Jason Hartman hosts Doug Casey, author of Crisis Investing: Opportunities and Profits in the Coming Great Depression, to talk about some hysteria. Doug gives us his opinion on the 2008 Recession and how it will play into a larger, Great Depression. He offers advice on investing in cryptocurrency, bonds, stocks, and mining asteroids.
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Jason Hartman 1:00
Let’s welcome back a guest who’s been on several times. And that is none other than Doug Casey. He is the founder of international man. Also Casey Research, which he’s not as directly involved with anymore. He’s an author of several great books, and a real thought leader on various investments and situations. And we’re obviously all in a situation now. So I wanted to invite him back, Doug, it’s great to have you back on and you’re coming to us from Argentina. Is that or no? Ecuador, right?
Doug Casey 1:32
No, across the river I’m or why. Okay, farm here.
Jason Hartman 1:37
Fantastic. And then you also at least used to live in Aspen half of the year and then South America the other half of the year. Is that about right?
Doug Casey 1:46
That’s right. I still have my ranch in Aspen, but it’s questionable whether I’ll even go back there this summer.
Jason Hartman 1:51
Yeah, well, I met you at Aspen and we did a live interview in person there and that was a lot of fun. I think maybe that was the last time you were on the show. But also lot has changed in the world. What is your take on the coronavirus pandemic situation? Is this an overreaction? Is the is the reaction maybe bigger than the problem or what are you thinking?
Doug Casey 2:13
It’s a gigantic overreaction. The hysteria that’s going on right now is the biggest in the way of hysteria since the witch trials of the famous late in the late late 17th. century. Wow. Simply overblown. The fact of the matter is that the ordinary seasonal flu kills someplace between 25 and 60,000, American 25,000 and 60,000 Americans a year and always has the death toll from this isn’t going to be anything near that. But these morons have totally shut down the economy. And I don’t think it’s going to recover very easily. So this is a manmade disaster and I’m not talking about the virus. itself, I have no idea what it is. It’s just another virus or hundreds of viruses, the pass through the population and always have but people only really isolated viruses as a kind of life form. It was only 70 or 80 years ago. So these things have been going on since day one. This is just one among many. And it should be and would have been just forgotten, but it’s not it’s, it’s turned into a major disaster for no good reason.
Jason Hartman 3:32
Okay. I don’t want to get into the debate because we’ll burn up a lot of time of is this different than the flu or not? There are some differences even though the death numbers are the issue you mentioned is definitely correct. But there’s the contagiousness, there’s, there’s the treatment. There’s the overwhelming the healthcare system possibility. There’s the fact that, you know, on the normal flu usually don’t need ventilators. So some differences. I mean, you agree with that, right?
Doug Casey 3:57
Well, look, I’m not Avaya virus. I’ll just I’m happy to do me all just, I’m not a medical expert. And I don’t really trust. Anything that you see on the news these days. Yeah. So, who really knows, but all I can say is that I haven’t personally, I don’t personally know anybody that’s been a flood afflicted by the virus.
Jason Hartman 4:20
Okay, fair enough. So the economy, let’s jump on that now. The economy is in uncharted territory. I mean, I like to say, Doug, that we are witnessing the biggest money printing extravaganza in world history. And we’re just seeing the beginning of it now. The 2.2 trillion is just the beginning. At least that’s my take on it. What do you think about this, you know, the various bailouts the various aid and it feels like we’re galloping towards socialism. Wow, it’s, it’s absolutely crazy.
Doug Casey 4:52
Well, it’s a catastrophe and I’m making the analogy I like to use is that since the meltdown of 2008 look at that as being entering the leading edge of a huge financial hurricane. We went through the bleeding edge of the hurricane in 2008, and nine and 10. A very big hurricane. So we’ve been going through a very big eye of the storm. Now we’re entering the trailing edge of the storm. And it’s going to be much worse, much different and much longer lasting than the unpleasantness that we might remember from 2008 and nine and 10.
Jason Hartman 5:28
Okay, so your metaphor is that for the past eight to 10 years coming out of the Great Recession, and I’m I started using 2012 as the kind of coming out of the Great Recession, even some would consider it 2010. But 810 years was the eye of the hurricane. And now, you know, in the eye, it’s sort of calm, right? There’s been good economy, things have been growing people, there’s a wealth effect that’s been going on that last eight or 10 years, and now we’re going to get the other part of the storm right. Is that the way You’re looking at it.
Doug Casey 6:01
That’s right. And what happened was, is that the government caused the disaster of 2008 so forth. By creating gigantic distortions and Miss allocations of capital, we can go back a lot further Western civilization itself, which, incidentally, is the only civilization in the history of the world that actually counts. It peaked in 1914, and has been going downhill since then. That’s not to say that science and technology, which are the soul fruits, which are among the fruits of Western civilization, the only civilization that has a meaningful science technology, but science and technology has been increasing at the rate of Moore’s law for the last hundred years, but the civilization itself has been going downhill. So
Jason Hartman 6:56
tell us what you mean by that because I sometimes like to Say with a friend of mine, that we think civilization peaked in 1990. Now, granted, there’s been technological advance since then, but I’m talking about the culture war. What do you mean by that? When you say you say 1914? Well, okay, you’re probably talking about the Federal Reserve and the IRS coming along. Right. So
Doug Casey 7:20
those are two of the things I’m talking about, but from the essence of
Doug Casey 7:26
Western civilization, what started with the Greeks in the fifth century BC, the look, it’s all kinds of things that have changed over the years, NASA is an entirely separate conversation. But I think that what we’re looking at here is something much more serious than just say, financial meltdown. I think it’s going to turn into an economic meltdown. We’re going to have gigantic political changes. It’s going to turn into a social meltdown, too, as well. The United States itself Incidentally, is no longer with A country. It’s a multicultural domestic Empire at this point. And it’s very hard to hold something like that together. We don’t have our have a binding culture where people that live in the geographic area called the United States, they no longer share anything that resembles a common religion. Even a common language. common culture.
Jason Hartman 8:29
Yes, because there’s so much for America being a melting pot lately, right? It’s more of a toss salad. Would that be a fair statement?
Doug Casey 8:37
Well, let’s try to toss out where its components don’t even go together
Jason Hartman 8:43
very well. Right? A mismatched toss salad, but they’re, the ingredients don’t taste good. Okay, all right.
Doug Casey 8:52
So this whole thing, the virus is really just the pin that broke the gigantic financial bubble. was created by the government creating trillions of dollars starting in 2008. And it wasn’t only the US government, it’s all the major governments around the world that have created trillions and trillions of their own currencies. Now that the pin has broken the bubble, they can no longer reduce interest rates any further. They’re already zero or below zero and Europe and Japan close to zero in the US, can they create a lot more money while they’re doing that? But these trillions of dollars, basically helicopter money, maybe they’re going to pull up the markets again, the financial markets, sure that’s the first place that money goes. But this time around, we’re going to have huge price rises on our retail level, food, shelter, clothing, basics of that nature, are all gonna start heading up strongly at the very time
Jason Hartman 9:55
You mean prices of those things. Exactly. Okay. Right. So in flight In food, clothing shelter, you said, Right,
Doug Casey 10:03
exactly. We’ve had plenty of inflation in the financial markets where stock price asset inflation versus consumer
Jason Hartman 10:10
price inflation got it.
Doug Casey 10:11
Exactly. And even bond prices are at an all time high. This next time around, actually, the big problem this time around isn’t going to be so much the stock market, although it’s we just started upon this bear market, the big problem is going to be in bonds, they’re a triple threat to your capital, you have the inflation risk, the currency that the dollars that you get back, I going to go down in value very rapidly over the next decade, you’ve got the interest rate risk, interest rates now an all time low, are going to start heading back up to the levels they were in the early 80s and beyond. And by that I mean 15 and 20% and higher. And the last the default risk, there’s so much debt in the world. A lot of it’s not going to be paid. So I’m buying About the worst place for money at this point.
Jason Hartman 11:02
Okay. And I’d agree with that bonds are very vulnerable to inflation. So I would definitely agree with you there. Okay. So I mean, would it be fair to say that you’re a gold bug? Well, I believe that gold is proven as being the best kind of money. It has unique characteristics that are really only true of gold that make it especially useful for money. Steel is especially useful for buildings and cars, and aluminum as good for cans and airplanes. And every one of the 92 naturally occurring elements has unique characteristics, and gold as the most durable and visible of all the naturally occurring elements is especially what is money that’s why it’s always been used as money. So I think the world is going to go back to gold and the idea of now national currencies that are not even paper anymore because they want to go digital with them. total disaster from a personal freedom point of view, meaning a private because your let me just expand on that for a moment. You know, if you don’t have privacy in the way you allocate your resources if you don’t have privacy in the way you spend your money, you know, that is a very big concern for liberty. Okay, financial privacy, you know, if the government can track through a digital dollar or a cryptocurrency that is sponsored by the central banks and the governments then you have no privacy. They know everything you buy, they know every every they know they know how much you have, and they know everything you buy, and they know what you spend, they know if you bought a gun. They know if you bought a face mask. They know if you bought a new phone, you went to a strip club, okay, so this is very risky that they do that and I already see them through this crisis paving the way to that China as this first started to break out, you know, there were articles about how the currency is dangerous because it carries germs and people can become infected by using the currency. And China is fairly cashless By the way, at least when I was there, you know, people were using WeChat to pay for lots of things and just not a lot of cash being used. Of course, the Scandinavian countries are almost completely cashless some places in the US are cashless where they literally say, you know, please no cash, you know, use a credit card use Apple Pay or Google pay. So this this is a big concern. You know, as far as cryptocurrencies go, I think the one that will win the game is not going to be Bitcoin or aetherium or anything else. It’s going to be the one sponsored by the governments in the central banks.
Doug Casey 13:48
I’m certainly going to avoid using any government or central bank cryptocurrency.
Jason Hartman 13:54
Yeah, well, I’m not saying I like the idea of them winning the game. I’m just saying because they’re the most governments and central banks are the most powerful entities the human race has ever known. They will force it upon us, they’ll just tell us that’s what we have to use. There are now legal tender laws about the dollar, saying it’s for all debts, public and private. Right? It says it right on the on the currency. And they’ll just make us use it. Right?
Doug Casey 14:18
Well, I suppose they will. But this is one of the advantages of living in or out of the way backward countries, as I do, I mean, I’ve, I’ve traveled many times, most of these countries many times, to 155 different countries, I’ve lived in 10 different countries. And I find that I generally prefer living in these quiet, backward countries, even countries that have, especially countries that have serious economic problems, because bringing capital from all side I can have an extraordinarily high standard of living and a very low cost. But getting back to what you were saying, yes, the world is going to go in that direction. I don’t know what you can do about it if, if the whole world starts to resemble Germany in the 1930s, or the Soviet Union from the way it was from the 1920s, to the 1980s, there’s not much you can do about it. And unfortunately, most people worship their governments, they think that their governments are necessary and important and good. I’ve been a philosophical anarchist for many years. I don’t believe that the institution of government itself is either necessary or immoral. But that’s, that’s a philosophical state. And
Jason Hartman 15:36
that will take an awfully long time to discuss. So let’s skip that one for now. But yeah, okay, got it. So the next things to expect, we both agree that we’re going to see more socialism, more government intrusion in our lives, the movement toward a government sponsored cryptocurrency and we all agree on that.
Doug Casey 15:57
Yeah, that’s what’s going to happen next. In the cars, we’re going to see much higher levels of inflation, which is well, on the part of the central banks which create the currency, they’re going to be creating tons of new currency, whether it’s the old currency that we use now, or the new one, it’ll be much easier for them to do that. It’ll create more distortions in the market we’ve entered upon is what I call the greater depression. As I said before, it’s going to be much worse and more serious and different than the unpleasantness not just of 2008 and on, but of 1929 to 1946. This has the potential to be the biggest upset since the Industrial Revolution. It’s gonna be fascinating to watch
Jason Hartman 16:42
it. It definitely is, and hopefully we will help our listeners at least be comfortable through it or potentially thrive and prosper through it. Because economics is a relative game. All you have to do is be ahead of the average and you are Winning, okay, even if the average declines, just be ahead of it. So if everybody’s losing their shirt, and you’re treading water and staying the same, you’re doing great. Okay. And one of the things I would encourage people to do, because one of my other predictions is we’re going I mean, there are many, but we’re going to see people flee high density living environments to low density living environments, they already know now they can usually work at home, we’re going to see a move toward a simpler life, I believe out of this, we are going to see a move toward a nationwide Housing Assistance Program. Maybe it’s the section eight program we already have expanded, or a whole new program, we’re going to see more pushes toward universal basic income. And Spain has already is already in the process of enacting a universal basic income. And this is going to spread around the world if you asked me, but you know, when I was a kid, Doug, and I did encourage people to you know, go to YouTube or whatever and watch some of the apps episodes, I used to watch the show The Waltons, I’m sure you know that show. And, and you just see how simple life was back then. Right? I think we see that, you know, we view that when we watch any old era TV or movie, but you look at that. And you also look at the Great Depression, and how people in the urban areas in the high density areas were hurt the most. And the people that suffered the least, or the people living in the more rural and they really didn’t have suburbia back then yet because that came after world war two in America, which is a uniquely American idea, suburbia, they didn’t really, you know, their life didn’t change that much at all. They grew their own food, they were self sufficient. And, you know, they kind of went on with life. But if you were in an urban area, or you were in line for soup, or whatever you could get and you couldn’t be self sufficient. And so, you know, there’s been this push to push people, maybe it’s un agenda 21 or whatever or just you The way societies evolved toward these high density urban living environments where they cannot be self sufficient. You probably have some thoughts on that, especially since you live on ranches anywhere you go, right?
Doug Casey 19:12
Yes, I agree. You’re you’re absolutely correct. There will be a move away from the city is now here in Oregon. I’m on 1000 acres I’ve got just
Jason Hartman 19:23
Well, that’s
Doug Casey 19:24
that’s a very small plot for this part of the world. If you’re a landowner, yeah. I mean, across the river in Argentina, I have about 150,000 acres in conjunction with some partners, but this is a much more liveable thing to be on. But here I’ve got, I’ve got a gym, I’ve got a pool. I’ve got a mile river front, I’ve got dairy cows, beef, cows, chickens. So I’m pretty self contained. I’ve got a great library and we’re on the internet right now. So what else need actually nothing that I can think of Yeah, you’re quite correct. On all that you said, I’m I’m intensely optimistic about the long term future. I’m a believer and Ray Kurzweil, his concept of the singularity, right coming up, perhaps at the end, this generation and
Jason Hartman 20:18
he predicts 2030 will achieve singularity when the $1,000 computer can do what the human brain can do. Right is that that’s part of the singularity concept that Ray Kurzweil talks about.
Doug Casey 20:34
That’s just part of it. Yeah,
Jason Hartman 20:36
go ahead and the command on it avoid
Doug Casey 20:38
locations in many, many different areas of life. It’ll couldn’t transform life totally, especially when we get into nanotechnology. So if you can hang on for another 20 years, we may live in a absolutely different world, hopefully. Much, much better world but totally different. But we have to do here is figure out What’s gonna happen over the next few years, and I believe that the general standard of living is going to go down a lot, the chaos levels going to go up a lot. And the only thing that you can really do other than speculate in the markets to try to stay ahead, although I’ve got to say that’s going to be very hard because of depression. This is a time when everybody’s standard of living goes down, and the winner is just the person that loses the least.
Jason Hartman 21:26
Right, exactly that, by the way, listeners, that’s a really good point. Doug, can you repeat that?
Doug Casey 21:33
Yeah, in a depression, the winner is the person that loses the least because the general standard of living drops in a depression, and that’s what we’re looking at.
Jason Hartman 21:43
Okay. So tell us how we lose the least. I like it. That’s good.
Doug Casey 21:48
The most important thing is that you have assets where there’s no counterparty risk, where you don’t have to trust a bank, or an insurance company or for that matter, your Pension Fund, which is stuffed with bonds and or price stocks. So I think that your basic savings should be in the form of gold and silver coins, mostly in your own possession. If you have significant assets, you should have been more than one political jurisdiction because your greatest danger today isn’t the markets which are dangerous enough, but it’s the political system. It’s your government. So you should have gold and silver coins. And if you want to speculate, the best place to be, in my opinion, are mining stocks. They’re very cheap right now, gold mines especially, are all making a lot of money at 1600 dollars an ounce, but they’re very cheap because the average financial manager doesn’t believe in them. He doesn’t understand them. He doesn’t own them. That’s going to change no pylon to them. It’s going to be like the contents of Hoover Dam. Trying to get through garden hose in the next few years. So that’s where I’m concentrated right now. mining stocks in general, tell
Jason Hartman 23:08
us about mining stocks vcv cheap oil. That’s good news for the miners, right? Where energy gets really cheap because it’s it costs less to bring bring the metals out of the ground is that is that how you would look at
Doug Casey 23:20
that? depends on the type of mine, whether it’s underground mine or an open pit mine, whether the mine is close to civilization or far away. But we can generalize and say that perhaps 20% of the costs of mining is oil related. And, of course, oil has fallen in the last couple of months from about $55 down to about 25. At the moment. I don’t know how much lower it could go because none of the frackers in the US are making money. In fact, they’re all hemorrhaging money at this point, right?
Jason Hartman 23:53
They were probably going to lose them completely. They’re just not going to stay in business.
Doug Casey 23:58
Probably not unless Well, prices go up. But I speculate in commodities, not just oil and gas and copper and gold, but soybeans and hogs and cocoa and coffee, all the rest of them. And what I can tell you right now is that none of the producers of commodities, except for gold, are making money. It doesn’t matter. The gold miners are making money from Gold’s point of view, because all the gold that’s ever been mined, basically, is still in existence. That’s not true of any other commodity. Silver,
Jason Hartman 24:37
you know, I just got to ask you about that for a second. This still seems pretty far fetched to me, but it’s worth a discussion point. What about mining the asteroids? What about creating these metals and alette in labs, you know, I’ve read articles about you know, both of those things. And, you know, maybe the supply isn’t as limited as we want to believe this may be far off, but I don’t know how far you know, maybe Not that far out.
Doug Casey 25:01
In my, one of my books, crisis investing for the rest of the 90s. I talked about exactly this. There are about 6 billion ounces of gold in existence right now above ground. Okay? That’s the best guess nobody knows for sure. About 80 million ounces per year are produced. So the amount of gold in the world grows by about one and a third, one and a half percent per year. Now, your question was, can I supply go up a lot? Not really here on planet Earth, because all of the high grade deposits have basically been found people have been looking for gold for thousands of years, so all the low hanging fruits been found. Now when you find a new gold deposit, you’re looking at moving hundreds of millions of tons of ore, and it might grade a hundredth of an ounce per ton. This is next to nothing. gold mines now or something like the basin, treasure of Sierra Madre, you’re talking about gigantic earthmoving operations extremely capital intensive and high costs. Now what can change that? Will they mine the asteroids? Yes, of course they will. There’s no question that the acid many of the asteroids have heavy metals in them like Iridium and rhodium and gold, platinum among these things, but that’s going to be very, very high cost. And that’s pretty far in the future still 20 or 30 or 40 years, the sea is full of gold is full of everything, everything dissolves into the sea, so can go be recovered from the sea. talked about that for many generations. Well, perhaps bioengineering could breed types of seaweed that can concentrate gold and much the way that spinach concentrates iron, this type of thing could be done soon. No, not very soon at all. could go be created, transmuted from other elements? Yes,
Jason Hartman 27:04
of course. alchemy. Yeah. Right?
Doug Casey 27:08
Well, it can be done. It’s just a question of the number of protons in the nucleus of an atom. But
Jason Hartman 27:15
I just wanted to bring that up. Because you know, the value of precious metals, diamonds, or most anything else is based on scarcity versus demand. You know, it needs to be scarce and it needs to have high demand. That’s how you how the value is upheld, right? If it’s abundant, it has low demand, or if it’s abundant, then the demand can be met. If it’s scarce, and there’s demand for it, then the demand can be met and the price goes up. That’s right. Yeah, basic economics.
Doug Casey 27:48
Don’t Don’t worry. Don’t worry about a glut of gold anytime in the near future. Okay. All right. It’s just not an element.
Jason Hartman 27:55
Okay. What else do you want to say you know, we brought up the part about the move towards socialism and more bailouts and increased government intervention and, you know, inflation and inflationary future. Any any more thoughts about that?
Doug Casey 28:11
I’ll just say that we’ve entered upon the greater depression, which is what I called. And there’s not much you can do about it in much the same way that if a society jumps off the top of 100 storey building, they’re fine until they hit the ground, or about to hit the ground, hold onto your head, it’s gonna be very interesting with all kinds of consequences. One of the most serious of them down the road is going to be military. I mean, we’ve had World War Two, and there will be a world war three, it’ll be very, very different from World War Two. And I suspect it’s going to have a substantial biological component. So all the F 20 twos and B twos and the rest of this are not going to matter that much. Well, it’s not gonna matter. I mean, it’s all all that does is help to bankrupt the US So it’s going to be interesting to watch on your widescreen.
Jason Hartman 29:03
Who’s the we’re going to be with, is it going to be China?
Doug Casey 29:05
Well, look, if it’s a biological war, it could be with a really smart kid that lives in a basement. In Serbia, for all I know, there are many advantages to biological war and the US government has been working on this type of thing, mainly at Fort Detrick in the US for decades. And they spent billions of dollars developing all kinds of nasty things. But with the development of CRISPR and
Jason Hartman 29:33
gene editing technology,
Doug Casey 29:35
yeah, exactly. In other words, over the next generation, just as in the last generation, computer science was the big deal. For the next generation. I think it’s gonna be biological science. So but we’ll also have a computer element to the world war three because the whole world runs on computers, everything from the electricity grid, to the financial system, everything. It’s all connected. are driven now than it used to be. So you’re going to have world war three is going to be a computer war with a biological war. And of course, there will still be people running around with ak 47 shooting, but it’s going to be nasty.
Jason Hartman 30:13
Any idea when that’s coming down? You know, you’ve cheered us up so much today. I’m just kidding.
Doug Casey 30:21
I’m just calling him the way I see I prefer good times. They’re much more than I prefer bad times. But I didn’t make the game. Yeah, right. Of course. What I would recommend, however, to your listeners, Jason is that they read the novels that I’ve written. You can say many things in the foreign fiction that you cannot say, or you perhaps shouldn’t say. So they can go on Amazon and pick up a copy of speculator which is about mining business and our bush war in Africa. And drug lord is our hero goes into that trade. And now assassin which will be out in July, where our Our hero, Charles Knight, investigates the world of assassinations, political assassins in particular. And there can be other novels that are even more radical to follow. So you don’t want to fall behind. So I would, very early,
Jason Hartman 31:14
and Doug, those are available at all the usual sources, do you want to give out a website as well?
Doug Casey 31:21
Well go to international man calm. I do an interview or two with them every week. And we have a lot of great articles. It’s free. But they’re fantastic articles on all kinds of things. So international man.com is the place to go.
Jason Hartman 31:36
Excellent. And Doug, thanks for sharing some of these thoughts with us today. And let’s just close with that idea that in bad times, in general, the person who wins is the person who loses the least. And that’s what we’re here for. It’s a relative thing. I always say economics is a relative thing. So like that old cliche, that story of the bearer In the woods, and the two hikers and the one that’s, you know, tightening his shoelaces and his buddy says, Man, you can’t outrun a bear and he says, I don’t have that run the bear. I just have to outrun you. And and that’s, you know, really what it is about is using the least, because everything is relative. Doug Casey, thanks for joining us again.
Doug Casey 32:19
Okay, my budget Jason.
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