Economy On 'Edge Of Massive Depression': These Assets To Collapse, And Soar | Doug Casey
Summary
Precious Metals: Strongly bullish on silver and gold due to dollar debasement, structural deficits, and tightening physical inventories; advocates gradual accumulation of physical metals.
Silver Outlook: Expects potential move toward $100+ with supply shortfalls, potential Chinese export restrictions, and questions about paper-to-physical coverage.
Mining Stocks: Sees mining equities as volatile but undervalued, with historical multi-bagger cycles; public interest remains low, especially in juniors.
Energy Value: Positions fresh capital into oil & gas, uranium, and coal, citing attractive dividends and below cost-of-production pricing, viewing the group as the market’s cheapest.
Nuclear and Uranium: Calls nuclear the safest, cheapest, cleanest mass power and expects uranium prices higher; embraces contrarian upside in coal.
Industrial Metals: Bullish on copper (electrification, long mine lead times) and platinum (tight supply from South Africa/Russia and limited substitutes).
Macro Outlook: Warns of severe dollar debasement and a potential depression; skeptical of government data and AI-led market concentration risks.
Long-Term Tech: Long-run optimism for robotics and broader technology advances, while near-term tech equities appear expensive.
Transcript
So, silver hitting $100 next year, would that surprise you? >> No. In fact, I expect it to happen. The inevitable is now approaching the imminent, becoming the imminent, and we're on the edge of a massive depression. The most basic reason for it is the debasement of the dollar. Quite frankly, the US government is has painted itself into a corner and the Fed has to basically create a couple trillion dollars [clears throat] of new currency units every year just to finance the uh US government. >> Been a historic week for a lot of assets, including precious metals. Gold now at $4,500, nearing $4,600. And importantly, silver now almost at $80 an ounce, which is a number that I didn't think I would be saying on air for quite some time. But here we are near of near the end of 2025. Doug Casey is here to give us his take for what's going to happen in 2026 to not just the precious metals complex, but also the entire economy, what he thinks is most important, and why the state of education is about to change forever. Doug Casey is the author of several best-selling books including crisis investing and then crisis investing in the9s and now the preparation which we'll be talking about and he's also the author of uh several online forums including the international man. Welcome back to the show. It's good to see you Doug. >> It's a pleasure uh David although you're looking at me out on my farm in Uruguay at the moment. Wonderful place to spend the uh Christmas tide. But um as per what you just said uh silver I guess is the uh financial market that is [clears throat] getting the most attention at the moment and I always tend to look at these things from a uh historical point of view and uh you know if you look at the history of silver as a commodity uh particularly a monetary commodity in in the modern era uh it started with the with Spain's conquest of Mexico which liberated many many many millions of ounces of silver changed the whole world's financial system uh actually and um since then silver has been a monetary and political football in the US uh some of you in Canada uh would probably remember the name William Jennings Brian who is a uh presidential candidate at the turn of the last century who gave a fan famous cross of gold speech. He wanted to monetize silver, throw gold out entirely and use silver because at that time relative to gold, silver was an inflationary device. He was a Democrat and uh that party's always wanted to inflate the currency thinking that it's a good thing. Uh but it's actually a very bad thing to do that anyway. Look, silver bringing ourselves up to present time and should it be trading at $80 an ounce right now. Another thing that people have forgotten uh is the fact that uh at one point in the uh early 60s the US government had two billion ounces of silver uh in its vaults and uh it liquidated the entire amount and in 1965 Johnson took silver out of US coins in addition. So silver's gone from boom to bust and uh uh glut and so forth for many years now. For the last several years, silver's been running a deficit and last year it had a 300 million ounce deficit. About 865 million ounces of silver were mined in new production, but there was a 300 million ounce deficit. So I guess to answer the question, if we look at it from a fundamental point of view, yeah, there's good reason for silver to be at 80 [clears throat] $80 an ounce considering the amount of use deficit versus the amount that's being mined today. >> There's some stuff I'm seeing on Twitter to and I want to ask you to see if it's accurate or if you have any thoughts on this. According to this source on Twitter called Bull Theory, the physical market can no longer meet soaring demand. Here's what's actually going on. China is changing the rules. Starting January 1st, 2026, China will restrict silver exports. To export silver companies will now need government licenses. Only large state approved firms qualify. At least 80 tons um around $30 million in credit lines. Number two, the silver market was already short supply. uh that you talked about this physical silver inventories are collapsing number three. This is where it gets serious. Comx inventories are down 70% since 2020. London vaults are now down 40%. Shanghai inventories are at 10ear [snorts] lows. I think the general theme here is that there's a supply shock going on on several fronts, which explains why silver has been outperforming gold. What do you think? Is this accurate? Is this true? Yeah, it makes sense to me because uh look, getting back to the basics again, silver is one of the 92 naturally occurring elements. And of those elements, silver is the most reflective of light and the most conductive [clears throat] of both heat and electricity. So, it's a genuine high-tech metal. And it said I don't know the [clears throat] exact amount of truth to this but the next generation of batteries uh currently under development uh is going to use silver uh to a great extent not lithium perhaps that's part of the picture too. So add to that the fact that twice in the recent past, fairly recent past, in 1980, silver hit $50 an ounce and in 2011 it hit $50 an ounce. But the uh dollar has lost a huge amount of value uh since 1980. If it was to go to in real terms the high that it hit in 1980, it would have to go to 200. So, I guess bottom line boiling this all down, yeah, I think silver has reached a new plateau and it could very well go higher because uh how much of the paper silver that's traded on the exchanges really has physical silver that's good for delivery? It's a good question. So, uh, but look, the main way I play silver for many years, I bought silver and just put it away in a vault. And so, I have a bunch of physical silver, but uh, silver stocks uh, is where the real volatility is at. Uh most people won't even remember this, but back in this is ancient [clears throat] history. In uh 1970, a guy named Norman Lamb wrote a book called Small Fortunes and Penny Gold Stocks. It's still available on Amazon uh in the used book department. And Lamb pointed out that silver stocks on the Spokane Stock Exchange, which used to exist. I actually visited it, uh, went on average about 100 to one during a silver boom during the 60s. So, it's very very volatile. It's a tiny market, much smaller than that of gold. There are no big inventories of silver. Yeah, it could happen. It could go to $200. That's not a prediction. I'm just saying that I'm happy to own go, own a lot of physical silver and own silver stock. >> You already know why people hold gold. It's because it's real money. But what if your gold could do more than just sit in a vault? Well, that's where our sponsor today, Monetary Metals, comes in. They offer a way for you to earn a yield on your gold paid in physical gold. Through their leasing marketplace, you can earn up to 4% yield per year in gold. Instead of paying storage fees, your gold actually works for you. And because that yield is paid in gold, not cash, your stack grows no matter what the dollar is doing. Thousands of clients already earn monthly interest in gold and silver through monetary medals. And the numbers just keep climbing. So don't just hold gold. Start earning real gold on your gold today. Go to monetary-medals.com/in link down below or scan the QR code here. Put your gold to work soon. Look at this chart. Look at this long-term chart. It's that's a parabolic move. It's a straight line. It's not even like sloped. So you see you see something like that. Is your instinct to sell some of your silver holdings? >> That Yeah, that's absolutely my first instinct, especially with commodities because once again to uh bring up some historical context, the longest bare market in all of human history is commodities. uh things like copper. If you had a piece of copper when you were a caveman 10,000 years ago, you were a caveman billionaire cuz there wasn't any around and was very useful even then. So the price of everything, food, metals, you name it, has been in a long bare market for 10,000 years. And that's going to continue with the development of nanotechnology and uh things of that nature. But uh that's the long term. For the short term, yeah, that chart scares me a lot. But as volatile as the world's monetary situation is today, I'm very happy continuing to own my physical silver. And the public is not at all interested yet in silver stocks or gold stocks really. So, I'm very happy continuing to own both of those things. And if it drops back to $50 or $30 or $40 an ounce, I don't care because it's uh it's just an asset that I want to continue accumulating for the long term as I've done for most of my life quite frankly, which is how I wound up with all the silver. >> In 1980, some people attributed the uh parabolic rise to the Hunt Brother squeeze. In 2011, uh gold soared due to the debt crisis in Europe and other other issues as well. and silver rose with it. If you had to attribute one narrative to this parabolic move and we'll close it off here on silver, what would it be? >> The most basic reason for it is the debasement of the dollar. Quite frankly, the US government is has painted itself into a corner and the Fed has to basically create a couple trillion dollars of new currency units every year just to finance the uh US government. So that uh the fate of the dollar at this point is sealed and that's what's driving both gold and silver. So I I guess on the most basic level uh that's that's my answer. >> I want to talk about the economy now. We'll come back to your predictions for 2026. So stay tuned for Duck Casey's um outlook for the assets that we're discussing today and comment below what you think is going to happen to silver and gold in the new year. Now let's move on to this clip of uh of the um Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnik uh on air right after The GDP report came out last week. Take a listen. 4.3% GDP. Huge number. Uh the Trump administration is celebrating this. Of course, this is what he had to say. >> 4.3 GDP growth, beating it by a full point of 3.3. How does that affect our bottom line, our pocketbook issues? >> So, just think the whole world out there in the third quarter, the United Kingdom grew 0.1. The European Union grew 0.4 and Japan fell6% fell6%. Donald Trump's economy grew the United States of America, the biggest economy in the world 4.3%. What that means is that Americans overall, the all of us are going to earn 4.3% more money. We're making a raise. It's a simple way to do it. We've got more jobs, lower energy costs, and lower interest rates coming. This is the golden age coming. 4.3% this quarter means Americans on average are making more money. More money in their pocketbooks. That makes for a great Christmas. Can you evaluate what he just said here? A lot of things. We're all going to be 4.3% richer on average. More jobs coming. Lower interest rates coming. Well, we know lower interest rates are coming. Was this a great Christmas economically? >> Look, Mr. Lutnik is a great salesman. He's a hustler. He's a Carne Barker, much like Donald Trump himself is. And some of his figures impress me as being correct what he said about England and Europe. Quite quite correct. They're sinking ships. Uh and the question is for people that have capital, where are you going to put the capital? I mean [clears throat] physically, what country? what political jurisdiction are you going to put it in? So yeah, I'd get the I'd get my money the hell out of England and Europe sinking ships and the US is a logical place to put it. So that accounts for the fact that part of the reason that uh that uh the US is doing better uh than other countries in the west. No question about that. Also the fact is as bad as things are on the tax and regulation front in the US it's better than uh west western Europe. So uh the horse may be going to the slaughter house but it's the best looking horse on the way to the slaughter house. So some of the things that he said is are correct others are not correct. But on top of the that though I don't trust any of the numbers that come out of government agencies including the US government. I don't trust it much more than I trust those coming out of the Argentine government. Uh frankly so uh one thing that I do trust however there's a meme that started so circulating. a guy named Mike Green uh did some thinking and he took the poverty figures for the US and it it said that in the US if you earn less than $30,000 a year if you're a a a man a woman and two kids less than $30,000 put you in the p poverty level officially but Green crunched the numbers in a realistic way and the fact is that if you earn less than and hold on to your hat for $140,000 [clears throat] per year, uh, you're approaching poverty. And he spelled it out. I don't have all of his numbers here in front of me, but you can research it on the internet. $140,000 poverty level green. And I'll probably get you there and see his reasoning. And he's actually quite correct because an American that's earning $100,000 a year today is just getting by. So that kind of puts paid to the promotion that look we're on the edge of a financial pre precipice. The US government has been spending vastly more money than it's taken in for many years in spite of the fact that taxes have gone up, money printing's gone up, inflation has gone up as a result. Borrowing has gone up. So, uh, David, I will go back to what I was saying before and have been saying for many years. The inevitable is now approaching the imminent, becoming the imminent, and we're on the edge of a massive depression, a time when most people's standard of living drops significantly and noticeably. It's not going to be covered up any longer with uh credit card debt and uh uh automobile debt and mortgage debt and second mortgages on your house and so forth. So, >> how did this happen where you know it how did this happen, Doug? You know, just give us a history lesson. We we we came out of the >> Great Depression. There was second world war that arguably boil the economy. There was there was the uh there was a baby boom right afterward. Uh the 50s was a golden age of growth into well there were periods of recessions all throughout the last 70 years. Of course financial crisis in 2008 but then that we had the longest bull rally in American stock market history from 2009 to basically now. And now you're saying we're at the precipice. This is all going to end and our living standards are going to decrease. How how how do we how do we get here? Well, basically the country as a whole, not to mention the government which uh consumes about 40% of the economy directly and indirectly. Uh the way you become prosperous is by producing more than you consume and saving the difference. And uh Americans in particular, but the west in general uh has been consuming more than it's produced for for decades now. Uh that's not how you become wealthy. Uh this has been financed by debt. Uh where's the debt come from? It's borrowing against assets that have been created and produced over many many generations, hundreds of years, and by mortgaging your future. Uh so this is uh this is disguised uh the essential problems that we're we're facing. Uh one of the big problems is the fact that we have a fiat currency. It has no intrinsic value other than what the government assigns to it. uh and as they create trillions and trillions more dollars to prop up things uh the dollar is not only going to lose value but a lot of shaky financial institutions are going to fail. Half of the companies in the uh Russell 2000 are running at a loss today. The stock market is basically the Magnificent 7, the artificial intelligence companies that have gone to ridiculous levels and and in my opinion allocating huge amounts of money uh towards uh a technology which will work but it may be premature just as they did much the same thing with the internet. great thing, but it was a bubble that destroyed a lot of people along the way with overpriced stocks. So, basically, I'm rigged for rigged for um heavy weather and having been long gold and silver and certain other commodities for years, it's treated me very well and I think it will continue to for the time being. Are there any other hedges against fiat debasement besides precious metals? >> Look, [sighs] real estate. You say, "Well, they're not making any more of it." Yes, I understand the argument for real estate, and I own a lot of real estate. The problem with real estate, however, is that all over the West, especially in the US and Canada, though, uh, real estate floats on a sea of borrowed money. If you can't borrow money, you can't buy real estate today and you really can't sell it. Uh so it's all about the price of real estate is about the price of interest rates or the level of interest rates I should say. And the way I see it, no matter what the Fed does in the short run, long-term interest rates are headed up back to the levels that they were in the early 1980s, which most people have forgotten, [clears throat] even the US government was paying 15, 16, 17% for for to sell tea bills. U back in the early 1980s, uh we're headed back there just because of the debasement of the currency. Nobody's going to lend money for 4% when inflation's running five or 6%. And I think in the next three or four years, it's reasonable that we're going to see even official numbers show inflation's running at 7 8 10% maybe more. Who knows? >> 7 8 real estate doesn't look very good from that point of view because of the uh the foundation of borrowed money that lays under it. So where do you hide at this point? What's what's cheap? The stock market's not cheap. The bond market's not cheap. If interest rates go up, the bond market's going to go down proportionately. Uh so where else can you go? H this is a problem that we're facing as a civilization, not just that I'm facing and you're facing as an investor. Where do you put your money that's safe and secure and cheap and realistically high yielding? There's almost no place to run and hide. Now >> what happens when we get this great depression? What happens to not just markets but also society at large? Whenever we've had crises in the past, people have historically traded freedom for security. What about this time? >> Yeah. Well, in the past when they've done that, the government has been more stable than it was today. And people trusted the government more than they do today. But with very good reason, people don't trust the government today. I'm talking particularly about the US government, but this is equally true of the governments in Canada and and Western Europe. uh government has turned into a not that it was always this has always been the case but it's turned into a gigantic parasite a gigantic albatross around the necks of citizens where uh it government has become a a vehicle for grift where uh uh half of the population is attempting to live at the expense of the other half of the population and it's become unsustainable as reflected with the level of taxes, taxes at all levels. Um, real estate taxes, income taxes, VATS, sales taxes. Uh, I think anybody listening to this might recall all of these things have gone up lots and lots in the past and the still the governments are running at uh huge deficits and are bankrupt. So, it's funny. People are looking for the government to kiss everything and make it better. But not only is the government the cause of most of these problems, but it's no longer in a position to [clears throat] disguise the problems anymore. So, how's this all going to end up? Well, in the past, it's ended up with the natives uh going into the streets with uh torches and pitchforks and uh attacking the people in the castle. Um, I'm not sure how that's going to wind up these days with uh so many uh citizens of the West basically living off the government, either being employed by the government or getting benefits for the government from the government. It's unsustainable when you're talking about bankrupt governments across the board. So, uh, well, [laughter] h how are they going to solve the problem in Europe? I think they somehow idiotically they think that fermenting a war against Russia will somehow solve the problem. It'll certainly distract the pop the population. They'll have something serious to worry about. Uh not just heating their houses, but uh >> well, you mentioned something to me offline. You said that there's a possibility of the European Union breaking up. Why is that? >> Look, when the European Union was put together in the 50s, it started to be put together in the 50s. It was it was it was it was called the European Iron and Coal Union where they [clears throat] uh were reducing tariffs and allowing trade between the countries um to facilitate you know France produces this, Germany produces coal, they can trade and they're more competitive. But the thing grew and grew and grew and now the European Union uh as an institution the European Union itself the entity the European Union the government body employs 80,000 people most of them in and [clears throat] around Brussels. And do they produce anything? No they don't. All they do is pass laws and create distortions in the market. Uh, I mean, it's it's crazy. They're trying to regulate the the 200 varieties of the next thing that they want to do and and they're trying to do this is have a a Europewide income tax and a European army in addition. So, it's it's gotten out of control. It's going to fall apart because because all these governments in Europe like the they're all bankrupt anyway. So, this is a shell game. Okay. Uh, in going back to what's going to happen after the Great Depression, this coming depression, financial reset, you've talked about industries that you do see will be the future. You said robotics, for example, will be the trillion dollar industry. Perhaps that's going to lift us out of this depression if it were to come. What do you think? >> Listen, technology itself is what's lifted mankind out of grubbing roots and berries in the mud. uh the most important thing to happen in history was the industrial revolution 200 years ago and it's still with us and it's accelerating and things were seeing like like AI which is overblown at the moment but is a wonderful thing uh computers um robotics uh you know it's there are I've been told 150 different robot robotics companies and by [clears throat] robotics I mean working on bipeedal robots that will work like little terminators if you would in China alone I don't know how many of those are going to survive but robotics is huge uh and going to get bigger uh and there's even better things that are happening I mean we're finally at the threshold of nanotechnology becoming realistic Nanotechnology is basically the melding of submicroscopic computers with sub submicroscopic assemblers and creating pixie dust. Well, that's still out out there 10 or 20 years, but things like um the space industry, not just robotics. uh the fact that Musk has developed rockets that reduce the cost of putting things in orbit not just by a factor of 10 but by a factor of a 100. And now Bezos's com company Blue Origin is replicating it and doing the same thing. And the Chinese [clears throat] are behind but they're also doing the same thing with uh reusable rockets. Um now there's some fantastic things that are going on in technology and in the long run that's the important thing. It's not politics or or uh basically politics or even economic uh stresses and strains. It's technology w which will continue to elevate the human condition. So look, I'm a long-term optimist. I just think that we're in for some really tough years uh throughout the rest of this decade at a minimum. >> If you think that technology is a future of mankind, but at the same time tech is expensive as a as an asset class, then what do we do as investors? >> Well, you know, I ask myself that all the time. Now, for me, it's been an easy question to answer because I've always specialized in resource stocks, mining and uh oil and energy, [clears throat] and those have been generally good places to be, especially uh financing the companies, which is what I've always done. Uh the question I'm asking myself is, okay, how long do I want to stay in that area, which has been good. Uh I still I think that look the cheapest area of the market right now is energy. Oil stocks, gas stocks, uranium stocks, coal stocks. [snorts] Uh across the board, uh this isn't a high dividend era. Uh but they all yield pretty high dividends right now, which is an indication that they're cheap. Uh, so I'm uh when I have fresh money to invest, I'm generally going into oil and gas and uranium and coal. I think they're all going higher. They're all really cheap right now, incidentally. They're really cheap. >> Oil and gas are selling for typically at or below the cost of production everywhere. And the safest, cheapest, and cleanest form of mass power generation, mass power generation is unquestionably nuclear. And uranium I think is going higher as well. And coal is something that everybody hates and generally I like uh almost any uh commodity that everybody hates that has use value. So that's where I am generally. Uh the other place where I am it's not for most people but is in uh mining stocks and I generally look at the small mining stocks. The epicenter is in Vancouver where you are now. Uh the public is still uninterested in them. Uh they've been taught to hate mining stocks and of course the average person doesn't realize that he wouldn't have a car to drive or silverware to eat from if it wasn't for miners. The mining stocks are still very very cheap. Uh and um so and they're very very volatile. So I'm still heavily involved in them. where else to be. Uh it's a problem. That's where I am. >> What about investing in yourself? So, let's talk about education in the future of education. If the next decade is going to be unstable, Doug, what do we do to prepare for that? Which skills will matter more than just credentials? Well, earlier I mentioned the problem with debt and the numbers, the official number is that in the United States alone, I don't know what the numbers are for Canada, but they're probably proportionally about the same uh $1.7 trillion is owed by graduates of universities to people that finance their education. It's absolutely absurd because uh most kids today take liberal arts, they take sociology or political science or economics or gender studies or god god knows what uh or or English for that matter, which is wonderful to know, but it's something you should learn as a hobby. Anyway, for decades, kids have been told that the way to get ahead in the world is to uh get a college education and [clears throat] you'll coast into a middle class uh lifestyle from there. But it's not true. Everybody has a college degree today. The colleges have been captured by leftists and Marxists and uh uh the the um college is look I've been saying for years I said this on when I was on the Phil Donnu show actually by myself uh just before the election in [clears throat] 1980 I said listen you shouldn't go to college I went to college I considered a misallocation of four years of my time and a bunch of my parents money, not as much nearly as much as it would have cost today. So, what what I've done with my friend Matt Smith and his son Maximum is write this book called The Preparation. It explains why you should not misallocate that four years, that extraordinarily valuable four years of time and a whole bunch of money to go and sit in a classroom and listen to leftists lecture you for four years about how bad Western civilization is. Now, if you're taking STEM, science, technology, engineering, math, okay, that's a different story. But in North American colleges, most of the students taking STEM courses are foreigners. They're from the Orient, quite frankly. So, uh, what we've done in this book is not just tell people what they shouldn't do. Don't go to college in order to be corrupted, but what they should do. Uh, we've divided the four years of college into 16 quarters. And in each of these quarters, in addition to doing the things that you would learning the things that you would learn in college, literature and science courses and all this type of thing, we've laid out exactly what you should do and where you should go to become a Renaissance man. In other words, somebody who even if they were dropped into the jungle in the Congo would be able to survive and make it and emerge successful and even wealthy. For instance, one quarter we suggest you learn to be a welder. A very valuable skill, good everywhere in the world. Another quarter we show you where you go to learn how to build a house from the foundation, through the plumbing, through the electrics and everything. Uh, another quarter you go off and learn to sell. Uh my one of one of our co-authors is 20 years old now uh spent three weeks sailing from the Faulland Islands around Cape Horn to Chile and learning to be a competent sailor. Uh now he's going to Thailand where he'll spend three months uh learning Mui Thai because any successful competent person [laughter] should know how to defend themselves. So we go on and by the time you finish the program we lay out here, you'll have achieved the basics of an MBA, the basic basics of a law degree and lots of hard skills that I've just enumerated a few of them and it won't have bankrupted you in the process. So um that's what this book is about. It's available on Amazon. Everybody should read it. And uh if you have a son or a grandson that is on the point of going to college and wondering what to do, this book gives them a plan cuz you don't want to just sit in your mom's basement and play video games trying to figure out who's going to give you a job, which incidentally is a a foolish concept. Uh part of this is about learning to be an entrepreneur as well. Sorry to have gone on like this, David, but I I'm enthusiastic about the concept of a properly educated man. And a properly educated man is [clears throat] a a renaissance man. In effect, not just somebody that has a a goofy diploma to hang on the wall for having sat in the class and listened to lectures for >> Well, I think what you're talking about is lifelong education. I mean, yes, you should aspire to acquire all these different skills even after if you do choose to go to college, learn self-defense, for example. um something I've endeavored to do myself, but this is um an article that highlights what you should be doing in your formative years right after high school. So, this is from a gentleman by the name of Steven Tave, CEO and president of the American Higher Education Development Corporation. Um I've owned and operated trade schools for 40 years and Gen Z is on to something. They recognize the value of vocation education. Um I won't read the entire article for you. I'll summarize a few stats discussed here. Enrollment in vocational focused community colleges jumped 16% last year to its highest level in 2018. Construction trades enrollment up 23%. HVAC and vehicle maintenance up 7%. Gen Z increasingly views skilled trades as AI proof. Unemployment rate for vacational school graduates in their 20s is 2.1% versus 15.3% for four-year college alumni. Only 16% of Gen Z parents believe a college degree guarantees long-term security for jobs. And they're doing this because of the fear that AI is going to take white collar jobs. Let's talk about this trend. What do you think? >> He's absolutely correct. Uh it's it's important that you actually know things uh that are usable in the real world so that you can provide goods and services for other people. This is one of the ways incidentally that college is being degraded. is that if somebody is assigned a paper, uh I'm almost certain that 90% of the students to deliver the paper, uh go to AI, uh Chat GPT, and a dozen others and have that write the paper for them. But wait a minute, that's not helping you get an education. That's helping you pass the test. which is another reason why the value of diplomas is being degraded. Uh no, you have to learn how to not not just know things, not just fun things to know, academic subjects so that you can go to cocktail parties and talk about literature or talk about history. Both are very important, but those are things where you should educate yourself. Uh I think he's quite correct. You have to learn real skills that will allow you not just to uh talk about airy fairy things which are nice and even important but provide goods and services for other people uh you know fix the pipe when the water is leaking that type of thing. >> Absolutely. So uh everyone should check out the preparation uh the book is out now. So finally I promise the audience to get your outlook for some of the assets that we discussed especially the ones that you do like. Let's start with precious metals because we started with a started the conversation with silver and gold. So silver hitting $100 next year. Would that surprise you? >> No. In fact, I expect it to happen and maybe it'll go a lot higher. Although, look, I certainly hope nobody goes out and bets the farm on that right now. Even at these prices, you should, you know, take some extra money if you have it and start buying a little bit of gold and buying a little bit of silver and do that consistently. You want to build an asset base. Better late than never. [clears throat] As far as the price level of gold, I've said for several years now that gold was reasonably priced relative to everything else, food, clothes, houses. Well, now it's actually a little bit overpriced relative to other things. That doesn't mean it's not going higher, though, because the problem that we have is the world monetary system where central banks are buying gold because most of the assets that they have are US treasuries and they don't want to own US treasuries. They realize that they're the unsecured liabilities of a bankrupt government. So, they're dumping their US treasuries. And where can they put it? If you're a central bank, can't buy real estate, you can't really buy stocks. They're buying gold. And maybe maybe [clears throat] they'll even start buying silver, which has always been a secondary money. So answer to the question gradually accumulate even at these prices uh gold and silver as a speculative uh thing. And as inflation gets out of control, people are going to be forced to speculate. Well, my specialty has always been small resource stocks, as I said before, uh the metals and and the energy uh materials. So, and the stocks in those areas are still relatively cheap. So, that's something to look at, those two things. But I don't know, did I answer the question or not, David? I'm not sure. >> Yeah, for sure. And which of the commodities that you talked about, copper, oil, uh other base metals, things that are needed for the transformation of the economy and tech, which do you think will be the best performer in the next five five years? I'm going to extend this to five years, not just next year. >> Okay. Silver is definitely a high-tech metal that's being recognized as soft as such somewhat belatedly. Gold is a is money itself. Uh therefore it's going to go higher as as fiat currencies go down. One metal that people don't talk about uh but is is um is perking up is platinum. Uh platinum is really the smallest of the metals market. Well platium smaller of course but let's talk about palladium because 70% of platinum is mined in South Africa. There are not big uh inventories of uh platinum and as one of the 92 naturally occurring elements. There are certain things from a atomic and chemical point of view that if you need platinum there really is no substitute or there are substitutes but they're not as good. [clears throat] So, uh, platinum, which is $2,000 an ounce now, and in the past is traded for considerably more than gold from time to time, I think, because of the geopolitics of being mined in South Africa because South Africa's going to have big big problems. And those mines are in big trouble in South Africa and the rest of the platinum in the world comes from Russia, which is another kettle of fish. So, I think it's also a good speculation to buy some platinum. uh which you can do. Um but I think uh all of the uh commodities copper is about 550 right now and since it takes decades to build and get permanent and [clears throat] then finance a copper mine um yeah and and copper as the world is electrified more in the future which it will be with AI and all the rest of this type of thing. Yeah, copper is also a good bet. And so good copper stocks are a good place to be. Same goes for nickel at this point. So, uh, well, I'm back to the story of it's a good time to get involved in mining stocks cuz almost nobody owns them and everybody hates the mining business for the reasons I mentioned earlier. >> I was just going to show you a chart of the mining stock. Let's talk, let's finish off on the mining stocks. It's already the GDXJ index is already up 170% over the last 12 months, Doug. And so I understand that you think the commodities are cheap, relatively speaking, but are their stocks still cheap? >> Not as cheap as they used to be. But you have to recall that in the past the S&P 500 uh at times in the past 20% of its value was in mining and oil. Okay. Today mining and oil together about four or 5%. So relative to the rest of the market, it's still cheap. Point number one. Point number two, uh these are teeny weeny and very volatile parts of the market. It's not like consumer durables which don't move a lot. Uh everybody needs them. It's consistent. These things are very very volatile. And take take gold since it was liberated uh in 1971. Previous to that, it was controlled at $35 an ounce by the US government. Since then, we've had five big bull markets in gold stocks. But each of those bull markets, the average gold stock went about 10 to one. And with the smaller stocks, many many went 100 to one. And I've personally earned owned a couple of them that went a thousand to one. And I'm not talking over the course of a lifetime. I'm talking over the course of a cycle of five or six years. So to answer the question, the fact that uh a gold index is up 150%. That tells me that the market's waking up from very depressed metal uh levels and it could easily double and double and double again. as small and as volatile as it is and with the fundamentals which I'm not sure I've I've done as well as I'd like and laying them out. But yeah, this is a good time to be in it. Not the absolute bottom, but listen, you don't want to try to pick the absolute bottom. You know, it's better to get in get in on a trend and ride the trend. >> Well, we appreciate your insights, Doug, and uh I thank you once again for your contributions in 2025 rather. We look forward to more of you in 2026. Where can we find you for now? Where can we follow you and follow your work? >> Well, internationalman.com is a a website that we have which has great articles every day by me and other people like well for instance um David Stockman, an old friend of mine who used to be uh Reagan's [clears throat] management and budget guy. Uh lots of other guys. So go to internationalman.com and on YouTube um uh I do a a podcast called Doug Casey's Take and we have a newsletter called Crisis Investing as well where we pick individual mining and energy [clears throat] stocks as well as talk about the economy. So I guess those three things, David. >> Okay. Well, we'll put the links in the description down below. So, please make sure to follow Doug Casey there. Thanks a lot, Doug. Once again, have a wonderful, happy new year. All the best in 2026, and we'll see you again soon. >> Same to you, David. >> Thank you for watching. Don't forget to like and subscribe.
Economy On 'Edge Of Massive Depression': These Assets To Collapse, And Soar | Doug Casey
Summary
Transcript
So, silver hitting $100 next year, would that surprise you? >> No. In fact, I expect it to happen. The inevitable is now approaching the imminent, becoming the imminent, and we're on the edge of a massive depression. The most basic reason for it is the debasement of the dollar. Quite frankly, the US government is has painted itself into a corner and the Fed has to basically create a couple trillion dollars [clears throat] of new currency units every year just to finance the uh US government. >> Been a historic week for a lot of assets, including precious metals. Gold now at $4,500, nearing $4,600. And importantly, silver now almost at $80 an ounce, which is a number that I didn't think I would be saying on air for quite some time. But here we are near of near the end of 2025. Doug Casey is here to give us his take for what's going to happen in 2026 to not just the precious metals complex, but also the entire economy, what he thinks is most important, and why the state of education is about to change forever. Doug Casey is the author of several best-selling books including crisis investing and then crisis investing in the9s and now the preparation which we'll be talking about and he's also the author of uh several online forums including the international man. Welcome back to the show. It's good to see you Doug. >> It's a pleasure uh David although you're looking at me out on my farm in Uruguay at the moment. Wonderful place to spend the uh Christmas tide. But um as per what you just said uh silver I guess is the uh financial market that is [clears throat] getting the most attention at the moment and I always tend to look at these things from a uh historical point of view and uh you know if you look at the history of silver as a commodity uh particularly a monetary commodity in in the modern era uh it started with the with Spain's conquest of Mexico which liberated many many many millions of ounces of silver changed the whole world's financial system uh actually and um since then silver has been a monetary and political football in the US uh some of you in Canada uh would probably remember the name William Jennings Brian who is a uh presidential candidate at the turn of the last century who gave a fan famous cross of gold speech. He wanted to monetize silver, throw gold out entirely and use silver because at that time relative to gold, silver was an inflationary device. He was a Democrat and uh that party's always wanted to inflate the currency thinking that it's a good thing. Uh but it's actually a very bad thing to do that anyway. Look, silver bringing ourselves up to present time and should it be trading at $80 an ounce right now. Another thing that people have forgotten uh is the fact that uh at one point in the uh early 60s the US government had two billion ounces of silver uh in its vaults and uh it liquidated the entire amount and in 1965 Johnson took silver out of US coins in addition. So silver's gone from boom to bust and uh uh glut and so forth for many years now. For the last several years, silver's been running a deficit and last year it had a 300 million ounce deficit. About 865 million ounces of silver were mined in new production, but there was a 300 million ounce deficit. So I guess to answer the question, if we look at it from a fundamental point of view, yeah, there's good reason for silver to be at 80 [clears throat] $80 an ounce considering the amount of use deficit versus the amount that's being mined today. >> There's some stuff I'm seeing on Twitter to and I want to ask you to see if it's accurate or if you have any thoughts on this. According to this source on Twitter called Bull Theory, the physical market can no longer meet soaring demand. Here's what's actually going on. China is changing the rules. Starting January 1st, 2026, China will restrict silver exports. To export silver companies will now need government licenses. Only large state approved firms qualify. At least 80 tons um around $30 million in credit lines. Number two, the silver market was already short supply. uh that you talked about this physical silver inventories are collapsing number three. This is where it gets serious. Comx inventories are down 70% since 2020. London vaults are now down 40%. Shanghai inventories are at 10ear [snorts] lows. I think the general theme here is that there's a supply shock going on on several fronts, which explains why silver has been outperforming gold. What do you think? Is this accurate? Is this true? Yeah, it makes sense to me because uh look, getting back to the basics again, silver is one of the 92 naturally occurring elements. And of those elements, silver is the most reflective of light and the most conductive [clears throat] of both heat and electricity. So, it's a genuine high-tech metal. And it said I don't know the [clears throat] exact amount of truth to this but the next generation of batteries uh currently under development uh is going to use silver uh to a great extent not lithium perhaps that's part of the picture too. So add to that the fact that twice in the recent past, fairly recent past, in 1980, silver hit $50 an ounce and in 2011 it hit $50 an ounce. But the uh dollar has lost a huge amount of value uh since 1980. If it was to go to in real terms the high that it hit in 1980, it would have to go to 200. So, I guess bottom line boiling this all down, yeah, I think silver has reached a new plateau and it could very well go higher because uh how much of the paper silver that's traded on the exchanges really has physical silver that's good for delivery? It's a good question. So, uh, but look, the main way I play silver for many years, I bought silver and just put it away in a vault. And so, I have a bunch of physical silver, but uh, silver stocks uh, is where the real volatility is at. Uh most people won't even remember this, but back in this is ancient [clears throat] history. In uh 1970, a guy named Norman Lamb wrote a book called Small Fortunes and Penny Gold Stocks. It's still available on Amazon uh in the used book department. And Lamb pointed out that silver stocks on the Spokane Stock Exchange, which used to exist. I actually visited it, uh, went on average about 100 to one during a silver boom during the 60s. So, it's very very volatile. It's a tiny market, much smaller than that of gold. There are no big inventories of silver. Yeah, it could happen. It could go to $200. That's not a prediction. I'm just saying that I'm happy to own go, own a lot of physical silver and own silver stock. >> You already know why people hold gold. It's because it's real money. But what if your gold could do more than just sit in a vault? Well, that's where our sponsor today, Monetary Metals, comes in. They offer a way for you to earn a yield on your gold paid in physical gold. Through their leasing marketplace, you can earn up to 4% yield per year in gold. Instead of paying storage fees, your gold actually works for you. And because that yield is paid in gold, not cash, your stack grows no matter what the dollar is doing. Thousands of clients already earn monthly interest in gold and silver through monetary medals. And the numbers just keep climbing. So don't just hold gold. Start earning real gold on your gold today. Go to monetary-medals.com/in link down below or scan the QR code here. Put your gold to work soon. Look at this chart. Look at this long-term chart. It's that's a parabolic move. It's a straight line. It's not even like sloped. So you see you see something like that. Is your instinct to sell some of your silver holdings? >> That Yeah, that's absolutely my first instinct, especially with commodities because once again to uh bring up some historical context, the longest bare market in all of human history is commodities. uh things like copper. If you had a piece of copper when you were a caveman 10,000 years ago, you were a caveman billionaire cuz there wasn't any around and was very useful even then. So the price of everything, food, metals, you name it, has been in a long bare market for 10,000 years. And that's going to continue with the development of nanotechnology and uh things of that nature. But uh that's the long term. For the short term, yeah, that chart scares me a lot. But as volatile as the world's monetary situation is today, I'm very happy continuing to own my physical silver. And the public is not at all interested yet in silver stocks or gold stocks really. So, I'm very happy continuing to own both of those things. And if it drops back to $50 or $30 or $40 an ounce, I don't care because it's uh it's just an asset that I want to continue accumulating for the long term as I've done for most of my life quite frankly, which is how I wound up with all the silver. >> In 1980, some people attributed the uh parabolic rise to the Hunt Brother squeeze. In 2011, uh gold soared due to the debt crisis in Europe and other other issues as well. and silver rose with it. If you had to attribute one narrative to this parabolic move and we'll close it off here on silver, what would it be? >> The most basic reason for it is the debasement of the dollar. Quite frankly, the US government is has painted itself into a corner and the Fed has to basically create a couple trillion dollars of new currency units every year just to finance the uh US government. So that uh the fate of the dollar at this point is sealed and that's what's driving both gold and silver. So I I guess on the most basic level uh that's that's my answer. >> I want to talk about the economy now. We'll come back to your predictions for 2026. So stay tuned for Duck Casey's um outlook for the assets that we're discussing today and comment below what you think is going to happen to silver and gold in the new year. Now let's move on to this clip of uh of the um Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnik uh on air right after The GDP report came out last week. Take a listen. 4.3% GDP. Huge number. Uh the Trump administration is celebrating this. Of course, this is what he had to say. >> 4.3 GDP growth, beating it by a full point of 3.3. How does that affect our bottom line, our pocketbook issues? >> So, just think the whole world out there in the third quarter, the United Kingdom grew 0.1. The European Union grew 0.4 and Japan fell6% fell6%. Donald Trump's economy grew the United States of America, the biggest economy in the world 4.3%. What that means is that Americans overall, the all of us are going to earn 4.3% more money. We're making a raise. It's a simple way to do it. We've got more jobs, lower energy costs, and lower interest rates coming. This is the golden age coming. 4.3% this quarter means Americans on average are making more money. More money in their pocketbooks. That makes for a great Christmas. Can you evaluate what he just said here? A lot of things. We're all going to be 4.3% richer on average. More jobs coming. Lower interest rates coming. Well, we know lower interest rates are coming. Was this a great Christmas economically? >> Look, Mr. Lutnik is a great salesman. He's a hustler. He's a Carne Barker, much like Donald Trump himself is. And some of his figures impress me as being correct what he said about England and Europe. Quite quite correct. They're sinking ships. Uh and the question is for people that have capital, where are you going to put the capital? I mean [clears throat] physically, what country? what political jurisdiction are you going to put it in? So yeah, I'd get the I'd get my money the hell out of England and Europe sinking ships and the US is a logical place to put it. So that accounts for the fact that part of the reason that uh that uh the US is doing better uh than other countries in the west. No question about that. Also the fact is as bad as things are on the tax and regulation front in the US it's better than uh west western Europe. So uh the horse may be going to the slaughter house but it's the best looking horse on the way to the slaughter house. So some of the things that he said is are correct others are not correct. But on top of the that though I don't trust any of the numbers that come out of government agencies including the US government. I don't trust it much more than I trust those coming out of the Argentine government. Uh frankly so uh one thing that I do trust however there's a meme that started so circulating. a guy named Mike Green uh did some thinking and he took the poverty figures for the US and it it said that in the US if you earn less than $30,000 a year if you're a a a man a woman and two kids less than $30,000 put you in the p poverty level officially but Green crunched the numbers in a realistic way and the fact is that if you earn less than and hold on to your hat for $140,000 [clears throat] per year, uh, you're approaching poverty. And he spelled it out. I don't have all of his numbers here in front of me, but you can research it on the internet. $140,000 poverty level green. And I'll probably get you there and see his reasoning. And he's actually quite correct because an American that's earning $100,000 a year today is just getting by. So that kind of puts paid to the promotion that look we're on the edge of a financial pre precipice. The US government has been spending vastly more money than it's taken in for many years in spite of the fact that taxes have gone up, money printing's gone up, inflation has gone up as a result. Borrowing has gone up. So, uh, David, I will go back to what I was saying before and have been saying for many years. The inevitable is now approaching the imminent, becoming the imminent, and we're on the edge of a massive depression, a time when most people's standard of living drops significantly and noticeably. It's not going to be covered up any longer with uh credit card debt and uh uh automobile debt and mortgage debt and second mortgages on your house and so forth. So, >> how did this happen where you know it how did this happen, Doug? You know, just give us a history lesson. We we we came out of the >> Great Depression. There was second world war that arguably boil the economy. There was there was the uh there was a baby boom right afterward. Uh the 50s was a golden age of growth into well there were periods of recessions all throughout the last 70 years. Of course financial crisis in 2008 but then that we had the longest bull rally in American stock market history from 2009 to basically now. And now you're saying we're at the precipice. This is all going to end and our living standards are going to decrease. How how how do we how do we get here? Well, basically the country as a whole, not to mention the government which uh consumes about 40% of the economy directly and indirectly. Uh the way you become prosperous is by producing more than you consume and saving the difference. And uh Americans in particular, but the west in general uh has been consuming more than it's produced for for decades now. Uh that's not how you become wealthy. Uh this has been financed by debt. Uh where's the debt come from? It's borrowing against assets that have been created and produced over many many generations, hundreds of years, and by mortgaging your future. Uh so this is uh this is disguised uh the essential problems that we're we're facing. Uh one of the big problems is the fact that we have a fiat currency. It has no intrinsic value other than what the government assigns to it. uh and as they create trillions and trillions more dollars to prop up things uh the dollar is not only going to lose value but a lot of shaky financial institutions are going to fail. Half of the companies in the uh Russell 2000 are running at a loss today. The stock market is basically the Magnificent 7, the artificial intelligence companies that have gone to ridiculous levels and and in my opinion allocating huge amounts of money uh towards uh a technology which will work but it may be premature just as they did much the same thing with the internet. great thing, but it was a bubble that destroyed a lot of people along the way with overpriced stocks. So, basically, I'm rigged for rigged for um heavy weather and having been long gold and silver and certain other commodities for years, it's treated me very well and I think it will continue to for the time being. Are there any other hedges against fiat debasement besides precious metals? >> Look, [sighs] real estate. You say, "Well, they're not making any more of it." Yes, I understand the argument for real estate, and I own a lot of real estate. The problem with real estate, however, is that all over the West, especially in the US and Canada, though, uh, real estate floats on a sea of borrowed money. If you can't borrow money, you can't buy real estate today and you really can't sell it. Uh so it's all about the price of real estate is about the price of interest rates or the level of interest rates I should say. And the way I see it, no matter what the Fed does in the short run, long-term interest rates are headed up back to the levels that they were in the early 1980s, which most people have forgotten, [clears throat] even the US government was paying 15, 16, 17% for for to sell tea bills. U back in the early 1980s, uh we're headed back there just because of the debasement of the currency. Nobody's going to lend money for 4% when inflation's running five or 6%. And I think in the next three or four years, it's reasonable that we're going to see even official numbers show inflation's running at 7 8 10% maybe more. Who knows? >> 7 8 real estate doesn't look very good from that point of view because of the uh the foundation of borrowed money that lays under it. So where do you hide at this point? What's what's cheap? The stock market's not cheap. The bond market's not cheap. If interest rates go up, the bond market's going to go down proportionately. Uh so where else can you go? H this is a problem that we're facing as a civilization, not just that I'm facing and you're facing as an investor. Where do you put your money that's safe and secure and cheap and realistically high yielding? There's almost no place to run and hide. Now >> what happens when we get this great depression? What happens to not just markets but also society at large? Whenever we've had crises in the past, people have historically traded freedom for security. What about this time? >> Yeah. Well, in the past when they've done that, the government has been more stable than it was today. And people trusted the government more than they do today. But with very good reason, people don't trust the government today. I'm talking particularly about the US government, but this is equally true of the governments in Canada and and Western Europe. uh government has turned into a not that it was always this has always been the case but it's turned into a gigantic parasite a gigantic albatross around the necks of citizens where uh it government has become a a vehicle for grift where uh uh half of the population is attempting to live at the expense of the other half of the population and it's become unsustainable as reflected with the level of taxes, taxes at all levels. Um, real estate taxes, income taxes, VATS, sales taxes. Uh, I think anybody listening to this might recall all of these things have gone up lots and lots in the past and the still the governments are running at uh huge deficits and are bankrupt. So, it's funny. People are looking for the government to kiss everything and make it better. But not only is the government the cause of most of these problems, but it's no longer in a position to [clears throat] disguise the problems anymore. So, how's this all going to end up? Well, in the past, it's ended up with the natives uh going into the streets with uh torches and pitchforks and uh attacking the people in the castle. Um, I'm not sure how that's going to wind up these days with uh so many uh citizens of the West basically living off the government, either being employed by the government or getting benefits for the government from the government. It's unsustainable when you're talking about bankrupt governments across the board. So, uh, well, [laughter] h how are they going to solve the problem in Europe? I think they somehow idiotically they think that fermenting a war against Russia will somehow solve the problem. It'll certainly distract the pop the population. They'll have something serious to worry about. Uh not just heating their houses, but uh >> well, you mentioned something to me offline. You said that there's a possibility of the European Union breaking up. Why is that? >> Look, when the European Union was put together in the 50s, it started to be put together in the 50s. It was it was it was it was called the European Iron and Coal Union where they [clears throat] uh were reducing tariffs and allowing trade between the countries um to facilitate you know France produces this, Germany produces coal, they can trade and they're more competitive. But the thing grew and grew and grew and now the European Union uh as an institution the European Union itself the entity the European Union the government body employs 80,000 people most of them in and [clears throat] around Brussels. And do they produce anything? No they don't. All they do is pass laws and create distortions in the market. Uh, I mean, it's it's crazy. They're trying to regulate the the 200 varieties of the next thing that they want to do and and they're trying to do this is have a a Europewide income tax and a European army in addition. So, it's it's gotten out of control. It's going to fall apart because because all these governments in Europe like the they're all bankrupt anyway. So, this is a shell game. Okay. Uh, in going back to what's going to happen after the Great Depression, this coming depression, financial reset, you've talked about industries that you do see will be the future. You said robotics, for example, will be the trillion dollar industry. Perhaps that's going to lift us out of this depression if it were to come. What do you think? >> Listen, technology itself is what's lifted mankind out of grubbing roots and berries in the mud. uh the most important thing to happen in history was the industrial revolution 200 years ago and it's still with us and it's accelerating and things were seeing like like AI which is overblown at the moment but is a wonderful thing uh computers um robotics uh you know it's there are I've been told 150 different robot robotics companies and by [clears throat] robotics I mean working on bipeedal robots that will work like little terminators if you would in China alone I don't know how many of those are going to survive but robotics is huge uh and going to get bigger uh and there's even better things that are happening I mean we're finally at the threshold of nanotechnology becoming realistic Nanotechnology is basically the melding of submicroscopic computers with sub submicroscopic assemblers and creating pixie dust. Well, that's still out out there 10 or 20 years, but things like um the space industry, not just robotics. uh the fact that Musk has developed rockets that reduce the cost of putting things in orbit not just by a factor of 10 but by a factor of a 100. And now Bezos's com company Blue Origin is replicating it and doing the same thing. And the Chinese [clears throat] are behind but they're also doing the same thing with uh reusable rockets. Um now there's some fantastic things that are going on in technology and in the long run that's the important thing. It's not politics or or uh basically politics or even economic uh stresses and strains. It's technology w which will continue to elevate the human condition. So look, I'm a long-term optimist. I just think that we're in for some really tough years uh throughout the rest of this decade at a minimum. >> If you think that technology is a future of mankind, but at the same time tech is expensive as a as an asset class, then what do we do as investors? >> Well, you know, I ask myself that all the time. Now, for me, it's been an easy question to answer because I've always specialized in resource stocks, mining and uh oil and energy, [clears throat] and those have been generally good places to be, especially uh financing the companies, which is what I've always done. Uh the question I'm asking myself is, okay, how long do I want to stay in that area, which has been good. Uh I still I think that look the cheapest area of the market right now is energy. Oil stocks, gas stocks, uranium stocks, coal stocks. [snorts] Uh across the board, uh this isn't a high dividend era. Uh but they all yield pretty high dividends right now, which is an indication that they're cheap. Uh, so I'm uh when I have fresh money to invest, I'm generally going into oil and gas and uranium and coal. I think they're all going higher. They're all really cheap right now, incidentally. They're really cheap. >> Oil and gas are selling for typically at or below the cost of production everywhere. And the safest, cheapest, and cleanest form of mass power generation, mass power generation is unquestionably nuclear. And uranium I think is going higher as well. And coal is something that everybody hates and generally I like uh almost any uh commodity that everybody hates that has use value. So that's where I am generally. Uh the other place where I am it's not for most people but is in uh mining stocks and I generally look at the small mining stocks. The epicenter is in Vancouver where you are now. Uh the public is still uninterested in them. Uh they've been taught to hate mining stocks and of course the average person doesn't realize that he wouldn't have a car to drive or silverware to eat from if it wasn't for miners. The mining stocks are still very very cheap. Uh and um so and they're very very volatile. So I'm still heavily involved in them. where else to be. Uh it's a problem. That's where I am. >> What about investing in yourself? So, let's talk about education in the future of education. If the next decade is going to be unstable, Doug, what do we do to prepare for that? Which skills will matter more than just credentials? Well, earlier I mentioned the problem with debt and the numbers, the official number is that in the United States alone, I don't know what the numbers are for Canada, but they're probably proportionally about the same uh $1.7 trillion is owed by graduates of universities to people that finance their education. It's absolutely absurd because uh most kids today take liberal arts, they take sociology or political science or economics or gender studies or god god knows what uh or or English for that matter, which is wonderful to know, but it's something you should learn as a hobby. Anyway, for decades, kids have been told that the way to get ahead in the world is to uh get a college education and [clears throat] you'll coast into a middle class uh lifestyle from there. But it's not true. Everybody has a college degree today. The colleges have been captured by leftists and Marxists and uh uh the the um college is look I've been saying for years I said this on when I was on the Phil Donnu show actually by myself uh just before the election in [clears throat] 1980 I said listen you shouldn't go to college I went to college I considered a misallocation of four years of my time and a bunch of my parents money, not as much nearly as much as it would have cost today. So, what what I've done with my friend Matt Smith and his son Maximum is write this book called The Preparation. It explains why you should not misallocate that four years, that extraordinarily valuable four years of time and a whole bunch of money to go and sit in a classroom and listen to leftists lecture you for four years about how bad Western civilization is. Now, if you're taking STEM, science, technology, engineering, math, okay, that's a different story. But in North American colleges, most of the students taking STEM courses are foreigners. They're from the Orient, quite frankly. So, uh, what we've done in this book is not just tell people what they shouldn't do. Don't go to college in order to be corrupted, but what they should do. Uh, we've divided the four years of college into 16 quarters. And in each of these quarters, in addition to doing the things that you would learning the things that you would learn in college, literature and science courses and all this type of thing, we've laid out exactly what you should do and where you should go to become a Renaissance man. In other words, somebody who even if they were dropped into the jungle in the Congo would be able to survive and make it and emerge successful and even wealthy. For instance, one quarter we suggest you learn to be a welder. A very valuable skill, good everywhere in the world. Another quarter we show you where you go to learn how to build a house from the foundation, through the plumbing, through the electrics and everything. Uh, another quarter you go off and learn to sell. Uh my one of one of our co-authors is 20 years old now uh spent three weeks sailing from the Faulland Islands around Cape Horn to Chile and learning to be a competent sailor. Uh now he's going to Thailand where he'll spend three months uh learning Mui Thai because any successful competent person [laughter] should know how to defend themselves. So we go on and by the time you finish the program we lay out here, you'll have achieved the basics of an MBA, the basic basics of a law degree and lots of hard skills that I've just enumerated a few of them and it won't have bankrupted you in the process. So um that's what this book is about. It's available on Amazon. Everybody should read it. And uh if you have a son or a grandson that is on the point of going to college and wondering what to do, this book gives them a plan cuz you don't want to just sit in your mom's basement and play video games trying to figure out who's going to give you a job, which incidentally is a a foolish concept. Uh part of this is about learning to be an entrepreneur as well. Sorry to have gone on like this, David, but I I'm enthusiastic about the concept of a properly educated man. And a properly educated man is [clears throat] a a renaissance man. In effect, not just somebody that has a a goofy diploma to hang on the wall for having sat in the class and listened to lectures for >> Well, I think what you're talking about is lifelong education. I mean, yes, you should aspire to acquire all these different skills even after if you do choose to go to college, learn self-defense, for example. um something I've endeavored to do myself, but this is um an article that highlights what you should be doing in your formative years right after high school. So, this is from a gentleman by the name of Steven Tave, CEO and president of the American Higher Education Development Corporation. Um I've owned and operated trade schools for 40 years and Gen Z is on to something. They recognize the value of vocation education. Um I won't read the entire article for you. I'll summarize a few stats discussed here. Enrollment in vocational focused community colleges jumped 16% last year to its highest level in 2018. Construction trades enrollment up 23%. HVAC and vehicle maintenance up 7%. Gen Z increasingly views skilled trades as AI proof. Unemployment rate for vacational school graduates in their 20s is 2.1% versus 15.3% for four-year college alumni. Only 16% of Gen Z parents believe a college degree guarantees long-term security for jobs. And they're doing this because of the fear that AI is going to take white collar jobs. Let's talk about this trend. What do you think? >> He's absolutely correct. Uh it's it's important that you actually know things uh that are usable in the real world so that you can provide goods and services for other people. This is one of the ways incidentally that college is being degraded. is that if somebody is assigned a paper, uh I'm almost certain that 90% of the students to deliver the paper, uh go to AI, uh Chat GPT, and a dozen others and have that write the paper for them. But wait a minute, that's not helping you get an education. That's helping you pass the test. which is another reason why the value of diplomas is being degraded. Uh no, you have to learn how to not not just know things, not just fun things to know, academic subjects so that you can go to cocktail parties and talk about literature or talk about history. Both are very important, but those are things where you should educate yourself. Uh I think he's quite correct. You have to learn real skills that will allow you not just to uh talk about airy fairy things which are nice and even important but provide goods and services for other people uh you know fix the pipe when the water is leaking that type of thing. >> Absolutely. So uh everyone should check out the preparation uh the book is out now. So finally I promise the audience to get your outlook for some of the assets that we discussed especially the ones that you do like. Let's start with precious metals because we started with a started the conversation with silver and gold. So silver hitting $100 next year. Would that surprise you? >> No. In fact, I expect it to happen and maybe it'll go a lot higher. Although, look, I certainly hope nobody goes out and bets the farm on that right now. Even at these prices, you should, you know, take some extra money if you have it and start buying a little bit of gold and buying a little bit of silver and do that consistently. You want to build an asset base. Better late than never. [clears throat] As far as the price level of gold, I've said for several years now that gold was reasonably priced relative to everything else, food, clothes, houses. Well, now it's actually a little bit overpriced relative to other things. That doesn't mean it's not going higher, though, because the problem that we have is the world monetary system where central banks are buying gold because most of the assets that they have are US treasuries and they don't want to own US treasuries. They realize that they're the unsecured liabilities of a bankrupt government. So, they're dumping their US treasuries. And where can they put it? If you're a central bank, can't buy real estate, you can't really buy stocks. They're buying gold. And maybe maybe [clears throat] they'll even start buying silver, which has always been a secondary money. So answer to the question gradually accumulate even at these prices uh gold and silver as a speculative uh thing. And as inflation gets out of control, people are going to be forced to speculate. Well, my specialty has always been small resource stocks, as I said before, uh the metals and and the energy uh materials. So, and the stocks in those areas are still relatively cheap. So, that's something to look at, those two things. But I don't know, did I answer the question or not, David? I'm not sure. >> Yeah, for sure. And which of the commodities that you talked about, copper, oil, uh other base metals, things that are needed for the transformation of the economy and tech, which do you think will be the best performer in the next five five years? I'm going to extend this to five years, not just next year. >> Okay. Silver is definitely a high-tech metal that's being recognized as soft as such somewhat belatedly. Gold is a is money itself. Uh therefore it's going to go higher as as fiat currencies go down. One metal that people don't talk about uh but is is um is perking up is platinum. Uh platinum is really the smallest of the metals market. Well platium smaller of course but let's talk about palladium because 70% of platinum is mined in South Africa. There are not big uh inventories of uh platinum and as one of the 92 naturally occurring elements. There are certain things from a atomic and chemical point of view that if you need platinum there really is no substitute or there are substitutes but they're not as good. [clears throat] So, uh, platinum, which is $2,000 an ounce now, and in the past is traded for considerably more than gold from time to time, I think, because of the geopolitics of being mined in South Africa because South Africa's going to have big big problems. And those mines are in big trouble in South Africa and the rest of the platinum in the world comes from Russia, which is another kettle of fish. So, I think it's also a good speculation to buy some platinum. uh which you can do. Um but I think uh all of the uh commodities copper is about 550 right now and since it takes decades to build and get permanent and [clears throat] then finance a copper mine um yeah and and copper as the world is electrified more in the future which it will be with AI and all the rest of this type of thing. Yeah, copper is also a good bet. And so good copper stocks are a good place to be. Same goes for nickel at this point. So, uh, well, I'm back to the story of it's a good time to get involved in mining stocks cuz almost nobody owns them and everybody hates the mining business for the reasons I mentioned earlier. >> I was just going to show you a chart of the mining stock. Let's talk, let's finish off on the mining stocks. It's already the GDXJ index is already up 170% over the last 12 months, Doug. And so I understand that you think the commodities are cheap, relatively speaking, but are their stocks still cheap? >> Not as cheap as they used to be. But you have to recall that in the past the S&P 500 uh at times in the past 20% of its value was in mining and oil. Okay. Today mining and oil together about four or 5%. So relative to the rest of the market, it's still cheap. Point number one. Point number two, uh these are teeny weeny and very volatile parts of the market. It's not like consumer durables which don't move a lot. Uh everybody needs them. It's consistent. These things are very very volatile. And take take gold since it was liberated uh in 1971. Previous to that, it was controlled at $35 an ounce by the US government. Since then, we've had five big bull markets in gold stocks. But each of those bull markets, the average gold stock went about 10 to one. And with the smaller stocks, many many went 100 to one. And I've personally earned owned a couple of them that went a thousand to one. And I'm not talking over the course of a lifetime. I'm talking over the course of a cycle of five or six years. So to answer the question, the fact that uh a gold index is up 150%. That tells me that the market's waking up from very depressed metal uh levels and it could easily double and double and double again. as small and as volatile as it is and with the fundamentals which I'm not sure I've I've done as well as I'd like and laying them out. But yeah, this is a good time to be in it. Not the absolute bottom, but listen, you don't want to try to pick the absolute bottom. You know, it's better to get in get in on a trend and ride the trend. >> Well, we appreciate your insights, Doug, and uh I thank you once again for your contributions in 2025 rather. We look forward to more of you in 2026. Where can we find you for now? Where can we follow you and follow your work? >> Well, internationalman.com is a a website that we have which has great articles every day by me and other people like well for instance um David Stockman, an old friend of mine who used to be uh Reagan's [clears throat] management and budget guy. Uh lots of other guys. So go to internationalman.com and on YouTube um uh I do a a podcast called Doug Casey's Take and we have a newsletter called Crisis Investing as well where we pick individual mining and energy [clears throat] stocks as well as talk about the economy. So I guess those three things, David. >> Okay. Well, we'll put the links in the description down below. So, please make sure to follow Doug Casey there. Thanks a lot, Doug. Once again, have a wonderful, happy new year. All the best in 2026, and we'll see you again soon. >> Same to you, David. >> Thank you for watching. Don't forget to like and subscribe.