These 3 Sectors Set to MELT DOWN – 'It'll Happen QUICKLY': Edward Dowd
Summary
Market Outlook: Edward Dowd predicts a significant market downturn, highlighting weaknesses in the broad market, housing, and credit sectors, with AI stocks particularly vulnerable to a crash.
Gold Investment: Despite recent fluctuations, Dowd remains bullish on gold, viewing it as a reestablishing form of money and a hedge against economic uncertainty.
Oil Price Forecast: Dowd forecasts WTI crude oil prices could drop to $25-$35 per barrel due to economic slowdown and demand destruction, though he notes this price level won't last long.
AI Technology: Dowd argues that AI is overhyped and not yet ready to replace human labor at scale, with current corporate adoption rolling over due to its limitations.
Real Estate Concerns: The US housing market faces a potential downturn due to affordability issues and excess inventory, though Dowd does not foresee a systemic crisis.
China's Economic Challenges: Dowd suggests China is on the brink of a severe economic downturn due to demographic issues and a real estate crisis, with potential global deflationary impacts.
Banking Sector Risks: Regional banks may face challenges due to bad credit cycles, with potential for consolidation and some banks going bankrupt, though not expected to be systemic.
Transcript
Hello everybody and welcome to Commodity Culture where we break down commodities markets, sound money principles and geopolitics all with the goal of making you a better investor in the commodities sector. My name is Jesse Day and on this episode I'm thrilled to welcome Edward Dow to the program. A former portfolio manager at Black Rockck where he managed a 144 billion growth equity portfolio for a decade. He is also an author and a founding partner of Finance Technologies. Edward is seeing many signs of weakness in the broad market, the economy, the housing market, and credit markets, and he believes the stage is set for a multitude of bubbles to burst, resulting in a crash of overvalued AI stocks that are currently running way ahead of themselves. Edward remains bullish on gold despite the recent draw down and he sees it headed much higher as its role as money continues to reestablish itself. We also discuss why he sees WTI crude oil dropping as low as $25 a barrel, why China could be on the verge of economic collapse, and so much more. So strap yourselves in for my conversation with Edward Dow. Edward Dow, it is great to have you back on Commodity Culture. Last time I had you on the show, you were fairly bearish on the long-term trajectory of the broad market. Since then, despite a brief dip in the aftermath of Trump tweeting about imposing 100% tariffs on China, we're up between 5 and 10% on the three big indices. I want to read something you wrote on X recently where you said, "Current sentiment on AI bubble seems to be the following. One, yes, it is a bubble, but it's still in early innings. Two, the above crowd hopes to sell the bubble that everyone agrees on to a marginal So, break down your thoughts here and how you see this all playing out for the the broad market. >> Yeah. So, the broad market has been led by the the mag 7 to 10. It's an AI bubble. If you look at the value line geometric index, which is 1,700 issues, uh the high was put in in 22. than a lower high in in January, February of this year and we're we're still not back above that high. So, we've had three lower highs in that broader index. So, this is really a very concentrated broader indicy uh stock market bubble being driven by AI and I, you know, a lot of people have been saying it's a bubble for a while. Those voices were small and kind of ignored. But now we have uh you know the Wall Street Journal today you know questioning circular financing deals and asking is it an AI bubble? So consensus seems to be it's a bubble but the consensus now is yeah but it's going to go higher. So you know that kind of logic uh is never you know you don't want to hang your hat on that. And you know look um we are now starting to see cracks uh in the credit markets. Uh interest rates are decidingly taking a tick lower which is indic indic indicative of slowing economic growth. Inflation is going to be something that we're that you know was on everyone's mind. That's going to be in the rearview mirror. Uh we put out reports in January indicating we thought interest rates were going to go lower. Oil prices are going to go lower. We're just and real estate real estate is going lower. It's just not well uh it's not it's it's an opaque market. So, that'll take time before it hits the headlines. And we're just waiting on the the stock market people to figure this out. The bond people are starting to figure it out. Uh the smart money on the sidelines is starting to uh allocate money to the recession trade slowly. It's not it's not consensus yet. Um but you can see it in the markets. The 30-year bond uh is now well below 5%. The 10ear is below four. The two-year at 348. in the three-month T bill continues to hit new 52- week lows. Uh interest rates going down is not sign of growth. It's a sign of a slowing economy and the markets are leading and the Fed is behind the eightball. They've kept rates too high for too long. And so if if you if you looking to the health of the economy based on headline indicy numbers, the S&P and the the Dow Jones and the NASDAQ, um you're going to be led astray because when those finally those two those three indices figure it out, and they will, it'll be it'll happen quickly. Uh the bond guys are always ahead of the equity guys. I was a fixed income institutional investor for HSBC. Then I became an equity guy after going to business school. So, I've had a lot of respect for bond people. Uh, they tend to focus on these things earlier. The bond markets figured out what was going on in the great financial crisis well before the equity people did. And, uh, I remember being at Black Rockck and we'd had a meeting every day. The bond people were, you know, fearful as all hell in these morning meetings all throughout two 2007. The equity people were still partying like there was no tomorrow, saying everything's fine. So, the bond markets will prove uh the equity bears right at some point. I don't try to time I'm not I I don't recommend shorting to anybody or any of that nonsense. My recommendations have been a healthy portion of dry powder cash. Uh if you're more speculative, you can get into longer duration uh US treasuries and a healthy portion of gold. The gold call has worked out. Uh gold uh I think is going to consolidate for a while now. I mean, it it it had a 60% move this year and uh it kind of had a blowoff top and it's not it's not the end of the gold bull run. It's just it's we're going to go sideways for a long time. I think maybe three 3 to 12 months. >> Well, there's a few subjects you brought up there that I want to dive deeper on in just a moment. But first, I want to get your thoughts on AI in general as a technology because a lot of the narrative out there is that well, one, it's going to replace a huge amount of the labor force. It's going to revolutionize the way we interact with computers in the internet. And on the more extreme side, it's going to attain super intelligence and become sentient. I know there's a number of uh billionaires who have this ideology that we're going to be able to create life through AI. Now, a lot of this seems kind of absurd. So far, it seems to be a cool tool for research, useful for creating graphics and videos and stuff, but I haven't seen this massive economic impact yet. So how much of all of how much of AI is just hype and and how much is reality in your view? >> Well, it's it's look, it's like the internet hype in the do the internet was a real thing and there was a lot of hype, a lot of capex spend, then a bust, then eventually the the benefits of the internet came, you know, years and decade or two later here and here we are. The internet's a thing. AI is going to be a thing, but it's a similar overhyped technology that's not ready for prime time. A Yale study came out and said that AI is not yet replacing uh individuals. Now, corporations are riffing people. Uh that's reduction in force for those of you who don't know what that means. Uh and they're blaming AI. That's a nice headline. What they're really not saying is the economy is weak and they're laying people off and margins are getting squeezed. So, uh, I I think this this fear that you're going to be replaced by AI is overhyped in the near term. It might it might happen eventually, but it's not hap I I don't believe it's it's happening to the scale that is in the narrative focus out there in uh, you know, Twitter land or the mainstream media, but there's been and and corporate adoption of AI is rolling over. So, they've tried it out and what they're finding is what we're what we're finding and what you know, look, I I' I've thought AI was great when I first got on there. Then I realized it makes mistakes. It's got a hallucination rate of about 25%. And so, I've I've I've been burned a couple times posting some stuff. Uh, not too much. Now, I have to now I have to like when I ask Grock, I use Grock. When I ask Grock something, I have to then go check it on Google just to make make sure it's correct. And so this is this is not exactly what I thought it was. Um, and it's not ready for prime time. And it can't you can't replace humans with a 25% hallucination error rate. I mean, that's just a disaster. And the CEO of Starbucks recently, there's a new CEO of Starbucks. He he's a good CEO. He I think he came from Taco Bell. He cleaned up Taco Bell, then he cleaned up Chipotle. Now he's the head of Starbucks. He's saying we're going all in on AI. uh the you know somebody should pull him aside and tell him it's not ready for prime time because if he goes all in on AI they're going to spend all this money and then they're going to have to go back to the way they were doing things which is you know you know following SOP standard operating procedure and those kinds of things. So I think I think so from a use case model it's it's overhyped and you we all we got an indication of that when Sam Alman kind of admitted they're going to produce uh AI erotica which is basically a a term for porn. Um, so we're now at the porn stage of AI. You know, that's they they they need revenues. And here's the problem. the revenue uh versus the capex required is so mismatched that that you know someone I I saw a study I I I'm going to delve into it deeper but someone said to make a 10% ROI on the current investment and projected investment you'd need industry revenues to get to like something like 900 billion okay and that is an an absurdly seen right network of 20 billion. So there's a big gap and then basically it's you know and that's that's assuming that one or two companies has a monopoly because you can't get those profits without a monopoly and they likened it to Microsoft's revenues which is pretty much the operating system monopoly and it doesn't it doesn't make sense. The sponsor of today's episode is Arc Silver Gold Osmium. Owner Ian Everard is praised even by his competitors as one of the most honest and level-headed bullion dealers in the United States. They have some great prices. You can see some of them displayed right now on screen. Take advantage of these specials today by reaching out to Ian at 3072649441 or by email at ianarchsggo.com. Make sure to tell him of course that commodity culture sent you. And now back to the interview. I want to talk about the real estate market because as you mentioned, you wrote a report back in August on what you call the emerging US real estate crisis. Could you walk us through your findings and how a meltdown in the real estate sector could affect the stock market and broader economy? >> Well, so let's let's let's talk about housing. Housing is a huge part of our economy. It's 20% of consumption. Uh when you not not just home sales, but everything related around it. Um and it's a big part of infla the inflation calculation 36% of the CPI is housing uh and also if you include all the ancillaries around that so something like 40 40 plus percent is housing in the CPI calculation. So what we've seen is we had an over we had um we had a uh explosion of money in uh the Fed printing during COVID. We had a lot of um frenetic activity in the real estate market. The Fed purchased a tremendous amount of mortgage backed securities that allowed banks to then issue new loans. So there was a lot of lending and a lot of building. The building uh crisis this time has occurred in the multi-tenant housing sector which is multif family structures five units or more. Uh that we've never seen this kind of construction since the 70s. We believe a lot of that was driven by the illegal immigration. Unfortunately, that bit that that flow has been halted and now it's going the other way. And uh so we have a situation in housing where prices far outpaced uh people's ability to purchase. So now we have we sit here in 2025 with the largest gap with uh uh uh homes for sale versus homes sold. Typically speaking, that time series when you plot the two together and we have a graph in our report, they kind of track each other there. There there shouldn't be this gap, but right now there's this gap of about five 600,000 homes. So, and and home builders were building well during this period. So, there's inventory building and there's affordability issues and a weakening economy. So, the feedback loops are going to cause a price correction in housing. And uh you know, a lot of people now will it go systemic? We don't think so. We don't think this is a systemic crisis, but it'll be a nasty downturn in the US economy. There's other factors. We have an AI bubble on top of that, and if that bursts, that'll affect the economy. Um, and we also have problems with China and trade wars. In China, we're going to be putting out a big huge institutional type report that won't be for retail. It's going to be institutionally priced that's going to show that China's entering it the the acute phase of its crisis. So, we kind of have a global coordinated economic slowdown that's kind of coming. Unfortunately for Trump, it's coming right before the midterms. And you know, there's two a lot of people think Trump controls the stock market. He he does with tariff talk because he can turn it on and off, but you can't turn on and off indogenous factors to the economy that have that are due to cyclical reasons. And most recently, you know, we put in January, we put out a a report stating that uh illegal immigration really juiced the economy in 23 and 24. It was kind of a bold call, but we're starting to see the beginnings of the cracks of that uh emerge and it started in the subprime auto sector. Uh Triricolor went bankrupt and was ex mostly exclusively a subprime lender to illegals. They just disappeared overnight. First Brands is not a subprime lender. They're an after after our markets automotive part company, but car sales are going the wrong way. Used car sales are going the wrong way because of legal immigration. So, the first brands went belly up and they that that had been building for years with bad bad financing schemes. And now we have Primal Land, which is another subprime auto uh um outfit that just declared bankruptcy today. So, we're starting to see the illegal immigration halt and flow out starting to affect the real economy. Housing's next. And these will have feedback loops in the credit markets which will cause credit to contract and we'll just get a classic, you know, end of cycle bad credit goes poof. I don't think it goes systemic. We get a slowdown in the economy. It'll be bad for the stock markets eventually and risk assets and rates will go down quite a bit. we think, you know, the 10 year and the 30 year and rates settle down around two two and a half percent when it's all said and done. Um, when the Feds really starts to figure out how wrong they've been, we also have the other problem we had, uh, we had non-farm payroll numbers which turned out to be, you know, look, I don't know whether it was fraud or just statistical incompetence, but we miscounted jobs to the tune of about one and a quarter million in during Biden's 2024. So the uh the implications of that are many. That meant the Fed was working off bad numbers because they kept rates too high for too long. Uh the capital markets mispriced credit uh for you know about a year. So a lot of Ponzi credit was created. And what by Ponzi credit I mean you know end of cycle credit that probably will go bye-bye when when when when the cycle uh turns down. And then we also had um corporations make bad decisions thinking the economy was robust meaning you know like going forward with investment decisions. So we have a lot of capital that was misdeployed. So this could be a deep recession. So we have just a bunch of stuff going on and right now we don't know what the job market looks like because the government shut down. So we didn't get the September job numbers. Uh we're not going to get the CPI numbers. uh but ADP uh the ADP is a private uh uh survey. They showed a contraction in employment in the September. So uh without any government data, the markets are going to focus on that kind of data in for the time being. >> I want to pull on that thread regarding China since you are writing this big report for institutions up ahead because there's so many conflicting reports that we see in terms of media headlines, people with different agendas on social media, etc. The story is often that China's going to be the world leader in robotics and in AI and actually their economy is booming and that they hold all the cards when it comes to tariffs/trade war issues that that we're seeing crop up now. You know, rare earths being one example. I've spoken to some people who've said, well, if China could shut down, you know, US military uh new new builds due to the restrictions on rare earths within six to nine months if they really decided to clamp down. So they kind of hold all the cards in that situation. Of course, we also hear about the US hollowing out its manufacturing base, shipping everything over to China decades ago, and now that's kind of coming home to roost. And so that narrative paints China as kind of the all powerful new global superpower that's on the rise. And then others will say that the economy is actually showing a lot of signs of weakness. And of course, the CCP isn't out here truthfully giving us all of their economic data. um they're notoriously careful with guarding a lot of things uh about the the real data. So based on the investigations that you've done so far, what which side is correct or is it kind of a a gray zone somewhere in the middle? >> Uh well, without giving away too much of our juice, in broad strokes, um China hit a demographic wall in 2020 and it's in a furious decline until 2032. uh their internal demand has been collapsing since 2020 and they have a lot of you know they are the manufacturer of the world. They have a lot of installed capacity that they need to keep running because their number one focus is to keep their people employed so that they don't have a revolution. This has always been this is this is how they stay in power. So, the internal demand collapsed due to demographics and it's going to continue to collapse and they have a real estate crisis that is so bad. Uh, and it's going to turn acute. I won't get into why, but it's it's going to turn acute in 2026. Um, and they have massive over supply. Uh, so what they've been doing is exporting. Uh, their exports started taking off in 21 and 20 uh 2020 and 21 and it continues to this day. Hence the trade wars. So to keep themselves, this is what happened in to Japan. So this is a little bit like Japan in the 90s. Japan was a manufacturing powerhouse. They hit a demographic wall. They had a real estate bubble. They had a bubble. It burst. And to fix to fix their problems, they uh ramped up government spend. And they started exporting a lot more. Now they're onetenth the size of China. So, they were able to get away with that. Uh, China's going to try to export their way out of their problems. And this is this so this is where people think China holds all the cards. No, no, no. They they know what's coming for them. And so, I think that it's a big bluffing game. They're on the precipice of their crisis deepening. And I don't know whether the Trump administration knows this, but they have more cards than they think. Um, China. And we and we have to worry about China because um they have a decision. They can continue to try to export the way out of it which will have massive deflationary implications for everybody on the on the planet. Um or they can try to uh change their economy to more of a consumption-driven economy rather from than from a mercantalist economy which is what they are now. The problem with that is they would give up a lot of power if they do that. um you know when you develop a strong very strong middle class consumer-led middle class uh you know you don't have you lose power and you and you have to give some of the wealth to the lower peasants so to speak. So they're at a crossroads. This report will show that. Um and it also has implications for the global economy because if China is really on the precipice of their real estate crisis worsening, which we prove in in our research, very detailed 120page report, um it's going it's it's going to really uh affect a lot of what's going on in the world and there will be a big deflationary scare. Um if you look at China's bond market, their bond yields have collapsed. That is a sign of a deflationary environment. So their economy just from looking at their bond market isn't doing well. So you don't need to listen to all the you know the Twitter people with their agendas. Just look at the markets telling you, you know, you look at their bond yields. It's classic deflationary collapse and that's what's going on there. And they're trying to export the way out of it. So that's where we are. You know, those are broad strokes. There's a lot of other uh massive nuggets in our report that I won't talk about, but it's it's going to be a great report. >> Excellent. I want to talk about gold now. Um last time we spoke, gold was at around 3,300. You said gold was reestablishing its role as money. Obviously, the price has risen quite dramatically since then. Um however, taking a a couple days of of of a beating, I believe it's down on the day today as well. pretty steep correction happening over the past few trading days. What are your current thoughts on on the gold market? Is this just a perfectly natural healthy correction after after such a dramatic run? >> Well, I don't know if I said it on your show or someone someone else's, but about six months ago, five months ago, I said gold was going to 4,000 technically, just based on pure technicals. I have a friend that's good at this. He thinks that gold's going to 10,000 by 2030. I spoke with him today and anybody that knows anything about technical analysis, things don't go up in a straight line and gold had, you know, and you know, gold kind of made the covers of magazines, gold had what we call a near-term blowoff top. It's not going to it's not the end, but it will consolidate and go sideways for, you know, anywhere from 3 to 12 months. So, we're in a trading range, my humble opinion in go in gold. And uh again, you know, if you're buying gold, physic, I I recommend physical gold, not ETFs, not futures. Uh you know, um have it as a part of your portfolio and do what the banks are doing. The banks are accumulating gold because it's become money again. It's tier one capital, physical gold. And uh whatever whatever the new monetary system that's coming, and again, I can't it's I is it a year from now or 10? I don't know what when the new system comes, but we know one's coming. Um, gold will be a part of it. That that much I I I can guarantee some some portion of whatever it is will be backed by gold. Not maybe not all of it, but some of it. >> You have a price target of $25 to $35 for WTI crude oil. investors in the oil sector are already looking at current prices. We're at around 58, I believe, to be too cheap to incentivize production for a lot of companies. So, I'm wondering what are the factors you think could bring us down to that $25 to $35 level? And at that point, would oil be a screaming buy or do you think there's risk of a secular bare market emerging? >> No. Hey, look this when we our we in our January report, we didn't reveal this at the time, but since it's it's been out there a while, uh we said $30 oil is likely, and it's just due to, you know, a slowdown in the economy and demand destruction. Um when we put out the report, oil was $77. It's now 58, 57. It's going to 30 now. It won't stay there long. uh and that you know the the the the the cure to low prices in commodity markets are low prices themselves and the cure to high prices is high prices themselves because of the supply demand dynamic and what I mean by that is when prices get too low and it we're already starting to see it you start to cut back capex and and exploration and sure you know sure enough uh when that all shuts down then over time uh you need uh prices will rise to draw back capital. So $30 oil won't stay there long. Um at the bottom of this recessionary cycle, I think energy stocks will be a good enough value to take a look at. Um and uh then wash, win, rinse, repeat. And same with high oil oil prices. If you remember in the, you know, oil got to like 150 or 160 in uh the great financial crisis in June of 2008. Everybody said it was peak oil and it was over and that we were going to, you know, uh the lights were going to go off. Uh the the the solution to high oil prices was was was high oil prices. So much capex came on board that it we were a wash in oil and then eventually we collapsed. So this is just cyclical capback cycles long tailed. So when I say $30 oil, it's not going to stay there long. >> You spoke about first brands and color. We've also seen two regional banks, Zion's Bank Corp and Western Alliance have their share prices take a big hit as they faced issues involving fraud allegations. When it comes to the banking sector in the US, do you think there's more of these issues beneath the surface that could emerge? And if so, what could the implications be? >> Yeah, there's going to be in any look uh there was a regional uh banking scare in uh 2023 when Silicon Valley Bank went bust and the Fed came out and basically loaned banks money against their um bonds that had decreased in value due to their rapid interest rate rise. That's called duration risk. That program ended last year. Um, and they prevented a bank run, which was a smart thing to do. Um, but what they're not going to do is lend money against bad credit because now we're in the bad credit part of the cycle. So, there are going to be some regional banks that go uh bankrupt. And I, again, I'm not calling on anything to happen, you know, imminently, but throughout the cycle, there'll be some banks that get into trouble. There'll be some shotgun marriages. And my call that uh the big will get bigger and and the small will disappear is probably going to play out. Um I again we're not calling for this to be systemic. Uh if it does turn out it looks like that, we'll call it in real time. But uh you know there's a lot of tools in the in the in the tool shed now that the Fed has that they didn't have or imagine they had back during the the financial crisis. It'll still not prevent. There seems to be this belief that that means everything's going to be fine and asset prices are going to stay here. that that's not what it means. What it means is there'll be a correction in asset prices, but it won't be the end of the system. So, I think there's going to be bank regional bank consolidation. Um, some of these banks probably got into a little bit of trouble and on the wrong side of the credit uh story. Uh, I haven't looked at Western Alliance or Zion's banks, so I don't have a call on them. Uh, today Western Alliance CEO said that he likes still likes private credit. I quote tweeted that statement and said, "What else can he say?" I mean, this he's got these loans on his books, probably no bid. If I was in his seat, I'd say the same thing. So, I mean, there's you're not going to say, "Yeah, you're right. It's bad." So, you know, the markets will figure this out. They always do. Um, a note of caution today, something interests down about 1% right now. I was informed by a hedge fund friend of mine today that the realized volatility factor there's a lot of hedge fun factors and it's very complicated quant math the realized volatility factor which is uh probably means stocks that move fast and furiously both up and down um and there's been a lot of speculative stocks that have gone way way up like quantum computing and a bunch of these ridiculous things that factors down to 8.41 41% today which is a uh one of the worst three observations in 10 years. It's a minus three and a half sigma event. So underneath the mild 84 basis point you know reduction in the indices certain speculators are getting taken out to the woodshed. So you know I've been a student of the markets for years when we saw Oracle go up 30% about a month ago on open AI announc their quarter wasn't good. The quarter wasn't good. It was a bad quarter. Stock went up 30% on an AI uh you know announcement with open AI for future committed funds with no details. Those to me when when a a company that market cap stock goes up 30% in the aftermarkets uh that to me is an ending move not a beginning move. So we're seeing you know ending moves in equity that I saw leading into the ' 07 crisis. In the ' 07 crisis, I was on the right side of it. Uh we were concentrated in all the right stocks. I was a black rockck managing a growth fund and we were outperforming our benchmark. Then there came a day in October and we kind of, you know, we kind of knew the economy was faltering. There came a day in October of November, I believe, where we lost a ton of relative basis points versus a benchmark, and we said, "Oh, that's it. The markets decided that this game's over." and we we trimmed a bunch of stuff and started getting defensive over the next several months. There are equity people that know this and once they see the signs, they'll sell quickly. So, we're kind it feels to me like we're at the end the ending moves on the equity indices the speculative fervor. Uh we saw, you know, what two weeks ago, Bitcoin speculators basically liquidated in about 10 minutes. So, and if you were trading altcoins, uh your wealth was gone overnight. um especially if you were levered. So, we're kind of getting to the end days of the speculative fever and once those feedback loops start, it'll it'll it'll widen out. >> Well, I want to end on the g the realm of geopolitics. There's so many different things that we could touch on here, but I want to hone in on the potential war brewing between the US and Venezuela with the US carrying out strikes. Some are calling extrajudicial murders. Um, some are calling wonderful things because we need to stop all of this fentanyl from entering the US and killing citizens. Um, however, it feels like the government has not produced any concrete evidence on the contents of these boats or the facts that they were or were not smuggling drugs to the United States. I think even if they were, it was just a killing without any any sort of trial or or due process. What are your thoughts here? Is this really a move to get access to um Venezuela's vast oil reserves? Of course, we saw the uh the opposition. Uh I forget the woman's name. She appeared on Eric Trump's podcast and was glowing about how well, if we regime change Venezuela, you guys are going to get so rich. We're going to open up the market to all sorts of US companies. It's going to be a free-for-all for you guys. Everyone's going to make money. It's a win-win. So it feels like this is more about a business case for both oil and you know uh allowing American companies and the government to get access to the economy there than it is about smuggling drugs. But I'm wondering how you see the situation. >> Look, I'm a cynic. I mean uh it's always about oil and resources. That's I mean that that I mean I'll just leave it at that. I mean, I'm a cynic and you know, um, every administration does this. It's it's it, you know, I think it's a lot I think a lot of it's driven by the military-industrial complex. The military, uh, eyes that I mean, oil uh, eventually will become scarce and they're they're eyeing those resources. They're in the hands of a communist dictator. Uh, and they're very friendly to China and and and and Russia. And so you can you you can make a case that regime change needs to be done for that, but it's really ultimately always about the I mean if if Venezuela was not sitting on a vast swath of natural resources, would we care? Probably not. >> Yeah, I tend to agree with you. I don't think that's being cynical. I think that's being reality. >> Yeah. Of reality and history and how the politicians operate. Well, Edward, this has been a fantastic interview. Thank you so much for coming on the show. tell us about finance technologies and anywhere else you'd like to direct people who who want to follow your work. >> Yeah, so we have reports available finance technologies spelled with aph.com. Uh we have our uh US economic report we put out in January which is still quite relevant if you haven't bought it. We have a real estate package that has three uh reports looking at different aspects of the housing market and we're going to soon have a China report which won't be priced for retail be priced for institutions. It's that kind of a report. Um you can also follow me on Xdow Edward Edward and I'm also have a personal website eddow.com uh where you can um follow me there as well. >> Great. Well, I will put links to all of that in the description below. Thank you so much, Edward, for coming on. It's been a blast. >> Thanks, Jesse. >> Thank you for joining us today. This episode is brought to you by Arc Silver Gold, Osmium. They have some great prices right now. They are up on the screen. All of this while supplies last. If you're interested, be sure to reach out to owner Ian Everard today at 307264-9441 or by email at ianarchcsggo.com and make sure to tell him that Commodity Culture sent you. And be sure to pick up your Commodity Culture merch. Represent the show in style with a hat, t-shirt, hoodie, or mug, all backed by a 100% quality guarantee. Link is in the description below, and I'll see you guys in the next episode. Commodity Culture is a series on commodities and natural resources. If you would like to see more, be sure to subscribe and hit the bell notification so you're always up to date with the latest episodes.
These 3 Sectors Set to MELT DOWN – 'It'll Happen QUICKLY': Edward Dowd
Summary
Transcript
Hello everybody and welcome to Commodity Culture where we break down commodities markets, sound money principles and geopolitics all with the goal of making you a better investor in the commodities sector. My name is Jesse Day and on this episode I'm thrilled to welcome Edward Dow to the program. A former portfolio manager at Black Rockck where he managed a 144 billion growth equity portfolio for a decade. He is also an author and a founding partner of Finance Technologies. Edward is seeing many signs of weakness in the broad market, the economy, the housing market, and credit markets, and he believes the stage is set for a multitude of bubbles to burst, resulting in a crash of overvalued AI stocks that are currently running way ahead of themselves. Edward remains bullish on gold despite the recent draw down and he sees it headed much higher as its role as money continues to reestablish itself. We also discuss why he sees WTI crude oil dropping as low as $25 a barrel, why China could be on the verge of economic collapse, and so much more. So strap yourselves in for my conversation with Edward Dow. Edward Dow, it is great to have you back on Commodity Culture. Last time I had you on the show, you were fairly bearish on the long-term trajectory of the broad market. Since then, despite a brief dip in the aftermath of Trump tweeting about imposing 100% tariffs on China, we're up between 5 and 10% on the three big indices. I want to read something you wrote on X recently where you said, "Current sentiment on AI bubble seems to be the following. One, yes, it is a bubble, but it's still in early innings. Two, the above crowd hopes to sell the bubble that everyone agrees on to a marginal So, break down your thoughts here and how you see this all playing out for the the broad market. >> Yeah. So, the broad market has been led by the the mag 7 to 10. It's an AI bubble. If you look at the value line geometric index, which is 1,700 issues, uh the high was put in in 22. than a lower high in in January, February of this year and we're we're still not back above that high. So, we've had three lower highs in that broader index. So, this is really a very concentrated broader indicy uh stock market bubble being driven by AI and I, you know, a lot of people have been saying it's a bubble for a while. Those voices were small and kind of ignored. But now we have uh you know the Wall Street Journal today you know questioning circular financing deals and asking is it an AI bubble? So consensus seems to be it's a bubble but the consensus now is yeah but it's going to go higher. So you know that kind of logic uh is never you know you don't want to hang your hat on that. And you know look um we are now starting to see cracks uh in the credit markets. Uh interest rates are decidingly taking a tick lower which is indic indic indicative of slowing economic growth. Inflation is going to be something that we're that you know was on everyone's mind. That's going to be in the rearview mirror. Uh we put out reports in January indicating we thought interest rates were going to go lower. Oil prices are going to go lower. We're just and real estate real estate is going lower. It's just not well uh it's not it's it's an opaque market. So, that'll take time before it hits the headlines. And we're just waiting on the the stock market people to figure this out. The bond people are starting to figure it out. Uh the smart money on the sidelines is starting to uh allocate money to the recession trade slowly. It's not it's not consensus yet. Um but you can see it in the markets. The 30-year bond uh is now well below 5%. The 10ear is below four. The two-year at 348. in the three-month T bill continues to hit new 52- week lows. Uh interest rates going down is not sign of growth. It's a sign of a slowing economy and the markets are leading and the Fed is behind the eightball. They've kept rates too high for too long. And so if if you if you looking to the health of the economy based on headline indicy numbers, the S&P and the the Dow Jones and the NASDAQ, um you're going to be led astray because when those finally those two those three indices figure it out, and they will, it'll be it'll happen quickly. Uh the bond guys are always ahead of the equity guys. I was a fixed income institutional investor for HSBC. Then I became an equity guy after going to business school. So, I've had a lot of respect for bond people. Uh, they tend to focus on these things earlier. The bond markets figured out what was going on in the great financial crisis well before the equity people did. And, uh, I remember being at Black Rockck and we'd had a meeting every day. The bond people were, you know, fearful as all hell in these morning meetings all throughout two 2007. The equity people were still partying like there was no tomorrow, saying everything's fine. So, the bond markets will prove uh the equity bears right at some point. I don't try to time I'm not I I don't recommend shorting to anybody or any of that nonsense. My recommendations have been a healthy portion of dry powder cash. Uh if you're more speculative, you can get into longer duration uh US treasuries and a healthy portion of gold. The gold call has worked out. Uh gold uh I think is going to consolidate for a while now. I mean, it it it had a 60% move this year and uh it kind of had a blowoff top and it's not it's not the end of the gold bull run. It's just it's we're going to go sideways for a long time. I think maybe three 3 to 12 months. >> Well, there's a few subjects you brought up there that I want to dive deeper on in just a moment. But first, I want to get your thoughts on AI in general as a technology because a lot of the narrative out there is that well, one, it's going to replace a huge amount of the labor force. It's going to revolutionize the way we interact with computers in the internet. And on the more extreme side, it's going to attain super intelligence and become sentient. I know there's a number of uh billionaires who have this ideology that we're going to be able to create life through AI. Now, a lot of this seems kind of absurd. So far, it seems to be a cool tool for research, useful for creating graphics and videos and stuff, but I haven't seen this massive economic impact yet. So how much of all of how much of AI is just hype and and how much is reality in your view? >> Well, it's it's look, it's like the internet hype in the do the internet was a real thing and there was a lot of hype, a lot of capex spend, then a bust, then eventually the the benefits of the internet came, you know, years and decade or two later here and here we are. The internet's a thing. AI is going to be a thing, but it's a similar overhyped technology that's not ready for prime time. A Yale study came out and said that AI is not yet replacing uh individuals. Now, corporations are riffing people. Uh that's reduction in force for those of you who don't know what that means. Uh and they're blaming AI. That's a nice headline. What they're really not saying is the economy is weak and they're laying people off and margins are getting squeezed. So, uh, I I think this this fear that you're going to be replaced by AI is overhyped in the near term. It might it might happen eventually, but it's not hap I I don't believe it's it's happening to the scale that is in the narrative focus out there in uh, you know, Twitter land or the mainstream media, but there's been and and corporate adoption of AI is rolling over. So, they've tried it out and what they're finding is what we're what we're finding and what you know, look, I I' I've thought AI was great when I first got on there. Then I realized it makes mistakes. It's got a hallucination rate of about 25%. And so, I've I've I've been burned a couple times posting some stuff. Uh, not too much. Now, I have to now I have to like when I ask Grock, I use Grock. When I ask Grock something, I have to then go check it on Google just to make make sure it's correct. And so this is this is not exactly what I thought it was. Um, and it's not ready for prime time. And it can't you can't replace humans with a 25% hallucination error rate. I mean, that's just a disaster. And the CEO of Starbucks recently, there's a new CEO of Starbucks. He he's a good CEO. He I think he came from Taco Bell. He cleaned up Taco Bell, then he cleaned up Chipotle. Now he's the head of Starbucks. He's saying we're going all in on AI. uh the you know somebody should pull him aside and tell him it's not ready for prime time because if he goes all in on AI they're going to spend all this money and then they're going to have to go back to the way they were doing things which is you know you know following SOP standard operating procedure and those kinds of things. So I think I think so from a use case model it's it's overhyped and you we all we got an indication of that when Sam Alman kind of admitted they're going to produce uh AI erotica which is basically a a term for porn. Um, so we're now at the porn stage of AI. You know, that's they they they need revenues. And here's the problem. the revenue uh versus the capex required is so mismatched that that you know someone I I saw a study I I I'm going to delve into it deeper but someone said to make a 10% ROI on the current investment and projected investment you'd need industry revenues to get to like something like 900 billion okay and that is an an absurdly seen right network of 20 billion. So there's a big gap and then basically it's you know and that's that's assuming that one or two companies has a monopoly because you can't get those profits without a monopoly and they likened it to Microsoft's revenues which is pretty much the operating system monopoly and it doesn't it doesn't make sense. The sponsor of today's episode is Arc Silver Gold Osmium. Owner Ian Everard is praised even by his competitors as one of the most honest and level-headed bullion dealers in the United States. They have some great prices. You can see some of them displayed right now on screen. Take advantage of these specials today by reaching out to Ian at 3072649441 or by email at ianarchsggo.com. Make sure to tell him of course that commodity culture sent you. And now back to the interview. I want to talk about the real estate market because as you mentioned, you wrote a report back in August on what you call the emerging US real estate crisis. Could you walk us through your findings and how a meltdown in the real estate sector could affect the stock market and broader economy? >> Well, so let's let's let's talk about housing. Housing is a huge part of our economy. It's 20% of consumption. Uh when you not not just home sales, but everything related around it. Um and it's a big part of infla the inflation calculation 36% of the CPI is housing uh and also if you include all the ancillaries around that so something like 40 40 plus percent is housing in the CPI calculation. So what we've seen is we had an over we had um we had a uh explosion of money in uh the Fed printing during COVID. We had a lot of um frenetic activity in the real estate market. The Fed purchased a tremendous amount of mortgage backed securities that allowed banks to then issue new loans. So there was a lot of lending and a lot of building. The building uh crisis this time has occurred in the multi-tenant housing sector which is multif family structures five units or more. Uh that we've never seen this kind of construction since the 70s. We believe a lot of that was driven by the illegal immigration. Unfortunately, that bit that that flow has been halted and now it's going the other way. And uh so we have a situation in housing where prices far outpaced uh people's ability to purchase. So now we have we sit here in 2025 with the largest gap with uh uh uh homes for sale versus homes sold. Typically speaking, that time series when you plot the two together and we have a graph in our report, they kind of track each other there. There there shouldn't be this gap, but right now there's this gap of about five 600,000 homes. So, and and home builders were building well during this period. So, there's inventory building and there's affordability issues and a weakening economy. So, the feedback loops are going to cause a price correction in housing. And uh you know, a lot of people now will it go systemic? We don't think so. We don't think this is a systemic crisis, but it'll be a nasty downturn in the US economy. There's other factors. We have an AI bubble on top of that, and if that bursts, that'll affect the economy. Um, and we also have problems with China and trade wars. In China, we're going to be putting out a big huge institutional type report that won't be for retail. It's going to be institutionally priced that's going to show that China's entering it the the acute phase of its crisis. So, we kind of have a global coordinated economic slowdown that's kind of coming. Unfortunately for Trump, it's coming right before the midterms. And you know, there's two a lot of people think Trump controls the stock market. He he does with tariff talk because he can turn it on and off, but you can't turn on and off indogenous factors to the economy that have that are due to cyclical reasons. And most recently, you know, we put in January, we put out a a report stating that uh illegal immigration really juiced the economy in 23 and 24. It was kind of a bold call, but we're starting to see the beginnings of the cracks of that uh emerge and it started in the subprime auto sector. Uh Triricolor went bankrupt and was ex mostly exclusively a subprime lender to illegals. They just disappeared overnight. First Brands is not a subprime lender. They're an after after our markets automotive part company, but car sales are going the wrong way. Used car sales are going the wrong way because of legal immigration. So, the first brands went belly up and they that that had been building for years with bad bad financing schemes. And now we have Primal Land, which is another subprime auto uh um outfit that just declared bankruptcy today. So, we're starting to see the illegal immigration halt and flow out starting to affect the real economy. Housing's next. And these will have feedback loops in the credit markets which will cause credit to contract and we'll just get a classic, you know, end of cycle bad credit goes poof. I don't think it goes systemic. We get a slowdown in the economy. It'll be bad for the stock markets eventually and risk assets and rates will go down quite a bit. we think, you know, the 10 year and the 30 year and rates settle down around two two and a half percent when it's all said and done. Um, when the Feds really starts to figure out how wrong they've been, we also have the other problem we had, uh, we had non-farm payroll numbers which turned out to be, you know, look, I don't know whether it was fraud or just statistical incompetence, but we miscounted jobs to the tune of about one and a quarter million in during Biden's 2024. So the uh the implications of that are many. That meant the Fed was working off bad numbers because they kept rates too high for too long. Uh the capital markets mispriced credit uh for you know about a year. So a lot of Ponzi credit was created. And what by Ponzi credit I mean you know end of cycle credit that probably will go bye-bye when when when when the cycle uh turns down. And then we also had um corporations make bad decisions thinking the economy was robust meaning you know like going forward with investment decisions. So we have a lot of capital that was misdeployed. So this could be a deep recession. So we have just a bunch of stuff going on and right now we don't know what the job market looks like because the government shut down. So we didn't get the September job numbers. Uh we're not going to get the CPI numbers. uh but ADP uh the ADP is a private uh uh survey. They showed a contraction in employment in the September. So uh without any government data, the markets are going to focus on that kind of data in for the time being. >> I want to pull on that thread regarding China since you are writing this big report for institutions up ahead because there's so many conflicting reports that we see in terms of media headlines, people with different agendas on social media, etc. The story is often that China's going to be the world leader in robotics and in AI and actually their economy is booming and that they hold all the cards when it comes to tariffs/trade war issues that that we're seeing crop up now. You know, rare earths being one example. I've spoken to some people who've said, well, if China could shut down, you know, US military uh new new builds due to the restrictions on rare earths within six to nine months if they really decided to clamp down. So they kind of hold all the cards in that situation. Of course, we also hear about the US hollowing out its manufacturing base, shipping everything over to China decades ago, and now that's kind of coming home to roost. And so that narrative paints China as kind of the all powerful new global superpower that's on the rise. And then others will say that the economy is actually showing a lot of signs of weakness. And of course, the CCP isn't out here truthfully giving us all of their economic data. um they're notoriously careful with guarding a lot of things uh about the the real data. So based on the investigations that you've done so far, what which side is correct or is it kind of a a gray zone somewhere in the middle? >> Uh well, without giving away too much of our juice, in broad strokes, um China hit a demographic wall in 2020 and it's in a furious decline until 2032. uh their internal demand has been collapsing since 2020 and they have a lot of you know they are the manufacturer of the world. They have a lot of installed capacity that they need to keep running because their number one focus is to keep their people employed so that they don't have a revolution. This has always been this is this is how they stay in power. So, the internal demand collapsed due to demographics and it's going to continue to collapse and they have a real estate crisis that is so bad. Uh, and it's going to turn acute. I won't get into why, but it's it's going to turn acute in 2026. Um, and they have massive over supply. Uh, so what they've been doing is exporting. Uh, their exports started taking off in 21 and 20 uh 2020 and 21 and it continues to this day. Hence the trade wars. So to keep themselves, this is what happened in to Japan. So this is a little bit like Japan in the 90s. Japan was a manufacturing powerhouse. They hit a demographic wall. They had a real estate bubble. They had a bubble. It burst. And to fix to fix their problems, they uh ramped up government spend. And they started exporting a lot more. Now they're onetenth the size of China. So, they were able to get away with that. Uh, China's going to try to export their way out of their problems. And this is this so this is where people think China holds all the cards. No, no, no. They they know what's coming for them. And so, I think that it's a big bluffing game. They're on the precipice of their crisis deepening. And I don't know whether the Trump administration knows this, but they have more cards than they think. Um, China. And we and we have to worry about China because um they have a decision. They can continue to try to export the way out of it which will have massive deflationary implications for everybody on the on the planet. Um or they can try to uh change their economy to more of a consumption-driven economy rather from than from a mercantalist economy which is what they are now. The problem with that is they would give up a lot of power if they do that. um you know when you develop a strong very strong middle class consumer-led middle class uh you know you don't have you lose power and you and you have to give some of the wealth to the lower peasants so to speak. So they're at a crossroads. This report will show that. Um and it also has implications for the global economy because if China is really on the precipice of their real estate crisis worsening, which we prove in in our research, very detailed 120page report, um it's going it's it's going to really uh affect a lot of what's going on in the world and there will be a big deflationary scare. Um if you look at China's bond market, their bond yields have collapsed. That is a sign of a deflationary environment. So their economy just from looking at their bond market isn't doing well. So you don't need to listen to all the you know the Twitter people with their agendas. Just look at the markets telling you, you know, you look at their bond yields. It's classic deflationary collapse and that's what's going on there. And they're trying to export the way out of it. So that's where we are. You know, those are broad strokes. There's a lot of other uh massive nuggets in our report that I won't talk about, but it's it's going to be a great report. >> Excellent. I want to talk about gold now. Um last time we spoke, gold was at around 3,300. You said gold was reestablishing its role as money. Obviously, the price has risen quite dramatically since then. Um however, taking a a couple days of of of a beating, I believe it's down on the day today as well. pretty steep correction happening over the past few trading days. What are your current thoughts on on the gold market? Is this just a perfectly natural healthy correction after after such a dramatic run? >> Well, I don't know if I said it on your show or someone someone else's, but about six months ago, five months ago, I said gold was going to 4,000 technically, just based on pure technicals. I have a friend that's good at this. He thinks that gold's going to 10,000 by 2030. I spoke with him today and anybody that knows anything about technical analysis, things don't go up in a straight line and gold had, you know, and you know, gold kind of made the covers of magazines, gold had what we call a near-term blowoff top. It's not going to it's not the end, but it will consolidate and go sideways for, you know, anywhere from 3 to 12 months. So, we're in a trading range, my humble opinion in go in gold. And uh again, you know, if you're buying gold, physic, I I recommend physical gold, not ETFs, not futures. Uh you know, um have it as a part of your portfolio and do what the banks are doing. The banks are accumulating gold because it's become money again. It's tier one capital, physical gold. And uh whatever whatever the new monetary system that's coming, and again, I can't it's I is it a year from now or 10? I don't know what when the new system comes, but we know one's coming. Um, gold will be a part of it. That that much I I I can guarantee some some portion of whatever it is will be backed by gold. Not maybe not all of it, but some of it. >> You have a price target of $25 to $35 for WTI crude oil. investors in the oil sector are already looking at current prices. We're at around 58, I believe, to be too cheap to incentivize production for a lot of companies. So, I'm wondering what are the factors you think could bring us down to that $25 to $35 level? And at that point, would oil be a screaming buy or do you think there's risk of a secular bare market emerging? >> No. Hey, look this when we our we in our January report, we didn't reveal this at the time, but since it's it's been out there a while, uh we said $30 oil is likely, and it's just due to, you know, a slowdown in the economy and demand destruction. Um when we put out the report, oil was $77. It's now 58, 57. It's going to 30 now. It won't stay there long. uh and that you know the the the the the cure to low prices in commodity markets are low prices themselves and the cure to high prices is high prices themselves because of the supply demand dynamic and what I mean by that is when prices get too low and it we're already starting to see it you start to cut back capex and and exploration and sure you know sure enough uh when that all shuts down then over time uh you need uh prices will rise to draw back capital. So $30 oil won't stay there long. Um at the bottom of this recessionary cycle, I think energy stocks will be a good enough value to take a look at. Um and uh then wash, win, rinse, repeat. And same with high oil oil prices. If you remember in the, you know, oil got to like 150 or 160 in uh the great financial crisis in June of 2008. Everybody said it was peak oil and it was over and that we were going to, you know, uh the lights were going to go off. Uh the the the solution to high oil prices was was was high oil prices. So much capex came on board that it we were a wash in oil and then eventually we collapsed. So this is just cyclical capback cycles long tailed. So when I say $30 oil, it's not going to stay there long. >> You spoke about first brands and color. We've also seen two regional banks, Zion's Bank Corp and Western Alliance have their share prices take a big hit as they faced issues involving fraud allegations. When it comes to the banking sector in the US, do you think there's more of these issues beneath the surface that could emerge? And if so, what could the implications be? >> Yeah, there's going to be in any look uh there was a regional uh banking scare in uh 2023 when Silicon Valley Bank went bust and the Fed came out and basically loaned banks money against their um bonds that had decreased in value due to their rapid interest rate rise. That's called duration risk. That program ended last year. Um, and they prevented a bank run, which was a smart thing to do. Um, but what they're not going to do is lend money against bad credit because now we're in the bad credit part of the cycle. So, there are going to be some regional banks that go uh bankrupt. And I, again, I'm not calling on anything to happen, you know, imminently, but throughout the cycle, there'll be some banks that get into trouble. There'll be some shotgun marriages. And my call that uh the big will get bigger and and the small will disappear is probably going to play out. Um I again we're not calling for this to be systemic. Uh if it does turn out it looks like that, we'll call it in real time. But uh you know there's a lot of tools in the in the in the tool shed now that the Fed has that they didn't have or imagine they had back during the the financial crisis. It'll still not prevent. There seems to be this belief that that means everything's going to be fine and asset prices are going to stay here. that that's not what it means. What it means is there'll be a correction in asset prices, but it won't be the end of the system. So, I think there's going to be bank regional bank consolidation. Um, some of these banks probably got into a little bit of trouble and on the wrong side of the credit uh story. Uh, I haven't looked at Western Alliance or Zion's banks, so I don't have a call on them. Uh, today Western Alliance CEO said that he likes still likes private credit. I quote tweeted that statement and said, "What else can he say?" I mean, this he's got these loans on his books, probably no bid. If I was in his seat, I'd say the same thing. So, I mean, there's you're not going to say, "Yeah, you're right. It's bad." So, you know, the markets will figure this out. They always do. Um, a note of caution today, something interests down about 1% right now. I was informed by a hedge fund friend of mine today that the realized volatility factor there's a lot of hedge fun factors and it's very complicated quant math the realized volatility factor which is uh probably means stocks that move fast and furiously both up and down um and there's been a lot of speculative stocks that have gone way way up like quantum computing and a bunch of these ridiculous things that factors down to 8.41 41% today which is a uh one of the worst three observations in 10 years. It's a minus three and a half sigma event. So underneath the mild 84 basis point you know reduction in the indices certain speculators are getting taken out to the woodshed. So you know I've been a student of the markets for years when we saw Oracle go up 30% about a month ago on open AI announc their quarter wasn't good. The quarter wasn't good. It was a bad quarter. Stock went up 30% on an AI uh you know announcement with open AI for future committed funds with no details. Those to me when when a a company that market cap stock goes up 30% in the aftermarkets uh that to me is an ending move not a beginning move. So we're seeing you know ending moves in equity that I saw leading into the ' 07 crisis. In the ' 07 crisis, I was on the right side of it. Uh we were concentrated in all the right stocks. I was a black rockck managing a growth fund and we were outperforming our benchmark. Then there came a day in October and we kind of, you know, we kind of knew the economy was faltering. There came a day in October of November, I believe, where we lost a ton of relative basis points versus a benchmark, and we said, "Oh, that's it. The markets decided that this game's over." and we we trimmed a bunch of stuff and started getting defensive over the next several months. There are equity people that know this and once they see the signs, they'll sell quickly. So, we're kind it feels to me like we're at the end the ending moves on the equity indices the speculative fervor. Uh we saw, you know, what two weeks ago, Bitcoin speculators basically liquidated in about 10 minutes. So, and if you were trading altcoins, uh your wealth was gone overnight. um especially if you were levered. So, we're kind of getting to the end days of the speculative fever and once those feedback loops start, it'll it'll it'll widen out. >> Well, I want to end on the g the realm of geopolitics. There's so many different things that we could touch on here, but I want to hone in on the potential war brewing between the US and Venezuela with the US carrying out strikes. Some are calling extrajudicial murders. Um, some are calling wonderful things because we need to stop all of this fentanyl from entering the US and killing citizens. Um, however, it feels like the government has not produced any concrete evidence on the contents of these boats or the facts that they were or were not smuggling drugs to the United States. I think even if they were, it was just a killing without any any sort of trial or or due process. What are your thoughts here? Is this really a move to get access to um Venezuela's vast oil reserves? Of course, we saw the uh the opposition. Uh I forget the woman's name. She appeared on Eric Trump's podcast and was glowing about how well, if we regime change Venezuela, you guys are going to get so rich. We're going to open up the market to all sorts of US companies. It's going to be a free-for-all for you guys. Everyone's going to make money. It's a win-win. So it feels like this is more about a business case for both oil and you know uh allowing American companies and the government to get access to the economy there than it is about smuggling drugs. But I'm wondering how you see the situation. >> Look, I'm a cynic. I mean uh it's always about oil and resources. That's I mean that that I mean I'll just leave it at that. I mean, I'm a cynic and you know, um, every administration does this. It's it's it, you know, I think it's a lot I think a lot of it's driven by the military-industrial complex. The military, uh, eyes that I mean, oil uh, eventually will become scarce and they're they're eyeing those resources. They're in the hands of a communist dictator. Uh, and they're very friendly to China and and and and Russia. And so you can you you can make a case that regime change needs to be done for that, but it's really ultimately always about the I mean if if Venezuela was not sitting on a vast swath of natural resources, would we care? Probably not. >> Yeah, I tend to agree with you. I don't think that's being cynical. I think that's being reality. >> Yeah. Of reality and history and how the politicians operate. Well, Edward, this has been a fantastic interview. Thank you so much for coming on the show. tell us about finance technologies and anywhere else you'd like to direct people who who want to follow your work. >> Yeah, so we have reports available finance technologies spelled with aph.com. Uh we have our uh US economic report we put out in January which is still quite relevant if you haven't bought it. We have a real estate package that has three uh reports looking at different aspects of the housing market and we're going to soon have a China report which won't be priced for retail be priced for institutions. It's that kind of a report. Um you can also follow me on Xdow Edward Edward and I'm also have a personal website eddow.com uh where you can um follow me there as well. >> Great. Well, I will put links to all of that in the description below. Thank you so much, Edward, for coming on. It's been a blast. >> Thanks, Jesse. >> Thank you for joining us today. This episode is brought to you by Arc Silver Gold, Osmium. They have some great prices right now. They are up on the screen. All of this while supplies last. If you're interested, be sure to reach out to owner Ian Everard today at 307264-9441 or by email at ianarchcsggo.com and make sure to tell him that Commodity Culture sent you. And be sure to pick up your Commodity Culture merch. Represent the show in style with a hat, t-shirt, hoodie, or mug, all backed by a 100% quality guarantee. Link is in the description below, and I'll see you guys in the next episode. Commodity Culture is a series on commodities and natural resources. If you would like to see more, be sure to subscribe and hit the bell notification so you're always up to date with the latest episodes.