Gold To $10k? 2026’s ‘Biggest Danger’ Revealed | Doug Casey

The big danger that everybody has today is not financial or economic.

The biggest danger today is actually a political danger.

Gold is now trading more than it should be by historical levels.

But that doesn't mean it couldn't go to $10,000 or more.

Because who wants to hold the dollar?

It's funny.

When Trump started this war, or Netanyahu,

they said it'll be over two or three days.

The Iranians are going to make this asymmetric war.

A long war.

Let's bad news for us here in the West.

The S&P 500 is now at the lowest point since the beginning of the year,

2026.

And with oil at nearly $100 of barrel,

this may turn out to be the biggest market crisis in years.

If the Iran war continues to drag out,

says our next guest, Doug Casey.

Doug's been on the show several times warning us of a greater depression.

This is it, he says.

Doug Casey is famous for having been the author of several best selling books,

including crisis investing.

He's also the founder of the internationalman.com.

And the crisis investing newsletter.

No other person I can think of right now is better situated to talk to us about crisis investing.

Because that's exactly what's going on right now.

We're going to find out what Doug is doing with his money and how to survive this storm.

Also, don't forget to check out my clips channel.

Link in the description down below.

It's a second channel I just launched this week that has short highlights of my long-form videos

for you to jump straight to the content that you want instead of watching the entire thing.

And also, eventually, original short-form content as well.

Back to Doug.

Welcome back to the show.

Doug, good to see you again.

Well, thank you, David.

And I hate to be wrong about unfortunate events.

But yeah, anyway, it's nice to be here with you.

Although for me here is in Buenos Aires at the moment.

So I think all of us watching what's happening right now in Iran and oil for that matter

and stocks getting spooked by higher oil prices have two main questions in our minds.

This is from just my own sentiment as well as talking to people I know,

especially people on my own team who have been helping me with my research and ideas.

And the two questions come down to how long since we're going to last and how do we survive

as investors?

Nobody really knows the answer to the first question.

I don't even think Trump knows the answer to that.

And number two, you've written literal books about what to do in this exact situation.

When war erupts, when multiple countries are involved, when an entire region is on fire,

and when oil has spiking up to $100 a barrel, what do you do?

Let's start with that.

Okay.

Well, there's a big danger that everybody has today is not financial or economic.

Those are huge dangers.

And we can talk about them.

And they're the economy and the financial system are coming on good.

But your biggest danger today is actually a political danger.

So you have to diversify politically as well as financially.

I know it's not within the count of most people,

but if you're able to, you should have a crib in another country in case things go bad.

This is a look where we're entering something that looks like World War III.

And many times in history in the past, people have been caught, flat-footed,

being in the wrong country at the wrong time.

It happened in Russia in 1917, Germany in 1933, China in 1947, Vietnam in 1975.

It's a long list.

So that would be my best general advice, although I recognize that most people

today in North America are hanging on by their fingernails economically,

so they can't diversify.

But if you can, you should.

Certainly before we get foreign exchange controls, which I also think around the way,

that'll make it impossible for you to diversify even if you're able to.

Why are we entering World War III?

Russia and China are currently sitting on the sidelines,

not actively participating yet.

And many of the US allies, including Canada, have verbally said

that they are not going to participate in the Iran War.

Well, they don't have to.

First of all, the question comes up.

Does the United States, does America need allies?

Can my answer to that would be no, it doesn't.

Quite frankly, anybody that allies with the US today can bring much to the party.

In fact, American allies are nothing but tripwires and burdens on the US.

Well, it's pretty much like John Adams said,

the US shouldn't go about the world hunting dragons, which is what we're doing at this point.

This current war between the US and Israel and Iran could, however, spill over and get much bigger.

And I don't think it's going to go away.

It's funny, when Trump started this war, or Netanyahu, or the two of them together,

they said it'll be over in two or three days.

But they didn't seem to understand that Iran is a big country,

and it's hunting big game.

And they thought they could decapitate the regime.

And it'd be all over in a few days or a week.

But the Iranians are going to make this an asymmetric war, a long war,

which the US is not suited to fight, nor is Israel for that matter.

So that's bad news for us here in the West.

Doug, do you see this turning into another Iraq war or Afghanistan war the last decade?

Much more like Afghanistan than Iraq.

Iraq was kind of a conventional war, like who was that general?

Schwartzkoff said, we do deserts.

We don't like to do jungles.

We don't like to do mountains.

So it worked out pretty well in the short run in Iraq.

But you got to remember that this misadventure in Afghanistan last

20 years.

And the US walked away with its tail between its legs,

defeated by backward people, basically using AK-47s.

And it wasn't as bad as the exit from Vietnam,

which is real embarrassment.

People hanging onto helicopters from the top of the embassy,

but they were putting themselves in the wheel wells of planes taking off,

and had to desert $80 billion worth of equipment in Afghanistan.

It's not going to end much better than that in Iran.

I just hope that they don't put boots on the ground,

which they're now starting to talk about ideologically, in my opinion.

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Actually, you know, the US has sent 2,500 marines

to the Middle East, as we speak right now.

More marines and warships being sent to the Middle East.

About 2,500 marines aboard as many as three warships

are heading to the Middle East.

No official announcement as to whether or not these will be deployed

to Iran itself.

They are being sent to the region for evacuation,

peacekeeping, and other special operations.

So based on what we've observed so far,

how do you think this will progress?

Well, wars are the most unpredictable of all human activities, of course.

But 2,500 marines can't do anything against the Iranian Guard,

which is 200,000 dedicated fanatical type soldiers.

Plus, a million regulars in the Iranian Army.

So I don't know what 2,500 marines are going to do.

They might have a plan to, for instance, attack Karg Island,

which is a small island.

But it's where all of Iran's oil is transported to

before it's shipped out from there.

Well, they could take that island.

That might be a clever play.

But this war is immensely expensive.

And the fact is that the Straits of Hormuz,

everybody knows this at this point.

20% of the world's oil used to flow through the Straits of Hormuz.

But the world, but it's basically cut off,

at least to the degree that the Iranian want to cut it off.

And they want to cut it off to friends of the United States and Israel.

So those tankers aren't getting through.

But if you're nice to them, your tanker can get through.

But the world runs on oil, frankly.

And what's happening in Dubai, for instance,

Dubai, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, they're looked upon as puppets of the US.

And in fact, they are Bahrain, which is where the fifth fleet is based.

There's basically been blown up already.

The fleet can't stay there anymore.

I think this is, look, it's a bad idea to fight a war on the other side of the world,

especially if you're the one that launches the attack.

If you're the aggressor, okay?

It's, this is an unprovoked war.

Yes, I know.

The Iranians have said bad things about the US.

They've used lots of harsh language.

And this is going on for 40 years.

But there's been lots of provocation on the part of the US

against the Iranians since they overthrew the bra.

So this isn't the one-sided thing where we're the good guys.

They're the bad guys.

How does the US, how does the US lose this war?

Doug.

Just by letting time go by and bankrupting itself, look, it's one thing to start,

it's one thing to provoke a war against somebody that you perceive as an enemy,

somebody that doesn't like you.

But when you do this, when you're already 40 trillion dollars in debt and running two to

trillion dollar deficits, which have to be monetized, all that money can't be borrowed from

the Chinese anymore. It's got to be printed by the Federal Reserve.

So the debt goes up, inflation goes up, the standard of living goes down.

That's how the US will lose this war.

The notion that markets respond positively to war.

Can you just verify that statement?

Perhaps some sectors do better than others,

oil, for example. But generally speaking, how does war, especially in another region,

impact capital markets?

Well, look, as I said, I'm talking to you right now from Buenos Aires,

and Argentina has always done well during World War I, World War II, other dust stops like that

because it wasn't involved in the wars, it wasn't attacked.

But it made a lot of money shipping farm commodities to the warring countries.

They couldn't farm, they had to fight, so it was wonderful.

So yeah, you can make money from a war.

And companies like Raytheon, Lockheed, and the rest of these companies,

yeah, they're going to do lots of well as the US government throws money at them.

But the rest of the economy is not because war is not good for the economy.

You're basically destroying real wealth.

And the fact that you have to build it up again and somebody makes money from that,

the amount of real wealth in the world goes down. War is a very bad thing for everybody,

and everything except the state. The state gets bigger.

So that's why the people in places like Washington and Tel Aviv,

and for that matter, maybe Tehran, are all for a war, but not the common person.

Even the Nazis knew that during World War II.

How does this war impact the regular American person?

Besides gas prices going up at the pump.

How else does it impact us?

You mentioned it may spiral out into a global war.

Okay, well, that's bad for everybody involved.

But until then, should we care? Is the question?

Well, look, I'm trying to think of the bright side of having a war.

And it's been said accurately that war is nature's way of teaching Americans geography.

Most Americans had only heard about Iran.

They couldn't find it on the map.

But now it's been drawn, everybody's attention.

Is there anything good that can come of this war?

Well, let's suppose, you know, the two bad actors in the Middle East

are the Israelis who all of their neighbors hate, either overtly or covertly.

Maybe they're acting friendly now.

But the Israelis picked the wrong place in the world to start a state 80 years ago.

So, but right now, they're caused for all these problems.

And the Iranians are, you know, just like the Israelis.

But look, the thing is, I'm sorry about it for those people.

But it's their problem.

It's not the problem us here in North America, what they do.

You've got to leave them alone.

It's like getting involved with a, with a clan war between the Hatfields and the McCoy's.

I don't know, Canadians will reference that.

But it's a famous, famous family war in West Virginia that went on for 100 years.

And everybody forgot why they hated each other.

The best thing to do is don't be involved in it.

And bankrupt yourself, make new enemies, get a lot of, that's the only answer.

That's what the US should be doing, period.

What, what should be done about the skyrocketing oil price?

So, here is an article from the FT, the CME warrants, the head of the CME has worn the Trump

administration. It risks a, quote-unquote, biblical disaster.

If it attempts to lower oil prices by intervening in derivatives markets during the war with Iran.

Many people have called the government to intervene.

What do you think?

I think, you know, this is stupidity on stilts.

Sure, the US government can do things in the futures market to suppress the price of oil.

But the way an economy runs is you need, you need price signals.

You know what, you need to know what things really cost.

And if the government elevates or depresses prices, it gives false signals to the economy,

the businessmen, and it results in a bigger economic disaster to cover things up in the short term

politically. And as most of the production in the Gulf stays offline and tankers are afraid to go

through the straits because it's dangerous. Yeah, oil prices could go a lot higher.

And as the US government keeps printing up trillions of new dollars, even gold could go higher.

Although I hasten to say gold is now trading more than it should be by historical levels.

By comparison to a house or a car or suit of clothes, it's now above where it should be historically.

But that doesn't mean it couldn't go to $10,000 or more.

Because who wants to hold the dollar?

The dollar is a hot potato. And not just because it's losing value and will lose value much more

quickly in the future. But look, this is what Bricks was all about. They don't want the fiat currency

of a bankrupt government. So what are you going to use instead of the dollar? Nobody wants to use

the rubler you want either. That's why gold is gone up. It's the only financial asset. It's not

simultaneously somebody else's liability. And I've been a big gold buyer for, well, 50 years.

But what I've really done, that's been good, is speculate. I don't say invest in small goldbinding

stocks. I mean, look, there's a friend of mine here in Argentina. And I meet him socially.

And it turned out that he's a big shareholder in a small mining company. It's 25 cents a share

in Vancouver. I looked at it. Now it's $200. Well, I bought it too. But this has happened all over

with these small mining stocks at this point. I don't know. I don't know if they're going higher

at the moment. They've had a really good run. But the fact is, and you can contradict me if

I'm wrong, because you're on the ground in Vancouver, David. But I don't think the retail public

is involved at all, basically, in the mining stocks or even the small oil stocks. It's just the

cognizancy that I've been buying these things so far. The broad public has not. Am I right? Am I

reading this correctly? I can't comment on exactly whether or not the shareholder structures

of all these companies have changed. Certainly, I've talked to some of the juniors myself and

they're targeting a more institutional focus now with the price going up. So I don't know if

you're right or wrong on that. I do know, and I have personally attended the Vancouver

Resource Investment Conference, that this was the most widely attended conference in their history

in recent years. In the last couple of decades, actually. It was just jam-packed with retail

investors. Whether or not they're actually putting money in, I can't confirm, but I will tell you

sentiment on the ground is euphoric. But institutions, there is more. But it's not like in the old days.

It seems to me there was much more than there is now. As far as institutions are concerned,

central banks, which are institutions, have been buying lots of gold, but it's just them

that have been buying gold. The public hasn't been buying gold at all. And mutual funds and

things like that haven't been buying these mining stocks really at all either. I mean, they want to

stay away from them because they're poison from an ESG, DEI point of view. You know, everybody

knows miners rape the earth and exploit the natives and all these terrible things. And of course,

it takes 10 years from the time that if you're lucky enough to find that Easter egg in the middle of

nowhere, it takes another 10 years to put it into production, which is when your problems really

start. So no, I think that these mining stocks are, believe it or not, still undervalued. Gold,

slightly overvalued. Mining stocks, still very cheap. I think they got a big run in front of them

but I'm just going to show you the chart of gold right now. And this, where my cursor is, is

February 28th, February 26th, February 27th. That's the day of the opening hours of the attack on

Iran by US and Israeli forces. Since then, gold's come down. And so the narrative that gold has been

a protector of wealth during times of war. So far, it's done the exact opposite. It has a price

pattern in the last two weeks. Change your mind on holding gold as a safe haven. Well, it's run

up. It's doubled in the last year. So perhaps it was anticipating exactly what's going on right now.

So by the rumor, sell the fact, maybe that's what's going on right now. And as I said,

it's relatively overpriced at the moment. But look at it within the context of the broader market,

gold as a percentage of people's portfolios is about the lowest level in history. And for that

matter, commodities are grossly underpriced relative to financial assets. In fact, it was just

last week. I bought a bunch of corn ETFs. So I'm not just looking at gold and silver. But I'm

interested in uranium also very much. And coal, which has been a dead duck for a long time.

And the grains, the grains are very cheap at this point. In fact, the cheapest area of the

commodities market for what it's worth. And as I said, I bought the corn ETF. I've got, I trade

futures, but I'm playing this for a long ball. I'm not a, I'm not a crater. I'm a speculator.

There are different things. They're not the same thing. Trader and spec, wait, what do you mean by

that? Trader and speculator? Well, speculator, a speculator is someone who looks for distortions in

the market and tries to take advantage of distortions preferably that are cranked in by government

action. And there's a lot of that going today. A trader is somebody that's trying to, in my opinion,

trying to second guess the market. Meanwhile, getting eaten up by daily bid-asks,

spreads and commissions. And most important, the area between the two ears when you suffer

from fear and greed back and forth. So I don't believe in trading. I believe in finding a

distorted situation and capitalizing it for a period of months or preferably years.

I'm going to give you a few statistics that came to my attention just this morning duck. So,

first of all, fourth quarter GDP in the US was revised downward this week. GDP, a measure of

all goods and services produced across the US economy rose at only an inflation adjusted annual

rate of 0.7% in the fourth quarter, according to the B.E.A. The first revision of the GDP

reading was a sharp step down from the previous estimate of 1.4%. That's just in the US.

People have been commenting all over social media on the dismal state of the Canadian economy,

in which I currently reside. Canada just posted its worst job losses in over four years.

Unemployment has jumped to 6.7% youth and job business tops 14%. That's double digits.

Meanwhile, it's been reported by the financial times that, oh not this particular article,

CBS, my mistake. CBS reported a record share of Americans are taking emergency withdrawals

from their 401k's in 2025. 6% of people enrolled in 401k's from Vanguard made

so-called hardship withdrawals from their accounts up from 5% in 2024.

I wonder if this is just, you know, it was low before and now it's reversing back to trend,

but anyway, it doesn't look good. Is this what the beginning of a, sorry, go ahead,

I'll let you respond to these things. Yeah. Well, look, I've been saying for years because of

things that have been going on for a long time that we're heading for a depression, a period of

time when most people standard living drops significantly. A lot of the wonderful standard of living

that we have in North America has been financed by debt. And one of the things that debt does

is you're mortgaging your future when you take it on. There's a huge amounts of debt on all levels

at this point. And at some point that chicken has to come home to roost. So, I guess my advice to

the average guy out there is, okay, the economy is still held together with chewing gum and bailing

wire. So, I know this will sound ridiculous, but cut back your standard of living, your expenses,

what you're spending, going out to restaurants bars, cut, cut, you know, sell the expensive car

that you got as $5,000 a month payment on and buy something cheap to get around in because

things are going to get worse. So, act now. Take two jobs if you can and put aside the money

prudently. Pay off you. I mean, that's that that sounds inflammatory for me to say this now,

but I think if we talk in a year, David, a lot of people are going to wish that they'd done that

because they'll be forced to do it against their will. They won't be infant. Now you can do it

voluntarily. A year from a lot of people forced by the things you've mentioned. When less discretionary

spending happens in the economy, are there sectors that as an investor you would rotate to

that would counter that staples perhaps less cyclical defensives? You already talked about some

commodities like grains that are undervalued, but what about stocks? Are you looking at that?

Are you looking at any particular sector now? Yeah, well, there's a few special situations that

I've been involved in over the last year. Like one of them is traded in Vancouver that's been

very interesting. It's a stock called hydrograph. I have no idea whether they're going to be

a multi-billion dollar company or it's going to blow up, but I've been on that. But with rare

exceptions like that, I'm out of the general stock market. The general stock market is basically

a high-tech market at this point. It's all about investing billions. No, scores of billions,

hundreds of billions in artificial intelligence, computer farms and so forth.

I don't know. I think it might be a bubble. AI is a fantastic thing. I mean, the advances

that are being made in medicine and science and many things and the convenience that's providing

they're marvelous. But I wonder whether all this money going into AI isn't a misallocation

and it's turned into a bubble and it's going to blow up. And with technology advancing as quickly as

it is, I wonder if much of the hundreds of billions being invested is going to be outmoded

before it gets to be used and way before it gets to pay off the investment that's been made. It

sounds like a paradox, but this has happened before. So I've got no interest in the stock market

and especially not in that high-tech area in particular. Besides what's currently happening

in the Middle East, what are some one or two events or developments this year that you think

could move all global markets in either direction that you're watching? The war getting worse is

the big one. And I think it's a fair bet that the war is going to get much worse and is going

to spread. And I think the Iranians are going to come out on top of this. I don't think the

US or the Israelis really know what they're doing here. They've got a tiger by the tail now.

And if the war goes badly and costs more, it's going to suck capital out of the productive areas

of the economy and damage people's psychology and destroying all the real wealth involved

in particular, destroying a lot of oil and oil production, which the world runs on. I mean,

oil is the world's number one commodity. The world can't run without it. You can't make fertilizer

without it. You can't make classics without it. So you damage the oil and gas production industries.

That could set off a daisy chain where all the debt we have in the world can't be serviced.

Does the timing of, I'm sorry, go ahead. Does the timing of this war seem a little bit peculiar

to you from the perspective of the Trump administration's planning. The mid-trums are coming up

in half a year's time, as you know. And Trump has made it a platform mandate to bring oil

prices down. In fact, he's boasted about this before how low oil prices have been in the past.

And he was right up until now. And I mean, he and his cabinet knew this was going to happen if he

attacks Iran. The oil price goes up. And inflation goes up. And the American people risk getting

angry. He couldn't have waited until next year. Just in any way. I don't understand it. I mean,

it maybe could be that they were deluded into thinking that it was so easy to kidnap Maduro.

And then of course, Cuba is that government is going to collapse. Good thing.

Maybe they were deluded enough to think that the Iranian people would revolt. But actually,

just the opposite might happen. They might see their country under attack and gather around the flag.

So it was the opposite of what they were hoping for. I suspect they thought it would make things

better. I think they guessed wrong. Wrong bigly, as Trump would say. Right. And so the other,

I guess spillover effect is perhaps the federal reserve now is going to be less incentivized to

lower rates, much to the chagrin of the Trump administration, which has been pressuring the fed

to lower rates. And now they can't have oil prices go up. And everything else goes up. What

reason do they have to lower rates? I mean, we've been counting on lower rates to stimulate the

economy. I go ahead. Well, they they can't because the fact is, yeah, maybe they can they can

set short term rates by the amount of T bills and short term paper that they buy, supply and demand

with interest rates. But to do this, they have to print up lots more

fiat currency. And as inflation goes up, long term rates always reflect that.

So I think that, look, people forget that during the early 1980s, the US government was paying

15 to 18% in rates. Very, very high rates. They went down for 40 years until they bottomed

at almost negative numbers in 2022 rates have been going up since then, regardless of what the

government wants or does or anything. And I think rates are headed up now. And another big cycle

is going to take them back to and above levels we saw back in the 80s. So bonds are a very bad

place to be right now. We're entering a major bear market for bonds, interest rates are going higher,

doesn't matter what the government does. Printing up money is going to increase inflation

and inevitably really the higher interest rates, not to mention the exit from the dollar,

which isn't going to help the situation. The final piece of nobody wants to hold a hot potato

and the dollar is turning into a hot potato. And the final piece of news I'd like to get your

reaction to concerns private credit markets, which have been trending all over the internet. So

first, a number of banks on Wall Street, including Morgan Stanley as a manager, and Cliffwater

have a cap redemption outflow. So Morgan Stanley and Cliffwater LLC cap withdrawals from their

multi-billion dollar private credit funds after investors sought to redeem vastly more than the

vehicles allow Cliffwater's $33 billion flagship credit private credit vehicle limited redemption

to 7% of shares in the first quarter after investors sought to pull out a record 14%. Same thing

with Morgan Stanley, which has almost $8 billion in assets returned around $169 million.

Meanwhile, JP Morgan is marking down loan portfolios of private credit groups.

Just by looking at the information presented here, what does this trend look like to you, Duck?

It's a sign of one more sign, there are many, of the US and Canada being greatly overfinancialized.

And with interest rates having been as low as they were, people were reaching for a couple other

percent, a couple more percent by packaging up private deals. So this is a lot of debt.

And as the economy slows down, and earnings fall, and a lot of people can't make their payments,

I think there could be a real panic in the debt markets. So it's the inevitable

becoming imminent at this point. I don't expect they can too much debt.

So that's stuff before it's too late. And it's going down already.

Yeah, well, that's a powerful message to end the conversation on. So we'll stop here.

Thank you, Duck. Tell us where we can find your work and what you're working on these days.

Well, I guess I mentioned the last time we were on Matt Smith and I have completed a book called

The Preparation, which talks to young men about why they should not go to college and exactly what

they should do instead to prepare for the times ahead, the preparation. That's one thing,

working on another novel. This one will be called, the last one was called Assassin. This one's

called Terrorist. So that might be out before the end of the year. And a lot of the specific

investments that I'm making and speculations, I should say, more than investments today are

in crisis investing newsletter. Internationalman.com is a free daily blog. It's really good.

Greater articles every day. And I have my own show on YouTube, just like you do, David.

Excellent. We'll put the links down below. So make sure to follow Doug and his colleagues there.

Thank you, Doug. It's always good to have your wisdom and I encourage everyone to check out

Doug's work and follow Doug. Appreciate it. Thank you, David. And thank you for watching. Don't

forget to like and subscribe.