--- title: "We're in the End Stages. Here's What Edward Dowd Thinks You Should Do With Your Money." url: "https://www.readplaza.com/articles/were-in-the-end-stages-heres-what-edward-dowd-thinks-you-should-do-with-your-money" type: "article" publisher: "Commodity Culture" category: "Market Commentary" published: "2026-06-02T09:33:00+00:00" updated: "2026-06-22T21:44:49.322207+00:00" reading_time_minutes: 7 tags: ["Gold Mining Companies", "Gold", "Silver", "Semiconductors"] --- # We're in the End Stages. Here's What Edward Dowd Thinks You Should Do With Your Money. I've had Edward Dowd on Commodity Culture multiple times now, and every single conversation leaves me more convinced that most investors are not prepared for what's coming. Ed is one of the sharpest macro minds I've come across. He doesn't traffic in doom for clicks. He follows the data. And right now the data is telling a story that the mainstream financial media is almost entirely ignoring. In our latest conversation, which you can watch right in the link above, Ed opened with three words that stuck with me: we're in the end stages. End stages of the stock market bubble, end stages of the real economy holding up on borrowed time, and end stages of China's long economic denial. I want to break down the key points in writing because this kind of analysis deserves more than a single watch. Gold Is Going to $10,000Ed called $4,000 gold last year and it hit. His long-term target now is $10,000 by 2030, and the reasoning is solid. Central banks are buying. Commercial banks reclassified gold as tier one capital, which is basically making it money again. Retail demand from China and India is not slowing down and gold just surpassed US Treasuries as the number one reserve asset in the world. Any new monetary system that gets built, gold is going to be a part of it. As for where we are right now, Ed sees the current sideways action as healthy. After the run we had into the January highs, consolidation is exactly what you want to see. It tells you we didn't put in a parabolic top. If you're a long-term holder, Ed says don't stress it. If you're trading it, he says flip a coin. His conviction is on the multi-year move, not the next few weeks. The one short-term wildcard is the Iran war. When the conflict started, Turkey sold around 120 tons of gold to raise liquidity, and that kind of dollar rush is normal in a crisis. But if the war drags on and oil spikes toward $150, gold could catch a bid. Right now the stock market and oil markets are pricing in a resolution. As Ed put it, it better actually be resolved, because those markets have already moved as if it is. The AI Bubble Was Never Built on ProfitsThis is the part of the conversation that stuck with me most. Ed pointed out that 45% of the S&P 500's entire market cap is now AI or AI adjacent. Semiconductors alone are 18% of the S&P and 30% of the NASDAQ. The semiconductor index is up 80% in nine weeks. Ed's been doing this a long time and he called it directly: these are ending moves. Free cash flow in the AI complex is going the wrong way. Michael Burry has flagged off-balance sheet risk that's been moved out of sight but not out of existence. Bain consulting just came out with a report saying there's no ROI. Bloomberg covered it the same day we recorded. The narrative is shifting faster than the stock price is. His base case is a 30 to 50% decline when this unravels. He said he's hoping for 50 because at 30%, policy makers might step in with bazookas before the real reset can happen. Either way he's not putting new money to work here. Warren Buffett is sitting at 40% cash. His stock has underperformed the S&P for a year and a half. That's what Buffett typically does going into a major top. Ed thinks you should have dry powder too. How much depends on your age and what you have to lose. The Bubble Was Never Fixed. It Was Just Papered Over.Most people think the 2020 crash was resolved. It wasn't. What happened was the largest monetary expansion in modern history, and all that excess liquidity inflated asset prices, real estate, and private credit markets to levels that just don't reflect economic reality. Real incomes are decaying. People are still spending, but only because the savings rate dropped from 5.5% to 2.6% in a single year. Credit card delinquencies are up. Car loan delinquencies are up. Mortgage delinquencies are starting to rise. The top 10% of consumers are now responsible for 49% of all consumer spending. That's not a healthy economy. That's a thin thread holding the whole picture together. Ed drew the comparison to 2008 directly. Back then, a mini oil price shock from $70 to $140 over five months wiped out the consumer in the second half of the year. We're seeing the same setup now, except this time the oil shock is landing on top of a consumer who is already stretched. The stock market is not the real economy. Most people know that but keep acting like it isn't true. China Is Entering the Acute PhaseEd has been bearish on China for a while, and in this conversation he laid out why the timeline is accelerating. Their working-age population peaked in 2020 and they're losing 150 million prime-age workers by 2032. Residential real estate permits are down 70% since 2020. Total construction is now declining year-over-year. Net fixed investment went negative in Q4. Q1 stimulus didn't move the needle. The playbook China has been running is the same one Japan tried when their own demographic decline hit: export your way out of falling internal demand. EVs, tech, cheap manufactured goods dumped into global markets. That's exactly what they've been doing. And that's exactly why tariffs are, as Ed put it, strategically the right move even if you can criticize how they're being executed. If China successfully exports its deflation, it bankrupts homegrown industries everywhere else. The contagion risk into Japan and South Korea, their two biggest trading partners, is something Ed thinks most investors are completely ignoring while they focus on AI and the Iran situation. Japan already has a potential sovereign debt crisis blooming. There's a lot of risk in Asia that nobody wants to look at right now. Where Ed Says Capital Belongs, and Why I AgreeThis is always the part I want to get to. Not the fear but the framework. Ed was clear: he doesn't see anything he wants to own right now. Not in equities. Not in the broad market at historic valuations. His positioning is defensive. Cash and short-duration treasuries for retail investors, where you take on no interest rate risk and you hold dry powder for when things get mispriced. If you're an institutional investor, he sees a potential 12-month trade in US 10 and 30-year treasuries as a growth scare plays out and yields fall. But that's not a trade for your 401k. Gold and silver remain his long-term conviction. Not as a trade but as stores of value with thousands of years of precedent behind them. For the Commodity Culture audience, this validates what a lot of us have been building toward: quality junior miners, royalty companies, and precious metals producers levered to gold and silver prices without the balance sheet risk of the broader equity market. When the market finally cracks and assets get mispriced on the way down, that's when Ed says he'll have more interesting things to talk about. His timeline for that window is 6 to 12 months from now. Until then, dry powder Why I Started Writing for YouI've been making videos on Commodity Culture for years but there's only so much you can cover in an interview. The reason I joined ReadPlaza is to give you the written analysis that goes deeper. The context, the data, and the frameworks behind what you're watching on screen. If you want to keep getting pieces like this, breakdowns of my best conversations, the commodity plays I'm watching, and the macro context behind the moves, subscribe to my free newsletter here on Plaza. Straight to your inbox. No algorithm. No noise. Jesse Day Commodity Culture