Doug Casey came back from a short break and did what he does. He talked about Trump. He talked about Iran. He talked about a war that rhymes with the last world war, a Saudi state that spends like a drunk, a French street that is already burning schools, and a president who, he says, will not finish the term. Then, in the last minute, he told the listener where the money should sit. Energy stocks. Mining stocks. Extraordinarily cheap, he said, and nobody cares.
That last minute is the point. The rest is a trailer. The plot is the bond market. Casey thinks the political order is thrashing, and he thinks the thrash will be paid for with paper that the market is already marking down. Mines and wells are not a bet that his war story comes true on Friday. They are a bet that a rock in the ground is a weaker promise than a bond, and that weak is what you want when promises break. You can throw out every prediction he made and still have to answer that one sentence.
This is not a recommendation to buy a miner, an oil stock, or a metal. It is a reading of one conversation, with his claims labeled as his.
The preface he needed
He would not start on Trump without a disclaimer. He does not hate him. He does not claim the derangement. Next to Kamala Harris, he said, there had seemed to be no other choice. He even enjoys the jokes. He would not want the beer. The ego is too large. He hates a lot of what is being done anyway.
He put Trump inside a book. The Fourth Turning, by William Strauss and Neil Howe, describes a crisis era and an elder who stands in it and changes things. The book, Casey noted, does not promise that the elder is good. He is simply there. Casey said he is trying to stay objective inside that frame. The frame matters more than the man. If you need the man to be a villain or a savior before you can hear the rest, you will miss the mechanism. The mechanism is not a personality. It is a state that scares its own cities, spends money it does not have, and meets a bond market that has started to charge more for the loan.
The scare, and his own walk-back
The clip that bothered the press, as the host told it, was Trump talking as if Iran might strike Los Angeles or San Diego, and Mobile had come up before. Casey heard a method in it. Frighten people enough and they ask you to fix the fright. He does not think the fright is the likely next act.
He does think the quarrel is old, and he puts the fault on Washington and London. Oil was found under Iranian sand by outsiders. Later, he said, an elected government was removed and the Shah put in. He could not quite land the name. The man was Mohammad Mossadegh. The coup was 1953. Iranians remember it, he said, the way Americans would remember a foreign power swapping out their government. The Shah was a mixed rule. He fell. The embassy was taken in 1979, with Carter still in office. The chants followed. Casey called the chants what mobs do. He still called the grievance real.
Then Trump, in Casey's telling, made it worse. A surprise attack. A large death toll. Infrastructure in ruins. Casey's remedy is the one he knows will not be used. A public apology. An indemnity, printed if needed. A relationship that is not friendship and not a gunfight. Oil moving. People not killing each other. He said Trump does not apologize. Trump doubles down. After the elections, Casey said, the bombing is supposed to start again. He has heard that promise more than once.
On the nuclear threat itself, Casey was colder than the headline. He does not think Iran is about to destroy an American city. He called that hysteria. He does not think an intercontinental missile is the clever way to move a bomb, if a bomb existed. He said the physics is old, that poorer states have managed it, and that a dome of interceptors and a new class of battleship are the wrong tools for this era, the way cavalry was wrong in 1914 and giant battleships were wrong in 1941. He named Trump's proposed battleship in that class of error. His practical conclusion was narrower than the scare. Do not go out of your way to antagonize an opponent you cannot reliably keep at a distance. He does not think Tehran wants a bomb on California. He thinks Tehran wants the surrounding bases and the threats to stop. A devastated reply would follow any real strike, and he thinks they know it.
Read that twice, because he said two things that fight each other. He said the scare is hysteria. He also said the machine of tit for tat is how you get a wider war. The investor who buys the hysteria is buying a headline. The investor who buys the tit for tat is buying a process. Casey's own odds, on the city, are that the process does not jump to a nuclear attack. His odds on the process itself are that it gets worse.
A kingdom that spends, and a war he thinks it loses
The wider war, in this conversation, is not only Iran. It is the Red Sea and the Gulf, and Saudi Arabia as a family firm he thinks is cracking. He listed the spending from memory, and the figures should stay his until a filing confirms them. A city a hundred miles long, the Line, with something like $65 billion already in the sand, now cancelled back toward desert. A cube in Riyadh, the Mukaab, which he put near $50 billion. Resorts on the Red Sea, which he put near $45 billion. A stake in SoftBank, which he put near $45 billion, most of it, he said, already gone. A population that has tripled in fifty years. Young people watching princes spend. Oil in the northeast, where the Shia minority lives. A war with Yemen that he thinks the Yemenis are winning, because drones and missiles against hired soldiers and expensive American hardware is a bad trade, and because there is not much on the Yemeni side that a million-dollar weapon can usefully hit.
He added outside players. Pakistan and Turkey in a new alignment, equipment sent. France and Britain edging in. His prediction, offered as a prediction and not a fact, is that the Saudi government falls within about two years, and that the fall is chaos. Treat it as a man placing a marker. Do not treat it as a date. The useful piece is the shape. A state that has to keep the oil flowing, the princes paid, and a war funded, while it also builds monuments, is a state that needs the bond market and the oil market to stay kind. Casey does not think they stay kind.
Ships, and the rule he thinks nobody is using
The host and Casey then argued about the water. A few months ago, the host said, something like two thousand ships were stuck around Hormuz. Trump, Casey said, now claims traffic is almost back to the old level. Casey called that a lie, or a fantasy, or a line that sounded useful that day. He does not trust the man's numbers. The host's own count was thirteen vessels hit by Iran in eight days. His view was that if ships are moving, they are moving because Tehran allows it. Fire control over a strait is a permission, not a rumor.
The Americans, Casey said, citing a Wall Street Journal piece that day, often warn a ship and strike the engine room rather than the cargo. The host added a tanker, larger than Panamax, something like 750,000 barrels, burning off Sochi, and other ships hit in the Black Sea, including grain. One side's oil. The other side's food. Casey's rule was simple enough to be grim. If you sink someone's ship, they sink one of yours, or the feud has no reason to stop. Hatfield and McCoy. He does not know which tribe joins next. He said war is how Americans learn geography.
He also said the smart move is to leave. Pull the bases. They are tripwires. They provoke. They do not defend the people who live near them. The host noted that some bases are already smashed, and that bombers which had been in England were reported back in the United States. Casey's reason was not a strategy memo. It was a drone. You do not have to hit a bomber in the air. You hit it on the ground. Leaving would be the adult act, he said, and it will not happen, because it would embarrass. The empire, in his image, is a dinosaur in its death throes, dangerous because it is thrashing, not because the thrash will save it.
An investor does not need to referee every ship. An investor needs the pattern. Energy is being interrupted on purpose, by more than one navy, in more than one sea. The interruption is not a forecast of a closing price. It is a reason the oil Casey wants to own can spike and can also sit in a tanker that never arrives. A mine and a well are claims on stuff. A claim on stuff still has to cross water. He did not dwell on that. You should.
The election is a side door
He thinks the Republicans lose badly next month, House and Senate. The host put the betting odds near 86 percent for the House and something above 60 for the Senate. Casey then expects impeachment, and this time a conviction. That is one item on a list he has carried for a while. Health. Violence. The 25th Amendment, if a cabinet that he called lapdogs ever turned. A coup of the kind he believes removed Kennedy. He would like odds on a bet that the term is not completed. He admitted it looks like a long shot.
A list of ways a presidency can end is not evidence that it will. It is a man collecting exits. The part that touches capital is what he thinks follows a loss. Not a calmer war policy. A government even less able to choose, in a country he already calls unstable, with a money market that does not wait for the inaugural.
The New York result came up as a symptom, not as a trade. The host was still shocked that the city elected Zohran Mamdani. Casey called him an openly hostile religious politician in the most Jewish city in the country. The host answered that the new mayor had already quoted scripture and put money toward fighting antisemitism, which the host read as a man who had been talked to. Casey called that intelligent, not converted. The host's broader read is the one that scales. Americans have been voting for "not this" since the end of the Bush years. Obama. Then Trump. Now whoever is framed as the dissident. The vote is against the system, not for a worked-out replacement. That is a political fact about a tired public. It is a poor fact to build a portfolio on. Tired publics change villains. Bond coupons do not.
France is the street. The bond is the bill.
The host had numbers on the French protests, and they should be handled as his numbers. The government, he said, counted about 256,000 people. Organizers counted about 450,000. Twenty-four schools burned or ransacked. About 6,100 arrests, 87 percent of them minors. Eighty-five teachers hurt. Hundreds of other schools disrupted. About 1,800 prosecutions already moving, which he contrasted with the lighter touch he remembers from American unrest a few years ago. The protests had been growing for weeks. Not a weekend.
Casey reached for history. France has done this before, in 1789 and again in 1968, when he was in Europe and learned, as a student, to stay away from the Paris police. He thinks the welfare state, the taxes, and the rules are enough to make a young French person angry, and he thinks a large share of the crowd is the children of recent arrivals who do not feel the country is theirs. He cited a grim novel as if it were a forecast. You do not have to accept the novel. You have to notice what he thinks lights the fuse.
The fuse is the bond market. Long rates are rising. He used a plain example. If a yield goes from 4 percent to 5 percent, that is a large move in the income, and a large move down in the price of the bonds already owned. Somebody's asset just shrank. Pension funds live on that asset. Most people do not watch it. They think bonds get paid. He thinks the break becomes obvious only when it hits stocks, and the tech bubble with them. The top 10 percent, who took most of the gain, start to lose. The smaller saver sees the pension. Jobs go. Food aid buys less. The state, he said, knows one answer. Bail out the firms that are too big to fail. Bail out households, as it did in the pandemic. Print. Inflation up. Stocks down.
His image for the whole of the West is a body that stepped off a tall building a century ago and is now passing a low floor, still saying the fall feels fine. It is a cartoon. The arithmetic under it is not. A bond is a promise to pay later in money that a pressed government can create. When the buyers of that promise demand more yield, every other promise gets repriced. War talk can be wrong in every detail and this can still happen. A war can also be the excuse to print the bailout. Casey does not see an exit. He sees the tenth floor.
One check against this week, not against his cartoon. Yields on the long American bond have already been reported near levels last seen in the early 2000s, around 5 percent and higher, not waiting politely at the 4 percent in his example. The direction he is pointing at is not a theory from a quiet year. It is the tape. How far it goes is not something he knows, and not something this article will pretend to know.
The book is a costume
The host wanted to reread the elder's role, because those figures, he remembers, often lead people into war. Casey said the authors were not ideologues. He once spoke with Strauss. Howe, he noted, speaks well of Franklin Roosevelt as the elder of the last crisis, and as a man who did good. Casey's point in repeating that is not praise. It is scale. Roosevelt changed what a citizen could expect from a state, and what a state could take. Casey thinks another change of that size is coming, and that people do not remember how deep the last one went.
A cycle theory is a way to feel oriented. It is not a date. Casey likes predictions, and he repeated the old joke that you should make many, so a few land. He then made a large one. In ten years, he said, people may call Trump the worst president, worse than the men the textbooks rank at the top, whom Casey ranks at the bottom. Lincoln, Roosevelt, Coolidge in the popular list. He wants Lincoln tried again in a later episode. None of that is an investment. It is a mood about legitimacy. Legitimacy cracking is how you get the bond buyer to ask for a higher rate. The book does not tell you the rate.
The only sentence that is a portfolio
Then he stopped, and he said the part that was not a prediction of a bombing run. It is not all bad news, he said. They are very long energy stocks and mining stocks. Extraordinarily cheap. Nobody cares. That is where capital should go if you do not want to be ruined by what he thinks is coming.
Strip the salesmanship. What is he actually claiming? He is claiming that the claims which depend on a government paying later, or on a multiple of future hope, are the claims that break. A barrel and an ounce do not require the Fourth Turning to be true. They require a buyer somewhere, and a cost of getting them out of the ground that is still below the price. Cheap, in his mouth, means ignored. Ignored is not a valuation. A stock can be ignored and expensive. A stock can be talked about all day and still be cheap against its cost.
This year has already refused the simple version of "nobody cares." Gold and silver had a mania high in January and then gave a great part of it back. Miners fell harder than the metals, which is what miners do. They were not a secret. They were a crowd that arrived and then left some of the position. Casey's "cheap" is more honest if it means cheap against the January story, and cheap against a world in which the official buyer of gold is still the main bid under the price. It is less honest if it means a repeat of the long bear when a mining pitch could not get a meeting. Those were different markets. He is speaking from the second memory. The tape is living in the first.
Energy has the same split. If ships are being hit and straits are a permission, the commodity can be scarce and the equity can still be a company with a government, a tax, and a route. Saudi spending, if it breaks the way he says, is a supply story and a political story at once. Supply stories make prices jump. Political stories make contracts void. Owning the equity is not the same as owning the barrel in a tank you control. He blurred that, because the sentence was a close, not a model.
The honest way to use him is narrow. Do not build a book around Los Angeles, or a Saudi collapse date, or a president who leaves in month six. Those are his bets, and he said he wants odds because they are long shots. Do build a question around the bond. If long yields stay high or go higher, the discount rate on every future cash flow rises, the pension looks poorer, and the state reaches for the printer. In that world, a mine with a low cost and a finished plant is a claim that does not have to be rolled over next quarter. A story stock is not. An explorer with no metal is not. A trust that holds the metal is closer to what he means than a company that only talks about it. He did not rank them. You should, before you treat "mining stocks" as one word.
What would make him wrong
He is wrong, on the investment, if the bond market calms and the yields he fears go back down, and the only thing that was cheap was a sector that had already had its bull market. He is wrong, on the politics, if the bombing does not restart, if the term is completed, if Saudi spending is a waste but not a revolution, if the French protests peak and thin out, if the strait reopens because both sides decide the oil is worth more than the point. He left room for none of that. A man passing the tenth floor does not spend time on the parachute. The parachute is your job, not his.
He is right, in the only way that pays, if the paper promise is the thing that breaks and the stuff in the ground still has a bid. That can happen without a world war. A world war is not required for a bond to disappoint. It is only one way to hurry it. The hurry is what he watches. The disappointment is what the portfolio is for.
The close
Casey filled an hour with a war he says the United States picked, a scare he says is hysteria, a kingdom he says will fall, a street in France he says is the old revolutionary habit, and a president he says will be remembered as the worst. Any one of those can be tossed. They are predictions, and he told you he makes a lot of them so that some will land.
Keep the mechanism. The bond is a promise. The yield is the price of believing it. He thinks that price is rising, and that everything counted in a brokerage account will feel it, stocks included, bailouts included, inflation included. Against that, he wants capital in energy and in mines, because they are out of fashion and because they are not a promise to pay you later in someone else's money.
The war talk is not the investment. The investment is whether you believe the promise or the rock. He has chosen the rock. He has not shown you which rock, or what you pay for it, or what happens to the price if he is early by five years. Cheap and ignored is a start. It is not a ticket. The fall, in his cartoon, feels fine until it does not. The work is to know which of your holdings is the building, and which is the ground.
A note on sources and limits
This article is a reading of one episode of Doug Casey in conversation with Matt, on the Crisis Investing podcast. The Iran comments, the apology proposal, the view that a renewed bombing campaign follows the election, the list of ways a term might end, the Saudi spending figures, the two-year collapse marker, the Hormuz and Black Sea discussion, the dinosaur image, the election call, the French history, the bond example of 4 percent to 5 percent, the Fourth Turning remarks, and the closing line on energy and mining stocks are Casey's, or the host's questions as they appear in the transcript. They are not facts merely because he said them.
The host supplied the protest counts, the arrest share, the school damage, the prosecution figure, the thirteen ships in eight days, the tanker size, the bomber report, and the election odds. Those stay attributed to him. Mossadegh's name and the year 1953 are the standard historical labels for the coup Casey described without landing the name. The embassy seizure began in 1979. Where the transcript says "World War II" for a future war, the meaning in context is a third world war. This article says so.
Long-term yields "already near levels last seen in the early 2000s" refers to market reports from the first week of October 2026, not to a number Casey quoted. His 4-to-5 example is an illustration. It is not that week's print. Mining and energy being "cheap" is his judgment. A January 2026 mania high in the metals, and a later giveback, is the market context for doubting the phrase "nobody cares." It is not a valuation of any named company.
This is not investment advice and not a solicitation to buy or sell any security or commodity. Wars escalate and they fizzle. Bonds can rally. Mines can fail. Readers should read primary reports and speak with a licensed adviser before any decision.