Doug Casey on oil's new floor, the $1.4 billion grift, and why the next president will make Trump look like a moderate
Doug made a call on this week's episode that stopped me mid-conversation: he's betting Trump resigns before 2028.
Not impeachment. Not the 25th Amendment. Resignation — dressed up, in Doug's telling, with "some nonsensical reason why. Well, time for Vance to get groomed or whatever." And he didn't stop there: "I'd also make book that Melania is going to divorce him." His suspicion? The Melania coin was part of the alimony settlement.
You can dismiss that as Doug being Doug. But listen to the whole episode and the logic hangs together. Here's the chain.
The money trail
Trump's latest financial disclosure shows $1.4 billion in crypto earnings while in office. The Trump meme coin alone brought in $635 million. (Melania's coin managed about $6 million — which tells you something about the settlement theory.)
Doug's read: "Those coins serve absolutely zero useful purpose. It's like giving somebody a book contract or a speaking fee to pass money to them. It's basically a grift."
And that money has a job to do. "He'll need that money to mount a proper legal defense after he's out of office." A president facing legal exposure the moment he leaves power, sitting on a billion-plus war chest, in years Doug expects to get "so wild and wooly" that walking away becomes the smart trade — that's the resignation bet.
Mussolini economics
Doug's larger frame is that the grift isn't a side show — it's the system now. "He really is a modern-day reincarnation of Mussolini. His economic policies are actually identical to those of Benito Mussolini" — the US government buying stakes in companies on the open market, ten of them at this point, with the family positioned ahead of the deals.
Take the Kazakhstan tungsten arrangement: Trump's sons get in, then the US government invests heavily. Millions of Americans look at that and call it capitalism. Doug's correction: "It's actually fascism at work, in the classic Mussolini definition of the word." And every time Trump is associated with free markets, he delegitimizes them a little more.
What comes next is worse
Mamdani won in New York and is now using his star power to elevate three more like-minded candidates into Congress. Doug isn't mincing words: "They're actual real communists that wanna overturn the entire nature of US life."
Left and right, Americans are being radicalized against the system itself. Sanders, Obama, "drain the swamp," Mamdani — every one of those was a vote to tear something down. And the anger is monetary at its root, even if almost nobody can name it.
M2 money supply surged $247 billion in May — the largest monthly jump since May 2021, when Washington was mailing checks to everyone with a pulse. We now sit $1.3 trillion above the peak of that printing orgy. That's what's laying waste to the average American's standard of living. They can't make ends meet, they can't explain why, and so they reach for "billionaires shouldn't exist."
Doug's punchline on where the numbers go from here: "Trump is gonna have to ask what comes beyond a trillion. He doesn't know it, but it's a quadrillion. So that number is the next one we're gonna start hearing about."
"It's all like a gambler on tilt at this point."
The one trade hiding in all of this
Amid the doom, Doug laid out the most concrete investment case he's made in months.
The Hormuz standoff isn't getting resolved. Even under the best scenario, flows through the Strait will be controlled by Iran and its allies — restricted flows are the new baseline. Doug's conclusion: "Oil has reached a new base level at, let's say, $65 to $70 at a minimum."
Now the anomaly: "During the last real oil bubble, which was in 1980, oil stocks were 20% of the S&P 500. Now they're 4%" — even though oil matters more to the world economy than ever. Some of these companies are yielding up to 10% in current dividends.
"They're cheap, they're paying big dividends, nobody wants them, and it's one of the only parts of the financial world that's actually underpriced."
Everyone's chasing semiconductors and AI. The energy that powers all of it trades like an afterthought. That's the setup Doug lives for.
Also in this episode
Trump's feud with Meloni at the G7 (and what the Italian press called him afterward), the $16 million Reflecting Pool fixation, the CPS visit to the Buttigieg household and why child protective agencies should terrify every parent in America, and whether there will even be an election in 2028. Doug: "Who knows what could happen between now and then where we could have a national emergency and the election is put off — and that's really the end of the Republic of America."
On Friday: Doug's take on the recent Supreme Court rulings, his thoughts on Peter Thiel's Zero to One, and your questions. Subscribers can submit via the "Ask Doug a Question" link at the top of the Substack.
One more thing
John Hunt — Doug's co-author and, as Doug put it this week, "an actual renaissance man... not just an MD, he was trained in geology, and he can do everything" — has taken over the monthly Crisis Investing issues. His first one is out now, and it includes a genuinely interesting gold recommendation.
Doug's assessment: "Crisis Investing is a better newsletter than ever, and it's going to improve a lot from here."
If you want John's full write-up on the gold pick, upgrade at crisisinvesting.com.
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