So yes, most countries u are bloated in terms of their government, welfare state, big government, but they have rejected totalitarian government in large measure. I mean there's a few exceptions but overall capitalism has expanded its uh its arm out and more and more countries are privatizing and limited government and decentralizing the whole Trump movement. Malay in Argentina there are countries where there's an attempt to pull back the size of government. So we need to support that as much as possible. What would Ben Franklin think of Trump's trade policies today? >> Well, he said, "No nation was ever ruined by trade, even the most disadvantaged." And Trump himself kept saying, "Oh, how we've been ripped off this and that." Well, just ask consumers if they've been ripped off when they can get uh cheap products from China, from uh Latin America, from Mexico. Our products are much better because of trade. I mean, look at automobiles, the Fords and the GM cars. They're so much better today because of competition uh from uh from Toyota and Mercedes and uh Kia and all of these other foreign competition. It improves the quality, quantity, and variety of goods and services. and Trump's making a big mistake uh engaging in a trade war if the result is higher tariffs and higher barriers to trade. That's not good for uh America or anywhere else. So, I would like to see uh Trump uh long-term goal to be to reduce trade barriers. And if he can do that, I'm all in favor of it. But the evidence seems to be that he favors a fortress America, closing the borders. uh xenophobia in many ways in that $100 fee, $100,000 fee for foreigners uh coming in on H1B u uh v work visas. Uh these are these are not good policies. But uh again, if it's a trade negotiation, maybe the end result would be good, but I'm not holding my breath. Well, America already has one would argue energy independence with its fracking of uh oil and um if it were to increase its refining capacity as well, we'd have full energy independence. Uh there's food independence, there's an abundance of food supplied in the US um relative to its demand. What happens if we have in the US manufacturing independence as well? meaning everything the Americans consume is made domestically. I mean what does economic theory tell us about that kind of society and economy? Is it better or worse off? >> Well, the Nobel Prize was given to some economists today uh on the whole uh issue of economic growth and particularly economic development and in economic development you start off with agriculture. We were an agricultural country for many years and then we became a manufacturing giant and then we got into services and technology and the knowledge economy as Peter Ducker calls it. So there's a natural evolution away from these areas and you need in order to benefit globally manufacturing needs to be global. It can't be just domestic. We have 500,000 jobs that are going unfulfilled right now in manufacturing and technology. And look at look at who's running the uh uh some of the biggest firms in in the country. They're they're foreign uh uh foreigners who were born outside the United States like Elon Musk uh and others that have come in and made all the difference. Why would we close our borders to the best and the brightest from around the world? If there's one thing economics has won up until now in terms of this uh fight is for free trade and a liberal immigration policy. And no, we we we can fight against illegal immigrants. I understand that. That's perfectly it makes perfect sense. But only if you have a liberal legal immigration system so that Canadians and and uh Europeans and uh Latin Americans and people from all over the world from Asia and so forth can come into the US go to our colleges and universities uh get a good training and then use their bright minds to perform well. So Americans cannot do it all. In fact, the other thing is America, we've forgotten this in this de whole debate. What about all the jobs that Americans don't want to do in the hotels uh in the uh construction business uh in agriculture? Uh you need to have people coming across even on a short-term basis to do a lot of this work that Americans don't want to do. So, uh, Trump is, uh, I think he fell asleep at the Wharton School when when we were teaching sound free market, free trade economics. >> Do you think in the distant or perhaps even near future when robots, I'm just thinking hypothetically, robots with advanced AI could do some of these jobs in construction and hotels like you mentioned, would that give the government more incentive to close off borders at that point? Theoretically speaking, the country no longer needs immigrant workers to fulfill a slack in demand for labor. >> It's really impossible. One of the great things about uh the dynamics of any economy is that it's really hard to see into the future 3 years from now or even 10 years from now. Uh but artificial limitations on immigrants is not a good policy. You want to have the flexibility of of bringing in the best and the brightest from all over the world. Uh so yes, ro robots can play a major role and are playing a major role in the production of products and so forth. But imagine if every country closed their borders uh and nobody let anybody in in other countries. I mean I I if if if you don't have people coming across I mean imagine the animosity and and the disparity between standard of living creating tremendous envy and perhaps war and conflict as a result of that our liberal very Christian if you will policy of opening our doors to people who who are less fortunate than us. That's the greatness of America. We are a melting pot. Are we going to end our melting pot that was so successful? There's an old there's an old saying in the business that if if everything is working well, don't change it. And of course there are problems with illegal immigrants and these gangs that are coming in. And I I support efforts to eliminate uh the criminal element uh there. But as far as illegal immigrants who have come across the border to better their lives, they're often low profile. They work hard. Uh they pay their taxes. They're not on welfare and so forth. And we need to look critically at this whole problem. But the the real solution is to maintain a liberal immigration policy. And we'll see what happens. But I think it's a big mistake to just hope that robots and AI is somehow going to keep us from from hiring uh foreigners and so forth. It's hard enough right now, by the way, for standard American citizens to get a job. I mean, I teach at Chapman University and my seniors, they're having a hard time finding jobs right now. I want to touch on the labor market in just a minute. Let's finish off on trade. Just over the weekend on Friday in particular, uh specifically Trump announced an additional 100% tariff on China markets, stock markets and uh crypto markets fell in the news. In fact, crypto markets saw the biggest single day selloff uh measured by market capitalization in history. We've seen we're seeing a bit of a rebound today on Monday. Now, according to this article on Reuters, uh these uh fresh levies are spooking retailers. They should take effect November 1st, assuming no additional deal um is reached before then and assuming this is not repealed. I Well, first of all, let me just ask you for your speculation. Will this actually go through? Do you think? Huh? Well, hopefully none of this will go through and this is simply two strong men going at each other to say who who's going to blink first. Uh I I don't know the answer to that question, but I suspect that uh they're going to meet and agree to some type of an agreement. I mean, that's the way this game is played. The art of the deal, the the art of war, if you will. Uh that's that's what's going on here. And um so I think the market this is very typical of the market that the first day this is announced the market uh sells off and then recovers when um more stable minds are at work here and saying well this is just a negotiation. We'll see what happens. But certainly 100% tariff on Chinese goods would be devastating to consumers. It's one of the reasons Trump has to has to resolve these issues before the midterms because I I'm going to tell you uh the midterms. Uh look, the Democrats are going to take over the House at least and maybe even the Senate the way Trump is dealing with these issues. He has a window of two years to accomplish his goals. Then he has to back off. He has to show his success in what he's doing. And if he doesn't and Americans feel like prices are too high, job market is really bad, that we're in a recession, and even if the stock market starts selling off, that's really bad news for the Republicans. And you're already seeing it in these various elections. There's very few examples where Republicans have maintained control. They're they're losing elections right now. So, it's not unlike what's happening in Argentina. Malay is under tremendous pressure to be successful in Argentina, but the Pedonistas and the opposition are winning in the elections and this is not a this is not a good situation for Malay. >> So, just back to uh the tariffs. This is from um the budget lab at Yale estimates that tariffs will reduce household incomes by about $2,400 a year. Since Mr. Trump staggered rollout spreads. The increases have over several quarters. What might have been a one-off shock risks become becoming persistently higher inflation. Now, uh this se segus into your work, which is gross output. Can you just evaluate how the performance of uh the uh the consumer today in 2025 October compares to that of a year ago 2024 before the election? Well, one of the misnomers the one of the most significant misnomers in today's economy is that consumer spending drives the economy that it's it's 2/3 of total economic activity. Well, it is 2/3 of GDP, but GDP leaves out the supply chain. All the B2B spending at the various stages of production and it's bigger than GDP itself. When you look at the total spending at all stages of production, total economic activity, it's called gross output. the government, the federal government measures it every quarter along with GDP. Unfortunately, it comes out two months later, so it's kind of buried in the data and people don't look at it, but they should. I wrote a Wall Street Journal column just a couple weeks ago, two weeks ago uh on what gross output is telling us and it's been slow. It grew at 1% or less in the last year compared to uh 3% in GDP. So that's a danger sign. In particular, B2B spending, business spending at all stages of production was down 5.6% in real terms. B2B spending has been very slow since the U and the supply chain is very very slow to to get back to normal. Uh while consumers continue to spend. So consumers are spending. Everything's fine with the consumer at this point. But it's business spending that is a uh a pre uh indicator that uh we're headed for some kind of trouble and the supply chain in particular. Businesses are being hit with higher expenses with these tariffs. And I think it's affecting the supply chain and it'll eventually cause I mean if you go into Target uh into the grocery store, you look at these prices and they are starting to move up. uh business can't just absorb these uh p uh these higher tariffs continually. At some point they're going to pass them along to consumers and then we're going to finally see the end result of uh perhaps a recession. Certainly we're suffering from a slowdown right now. >> Do you think the labor market is at risk from entering a labor market recession? You know, see this is another example where GDP there's this disconnect between GDP that's up three 3% and job growth is not growing hardly at all. And it's not all due to AI. I mean there's some element involved with that I suppose. Uh but I I think a lot of it has to do with the uncertainty that Trump has created with his trade war and people are reluctant, businesses are reluctant to hire. Uh, I mentioned that my seniors at Chapman University, I mean, Goldman Sachs comes to Chapman University and they're only interviewing 1% of the applicants. That's what I was told by one of my students. And that's not what it had was in the case. And Goldman Sachs is booming in in terms of its stock market performance. It's done really well this year. You'd think they'd be hiring right and left, but they're not. So I think the gross output statistic, the go statistic that I put out and the B2B spending is a better indicator uh linking the slow job growth that's uh that you're finding in the economy and you're not seeing it in the GDP statistics unfortunately. >> What are the biggest differences between your measure of output, gross output versus GDP? >> Well, the big difference is the supply chain. GDP leaves out the supply chain and uh the supply chain is bigger than GDP itself. So it's natural that consumer spending is the big sector, the big elephant in the room when you look at GDP statistics. Uh and GDP uh I mean consumer spending is doing just fine. It grew at 3 or 4% a year and did well. Government spending is now in decline under the Trump administration. Doge is having its effect and then private fixed investment was basically flat for the year and then B2B spending in the supply chain uh actually declined uh in the last quarter. Now part of that may be due to the tariffs because in the previous quarter uh you had businesses bulk up on inventories. So that caused GDP to uh and investment to B2B spending to rise. But then it it stopped. Uh business has decided not to do that. Now they want to pair down inventories. Uh they built up these inventories and now they're pairing down the inventories and so uh B2B spending is declining. So there are a lot of differences in GDP and GO. people can go to grossoutput.com my website uh and get I have a press release that comes out every quarter with when the geo statistics are released. >> I want to finish off in the markets now scout uh Mark uh we we we know you as the economist who had correctly called the 1987 uh black Monday market crash. You have been warning your clients for several months about valuations being unreasonable leading up until October. I'm not seeing you making similar warnings now, Mark. Um, any parallels now to 1987? We're seeing the word bubble pop up on mainstream news quite a lot, but I'm not seeing you warning about something similar. Yeah, ever since the 87 crash, which was a prediction that I made uh back then, government has changed its policies. You know, you have a lot of well and and so have the the markets themselves. Uh they will stop trading uh if the market drops 10% or more. Uh they have these circuit breakers in place. Also they have the uh the emergency powers that uh the government has a organization that they put together and they bring uh uh they get together the treasury, the SEC, the Fed chairman and so on. They meet privately whenever there's a threat of a crisis and they can intervene and the Fed is going to aggressively intervene if there's a stock market crash. So I don't predict crashes necessarily, but bare markets uh they're they're still very real. So a bare market is still very possible. Uh we've seen it a number of times over the last uh uh since the 87 crash. You've had significant bare markets, but no total crash or the market drops 20% in a day. Individual stocks, yes, but not the market as a whole because of all these intervening factors. So, a bare market, yes, the market is overvalued. I've said over and over again, the tech stocks could fall in half and still be overvalued. That's uh that's the possibility of a of a major bare market occurring, but it would require a Fed to raise interest rates dramatically. would maybe a some kind of a black swan event uh war unex pandemic uh they close this market they close down the economy those kind of things can cause severe bare markets uh the uh PE ratio of the stock market is uh at close to an all-time high so there are some similarities between that and 1929 the technology is real the AI revolution is real. It's causing stocks to rise. But my understanding 50 uh uh revenue from AI stocks is 50 uh50 billion dollars a year and you have a AI trillion trillion dollar market. Uh so uh there is a bit of a disconnect there and overvalue. So there's a lot similarity between the dot uh craze of the late 1990s and the AI boom of today. So, I wouldn't be surprised to see some kind of correction due to a black swan event. I don't know what it'll be. Maybe maybe the Treasury will have an impossible task with central banks buying up all this gold and dumping their treasuries. We could have a no bid situation on the Treasury market. I mean, they're they have to refinance $7 trillion this year. I mean, that's that's a heck of a lot of money. and suppose uh nobody shows up to buy the treasuries that could cause the stock market to uh go into a crash or a bare market. So uh there are some warning signs out there that this is a speculative bubble even in gold and silver. We haven't talked about uranium man uranium stocks have really taken off >> and I think they have much more potential. I like the uranium area as a much better way to invest right now because of the growth in nuclear power. There's just a lot of benefits to nuclear power as an alternative energy. >> Do you think that with the advent of technology and how ubiquitous information is, the markets are a lot more efficient now than in ' 87? And so large volatile corrections or even an upward move um are less likely today because of higher efficiency. Does that make sense? >> Yes, it's more efficient, but that also means that uh emotions can also play a much bigger role because all you have to do is click on a button and you sell, right? And so numerous people can all start selling all at once. And how do you control that? it it's going to require government intervention uh in in order to do that. So efficiency can work both ways and I do think you have not eliminated human behavior and uh you know it's it's something that has existed forever. The plungers and the peacocks as they say right the plungers and the peacocks have not gone away. What is your outlook for um for the stock market into the end of the year and perhaps to 2026 given everything we've talked about and given uh what the Fed may do? We haven't talked about monetary policy in detail uh yet, but maybe let's factor all this together. >> I think the Federal Reserve has actually done a fairly decent uh uh approach here. I I was really expecting a bare market this year. the first year of the pre presidential term tends to be rather bearish uh not not performing as well as it has in the past and Trump has certainly disrupted the whole system over and over again. So you really wonder how I mean I'm I'm really quite pleased of course with the total returns of in my portfolio. It's the best returns we've ever had in 45 years of writing forecasts and strategies. Uh, so I hope it continues to the end of the year. I think the all bets are off as we enter 2026. Uh, it is going to be midterm election year. Uh, Trump may have to play some more games. I don't know. It's really hard to say, but we've done so well. It's hard for me to be uh optimistic uh as I was uh at the beginning of the summer, especially with, you know, we've added gold and silver and uranium plays and stuff like that. But uh you know, there's an old saying from my book, The Maximums of Wall Street, that it's not a stock market, it's a market of stocks. And uh if you can pick and choose some winners out there, uh things might might look up. But uh overall you need a portfolio that's well diversified and at some point the establishment firms are going to start taking profits these huge profits that they've had this year. So it'll be interesting to see if uh we can escape the o the the october bare market. We ex escape the September one. Uh so uh I'm fully invested still at this point, but I'm moving my stop orders up and protecting myself on the downside in case we do have a sharp selloff. Uh we did have a selloff by the way in the business development companies, the BDC's, my main street capital symbol main AI. It's my oldest longest position. They are the best performing private investment firm uh in the country with small to medium companies. Uh, Main Street Capital went through a 20% correction in the last month. They're recovering today, but 20% decline. Why? Because the Fed lowered interest rates, so investment income would may not do as well. But the private credit market which now now reaches$ two trillion dollar $2 trillion private credit market looks really frost like it's overvalued at this point and there could be some trouble down the road for some of these companies and so that's why the selloff that took place. Main Street I think will be fine because it's so well managed. But uh that can that can be an indication of how sell-offs can happen rather rapidly and you you you have to meet alert to them. >> Anything in particular or sectors in particular that look undervalued to you? We're relatively cheap right now. >> Oh boy. Well certainly biotech. >> You mentioned uranium. >> Yes. Go ahead. Well, uranium has uh has taken off over the last uh three months and I still think has further to go for sure. Uh I really think that's that's a go-to place to go on a short-term speculative basis. Uh but biotech is an area that I think has great promise. I mean, I have Amgen in my portfolio and it's break even over the last year, but it has some lots of uh good drugs coming down the pipelines. There's always some interesting plays in the biotech sphere and and uh that that might be advantageous and maybe even some of the bank stocks and so forth that really haven't done much uh recently uh could be a conservative way to play that market. So uh it's it's really hard to find these uh these really cheap stocks that uh that haven't had a a nice runup. So, uh, a little bit cautious making specific recommendations at this point. >> Tell us where we can find you and read your work. >> Well, I'm at markscowzin.com and that's my main website. Uh, and also, of course, I do my annual conference every year called Freedomfest. Uh, we're calling it uh the World's Fair of Liberty and we're celebrating the 250th anniversary of our nation. We are going to have a record crowd, I'm hoping, in Las Vegas at the Caesars Forum uh convention center July 8th through the 11th. So if people go to freedomfest.com, they can find out all about that. And the first 400 who sign up get a nice discount. So uh that's filling up pretty quickly. So it's going to be a really fun event. I'm looking forward to seeing a lot of people there. And I hope David, you will be there as well. It's a great place to interview great people. We have Steve Forbes and John Mackey, a former CEO of Whole Foods Market. Kennedy from Fox News will be back. We'll have a host of probably 200 plus speakers and exhibitors and so forth. We're really excited about the World's Fair of Liberty called Freedom Fest. >> Yeah, I was there a few years ago when it was held at Memphis. Uh very good conference. Had a lot of fun there. So, thank you again for hosting another wonderful event. So, we'll look forward to that next year. We'll follow up closer to uh the conference, I'm sure. And uh yeah, do follow Mark at his website link down below as well. Thanks Mark. It's good to catch up with you and I'll speak with you again. >> Pleasure. Be as Ben Franklin would say, be free. >> Be free. Easier said than done these days. We'll try our best Mark. And uh thank you for watching. Be free and be subscribed. Link down below.