I had David Hunter back on Commodity Culture this week, and I wanted to have him on because he is one of the few people who has held onto the same big-picture view through a market that has made a lot of people look foolish.

He thinks we are headed for a serious global bust. Bigger than 2008 in terms of the credit damage. He thinks the long secular bull market that began in 1982 is close to ending, and that the eventual drawdown in equities could be brutal.

But he is not bearish today.

David is still extremely bullish on the market in the near term. He thinks we may be entering the final parabolic stage of the cycle, where the gains that would normally take two or three years happen in a matter of months. His latest targets are 10,000 on the S&P 500, 36,000 on the Nasdaq, 4,000 on the Russell, and 70,000 on the Dow.

Those are enormous numbers. They also make people uncomfortable because the same person calling for them is warning about what follows.

But that is the whole point of David’s thesis. He does not see the next major decline coming from a market that is already weak. He sees it coming after one final, euphoric run that pulls in the last skeptics and convinces people that the old rules no longer apply.

We have been hearing some version of “the market is too expensive” for years now. And to be fair, it has looked too expensive for years. The valuations are stretched. Tech is dominating the indices. AI has become the trade everyone feels they need to own. Yet the market keeps shrugging off every headline that should have sent it lower.

Tariffs. Wars. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Rising geopolitical risk. Concerns around private credit, private equity, and commercial real estate. Investors have been given plenty of reasons to get defensive, but the market has largely treated each one as another reason to climb the wall of worry.

David thinks that skepticism has been fuel.

Institutional investors have fought this rally since the October 2022 low. Each correction has been met with new bearishness, and each recovery has forced people back in at higher prices. Now you are starting to see sell-side strategists raise targets more aggressively. That does not mean the top is here tomorrow, but it is the kind of shift in sentiment David wants to see as the cycle gets older.

The final stage is rarely quiet. It is the point where the market stops feeling risky to the people who have spent years warning about risk. It is where the stories get cleaner, the targets get higher, and the argument becomes that the old cycle is different because this time the technology really is transformative.

Maybe it is. But that does not mean the stocks cannot get ahead of themselves.

One more move, then the bust

David is not pretending that the final advance will be easy to trade. A parabolic market can still have pullbacks. It can shake people out two or three times before heading higher again. The danger, in his view, is that investors who have been cautious throughout the entire rally will finally capitulate near the end after watching another 30, 40, or 50 percent go by without them.

That is where people get hurt. They exit early because they are nervous, watch the market keep ripping, and then get pulled back in because they cannot stand missing it anymore. If the final move becomes as emotional as David expects, that pressure will only get worse.

At some point, though, sentiment changes from healthy skepticism into something else. The strategists are all bullish. Retail is all in. Investors stop asking what could go wrong because there has not been a meaningful consequence for ignoring risk in years. That is the environment David thinks will mark the real top.

He believes the eventual decline could be on the order of 80 percent. He also thinks those highs could stand for decades, much like Japan’s market peak in 1989. If that happens, the old passive-investing mantra of buying the index and waiting may not work the way it has for the past forty years.

That is a hard idea for people to hear because almost everyone investing today has grown up in the same regime. Rates have generally fallen. Price-to-earnings multiples expanded. Tech became a larger and larger percentage of the market. Every big decline was followed by a recovery that rewarded anyone patient enough to hold on.

David thinks the next cycle could look very different. Rates may fall during the bust, but he expects inflation to return with much more force once policymakers respond. The recovery that follows would not necessarily be a new secular bull market in the same assets. It could be a shorter, more violent rebound built on unprecedented liquidity and money creation.

The response is the easiest part of his forecast

The exact trigger for a global bust is hard to know. David talks about Japan, private credit, commercial real estate, private equity, and the sheer scale of global leverage as potential pressure points. There is more than $330 trillion in global debt, and leverage has a habit of looking harmless until it is suddenly devastating.

But he says the response from central banks is the predictable part.

When financial markets are free-falling, policymakers will print. They will not sit back and allow a depression to play out because it is the economically clean solution. They will try to stabilize the system with liquidity, bailouts, backstops, and whatever else is needed to stop the panic.

David thinks the Federal Reserve alone could end up creating $20 trillion or more in a severe crisis.

That is why his longer-term commodity outlook is so bullish. A deflationary bust can crush nearly everything at first, including gold and silver. He expects that. But once the money printing starts working its way through the system, demand will return while supply remains constrained.

The next leadership cycle, in his view, will not be built around the same tech-heavy index that has dominated this one. It will be more old industrial. More commodity-driven. The kinds of companies that can raise prices and generate earnings as inflation rises.

That means gold, silver, copper, commodity producers, industrial businesses, Caterpillar, Deere, and the companies tied to building, energy, resources, and real-world supply.

He thinks this is where portfolios can get caught backward. An S&P 500 investor is heavily exposed to what has done best over the last decade, especially tech. But if the next cycle belongs to commodities and old industrials, the index will be most heavily weighted to the part of the market that underperforms and least exposed to the new leaders.

Gold and silver could have two very different phases

David is calling for $7,000 gold and $200 silver in this current cycle. He thinks both could get there as the dollar weakens and rates fall over the next several months.

His view is that rates may have already peaked and could move lower for the next 18 months. That would support gold, particularly if the dollar heads toward the low-80s on the Dollar Index, as he expects. Currency debasement matters, but lower rates are part of the story too. Gold tends to do well when investors are being paid less to hold cash and bonds and confidence in the currency is eroding.

He is not calling for a straight line. Silver has already had a major run, a violent correction, and months of grinding frustration. The move from roughly $50 to $122 was parabolic, so it needed time to reset. David believes the correction bottomed around the mid-$50s and that the metal is beginning to turn again. There will still be volatility along the way, but he does not think the next pullbacks will last for months.

His longer-term call is even more aggressive. After the bust, he believes gold could fall back to somewhere around $3,500–$4,000 and silver could retrace toward $50. That would be painful for people who bought late in the current rally, but he sees it as the launchpad for the next phase.

In the inflationary cycle that follows, he thinks gold could eventually reach $20,000 and silver could reach $1,000 around 2032 or 2033.

Those targets sound extreme until you follow the logic all the way through. A massive global bust forces massive monetary intervention. Money creation eventually drives demand. Commodity supply cannot respond quickly because new mines, energy projects, and industrial capacity take years to build. If demand is being goosed by tens of trillions in new global liquidity while supply remains tight, the price has to do the adjusting.

Staying sane near the end of a cycle

The practical question is what investors do with that view today.

David’s answer is not “go all in.” He repeatedly says that people have to make decisions based on their own experience, risk tolerance, and ability to handle volatility. He could be wrong. The final rally may not unfold exactly as he expects. The top could arrive earlier or later than his forecast.

But he also warns against one of the worst outcomes: stepping aside early, missing a huge final advance, then buying back in because the market has convinced you that you were wrong just as the real danger arrives.

For investors who want a place to protect capital through a bust, he puts US Treasuries near the top of the list. He believes long-duration Treasuries could perform well as rates fall, though they carry more volatility if that call is wrong. He also sees FDIC-insured savings as a sensible option for people who want safety and do not want to trade around macro forecasts.

His broader point is that there may still be a lot of upside left in this market. But there is a difference between participating with your eyes open and assuming the cycle lasts forever.

The last forty years taught investors that every dip gets bought, rates trend lower, and the index always finds a way back to new highs. David Hunter thinks we may be close to the end of that regime.

If he is right, the biggest rally of the cycle could still be ahead of us.

And it may be followed by the most difficult market environment most investors have ever experienced.