20 November,2025 05:56 PM IST | Mumbai | PTI
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Hi readers,
I know the title might sound shocking, but hear me out, the least you can do for your future is give me a few minutes of your attention. My name is David Merkur, and I'm the CEO of Gold Silver Mart, a precious metals dealer. I started Gold Silver Mart with my brother Aharon in May 2023 after we spent years developing a trading strategy that we believed gave us a real edge when investing in gold and silver. We wanted to monetize that edge, so we built a business around it.
Since then, we've been putting our approach to the test publicly. I run a portfolio on Blossom Social under the name 100toM, which stands for turning $100 into $1,000,000. That account is currently up over 400% over the past year, and you can follow along with the performance and commentary for yourself.
I was also featured in an article on Nasdaq for my unconventional approach to forecasting gold's direction, and the predictions I shared there have so far tracked the market remarkably well. I'm sharing all this not to brag, but because I want you to understand that I don't come to this topic lightly. I live and breathe these markets. This is what I do.
So when I say I believe the stock market could crash as much as 80%, I don't expect you to take it on faith. I want you to weigh the evidence, challenge it, and think critically about what it might mean for you. My only request is that you read this with an open mind.
Over the years, I've spent countless hours studying market cycles, gold, oil, stocks, and economic history. What I'm about to share isn't investment advice, it's my opinion based on patterns, historical evidence, and how I see the system working beneath the surface. And in my view, all the signs point to a coming 80% collapse in the stock market, one that could rival or even surpass the Great Depression.
If that sounds extreme, that's because it is. But every time people have dismissed these signals, they've paid a heavy price. So before you write this off, let me walk you through the evidence and explain how crashes unfold in three distinct stages, and why this one might be worse than anything we've seen before.
Stage 1: Gold's Rise - The Real Crash Begins
I want to start where the real story begins, with gold. For thousands of years, gold was money. It wasn't some alternative asset or hedge; it was the foundation of the entire financial system. Currencies were simply representations of the gold they could be redeemed for. The value of oil, land, goods, and services was measured by how much gold they were worth. That all changed in the early 1970s, when the United States decided it could no longer redeem dollars for gold. Overnight, the global monetary anchor was gone, and paper money was set free.
But here's the part most people miss: just because we stopped measuring money in gold doesn't mean gold stopped measuring money. Everything is still priced in gold, maybe not directly, but beneath the surface. It's why I say when gold rises, it's not gold going up, it's everything else going down.
You can see this most clearly in the story of oil. After the gold standard ended, oil-producing nations, especially Saudi Arabia, realized that the dollars they were receiving for their oil were buying them less and less real value. They weren't just getting fewer goods; they were getting far less gold. They weren't thinking in dollars. They were thinking in gold. And what they saw was that the same barrel of oil was fetching a shrinking amount of real money.
This is what most people miss about oil pricing: oil isn't really priced in dollars. It's priced in gold, because oil powers the world and gold is money. Dollars are just the medium that sits between the two. Every time the gold price rises sharply, oil's real purchasing power collapses. If gold doubles, oil is suddenly worth half as much in real terms, even if the dollar price hasn't changed. That's the hidden truth beneath every inflation cycle and every commodity boom.
And this is where Stage 1 of a major crash always starts. Gold begins to rise, not because the world suddenly loves gold, but because the market is signaling that everything else is overvalued when measured in real money. Stocks, real estate, bonds, even oil, they're all shrinking relative to gold.
Let's look at what actually happened during the biggest market collapses of the last few decades, comparing gold and stocks from their peaks before the crash to their lowest points during the panic:
脗路 2000-2002 (Dot-Com Bust): S&P 500 crashed about -49%, while gold rose roughly +12%. Stock investors were cut in half, while gold holders gained purchasing power.
脗路 2008-2009 (Global Financial Crisis): S&P 500 collapsed about -56.8%, while gold's worst drawdown was about -31% before skyrocketing to new highs. Gold fell roughly half as much as stocks and recovered dramatically faster.
脗路 2020 (COVID Crash): S&P 500 dropped around -34%, while gold fell only -15% before blasting through to record highs within five months.
The message in that data is clear: gold doesn't crash like stocks do, and often, it doesn't crash at all. Even in the worst panics, gold either rises or falls far less than equities, and it almost always recovers faster. If you measure your wealth in real terms, gold consistently preserves far more purchasing power than paper assets.
This is why I say the real crash starts here. When gold starts moving, the repricing has already begun. Everything else is being marked down in real money terms, and most people don't even realize it's happening yet.
Stage 2: Bonds Surge - Safety Becomes the Priority
Once gold starts flashing the warning sign, the second domino to fall is the bond market. This is when fear stops being subtle and becomes visible. Investors who ignored gold's message rush into government bonds, not because they believe in them, but because they believe everything else is about to get worse.
A bond rally isn't optimism, it's a vote of no confidence. When bond prices surge and yields collapse, that's the market screaming that growth is slowing, inflation is peaking, and risk assets are about to get hit.
When fear creeps in, capital doesn't disappear, it runs. And the first place it runs after gold is into bonds. Pension funds, insurance companies, hedge funds, and even retail investors sell equities and move into long-duration Treasuries, chasing safety and liquidity. The result is yields plunging, often well before central banks make a single policy move.
We've seen this play out over and over: - 2000-2002 (Dot-Com Bust): 10-year Treasury yields collapsed from around 6.5% to under 4%. - 2008-2009 (GFC): Yields plunged from roughly 5.3% to ~2.1% as capital fled stocks. Long-term Treasury ETFs like TLT surged more than 30% during the worst equity collapse in generations. - 2020 (COVID Crash): The 10-year yield fell from about 1.9% to just 0.5%, its lowest level in history, even before the Federal Reserve's most aggressive easing began.
This isn't optimism, it's triage. It's the market abandoning risk and retreating to safety. Bonds are where capital hides while it figures out its next move.
This stage is also where liquidity stress builds. As bond yields collapse, they're telling you something deeper: credit demand is drying up, growth expectations are deteriorating, and risk appetites are evaporating. It's the financial system pulling its hand away from the stove before it gets burned.
But this rotation is never the end of the story, it's the bridge to what comes next. Once yields are near zero and bonds are overbought, there's only one place left for capital to run: cash. And that transition, from fear to outright panic, is what triggers the final stage of a crash.
Stage 3: Cash Strengthens - The Final Panic Phase
If gold is the warning siren and bonds are the fire alarm, then cash, specifically U.S. dollars, is where everyone runs when the chaos is undeniable. In a global crisis, the U.S. dollar isn't just another currency, it's the world's reserve currency and a symbol of stability backed by the mightiest economy on earth. When everything else is falling apart, investors don't flock to pesos or rupees, they flock to dollars.
From bonds to the dollar: the capital rotation
By the time we reach this stage, bond yields are already near zero and government debt is expensive. There's nowhere left to hide. Forced liquidations accelerate. Margin calls cascade. Corporations and funds start hoarding cash simply to survive. And global investors, from sovereign wealth funds to central banks, rush into U.S. dollars because they trust it more than anything else.
This surge into dollars is not a sign that the dollar is "winning." It's a sign that everything else is losing purchasing power faster. The dollar becomes the safest harbor not because it is flawless, but because it is the least dangerous ship in a violent storm.
Equities finally crack, and it's brutal
This is when the final domino falls. Stocks, which often hold up longer than people expect, finally implode. Investors who ignored the gold signal in Stage 1 and the bond signal in Stage 2 are now forced sellers.
脗路 In 1929, the Dow didn't reclaim its peak until 1954, a 25-year recovery. The S&P Composite index plunged more than 80% from its high.
脗路 In the dot-com collapse (2000-2002), the Nasdaq lost about 77% and took 15 years to recover.
脗路 In 2008, the S&P 500 fell roughly 57%, erasing over a decade of gains in less than two years.
These collapses wipe out wealth on a generational scale. The deeper the bubble, the deeper and longer the bust.
One of the biggest reasons I believe we're heading toward a potential 80% crash is valuation. Forward P/E ratios today are among the highest in history. And as Howard Marks explains brilliantly, there's a clear historical relationship between valuations and future returns: the higher the starting point, the lower, and often negative, the returns over the next decade.
Wall Street loves to repeat the story that the S&P 500 "averages 8-12% per year." But the truth is it almost never delivers in that range. The index swings violently, huge gains in boom years and catastrophic losses in busts. The so-called "average" is a mathematical illusion hiding the reality of cycles.
People consistently underestimate how long recoveries from valuation-driven collapses take. The 1930s bear market required 25 years to return to previous highs. The dot-com bust took 15 years. Even 2008, with record central bank intervention, wiped out more than a decade of gains. If the next collapse is worse, and I believe it could be, we might not just be talking about years. We could be talking about decades.
The deeper the excesses, the more violent the correction. And today, those excesses are everywhere.
The Gold-to-S&P Ratio - A Hidden Warning Signal
There's one chart almost nobody talks about, yet it's one of the most important in understanding where we are in this cycle: the gold-to-S&P 500 ratio. It measures how many units of the S&P 500 index one ounce of gold can buy, and it's one of the clearest ways to see how expensive stocks are relative to real money.
When this ratio is low, stocks are expensive and gold is cheap. When the ratio rises, it means either stocks are crashing, gold is rising, or both. And throughout history, that ratio doesn't just revert back to the mean, it often overshoots far above it as the pendulum swings back in gold's favor.
We've seen this again and again: - 2000 (Dot-Com Bust): The gold-to-S&P ratio more than tripled in the years following the peak. - 2008 (Global Financial Crisis): The ratio nearly doubled by 2011 as gold outperformed dramatically. - 2020 (COVID Crash): The ratio jumped about 60% in just months as capital rotated aggressively into gold.
Right now, that ratio remains near historic lows. That means stocks are still extremely overvalued relative to gold, and gold has an enormous amount of catch-up to do just to reach historical averages. If history repeats, the ratio will have to rise significantly. And if panic drives it beyond the mean, as it often does, gold could dramatically overshoot and dominate performance for a decade or more.
This isn't a short-term story. In my view, the coming gold bull market could last 10 to 20 years. It's not a trade, it's a structural shift. We've seen this type of long cycle before. Gold's run in the 1970s lasted almost a decade. Its surge from the early 2000s into the 2010s lasted well over a decade. Every time the paper system overextends, the reversion lasts years, not months.
And we are more overextended now than at any time in modern history.
Economic Warning Signs Are Already Flashing
If all of this sounds theoretical, take a step back and look at what's happening in real time. The early warning lights are already flashing, the same ones that lit up before every major market collapse of the past century. Most investors choose to ignore them until it's too late.
Here's what I'm watching:
脗路 Oil prices are collapsing. Oil is the heartbeat of global economic activity. When oil demand falls sharply, it's not just about energy, it's about slowing growth, shrinking production, and weakening trade. Historically, major drops in oil prices have preceded or coincided with recessions and market crashes. If oil's real price (measured in gold) is falling, it's a sign the system is contracting in real terms.
脗路 PMI and ISM are signaling contraction. Both the Manufacturing PMI and the ISM Service Index have gone below 50, the critical line that separates growth from contraction. Every single recession in modern U.S. history has been preceded by this breakdown.
脗路 Consumer sentiment is collapsing. Consumer spending drives roughly two-thirds of the U.S. economy. When sentiment crashes, spending follows, and that has a domino effect on earnings, employment, and growth. Current levels are as bad as or worse than what we saw before the 2008 crisis.
脗路 Interest rates are rolling over. Bond yields peaking and starting to fall isn't a sign of relief, it's a sign the market expects weaker growth and potential deflation. This is exactly what we saw in the months leading up to the 2000 and 2008 crashes.
脗路 Gold is outperforming almost everything else. This isn't random. It's the first stage of the sequence I've laid out, gold signaling that real money is being revalued upward as paper assets lose ground.
脗路 Defaults and bankruptcies are rising. Consumer delinquencies are climbing, corporate defaults are increasing, and bankruptcy filings are accelerating. These are classic late-cycle indicators, the financial system starts to buckle from the bottom up before the real panic begins.
All of these signals point in the same direction. They're not isolated data points. They're pieces of a puzzle, and when you put them together, they form the same picture we saw in 2000, 2008, and 2020. Only this time, the stakes are higher.
Why This Crash Could Be Worse Than Any Before
I believe this time could be different, and worse, not because history has stopped repeating, but because the underlying system is more fragile than it's ever been.
Global debt is at record highs. Governments, corporations, and households alike are drowning in obligations that can only be sustained in a world of constant growth and low rates. Central banks are trapped: if they raise rates too far, they risk triggering mass defaults and systemic collapse; if they cut them too soon, they risk igniting inflation and destroying confidence in fiat money. They are boxed in on all sides.
Leverage is everywhere. Speculation is rampant. Financial engineering has replaced productivity as the driver of returns. And valuations, across stocks, bonds, and real estate, are stretched far beyond what economic fundamentals can support. Every metric that has ever mattered is screaming the same thing: this system is more brittle and overextended than at any point in modern history.
In past crashes, policymakers still had room to maneuver. They could slash rates, inject liquidity, and stabilize the system. Today, that room is gone. The margin for error has evaporated. The next major reset will occur in a world with fewer safety nets, higher stakes, and far more debt than ever before.
That's why I believe the next crash could be deeper, longer, and more transformative than anything we've experienced. If the cycle fully resets, and I think it will, the effects won't just be financial. They will be structural. The global economy, the role of currencies, the balance between hard assets and paper promises, all of it could change.
Final Thoughts: A Warning, Not a Guarantee
I'm not writing any of this to scare you. I'm writing it because I believe most people are walking toward a cliff blindfolded, repeating slogans about "8% returns" and "stocks always go up" while ignoring the data that history has put right in front of them.
I could be wrong. I hope I am. But the evidence is overwhelming: gold is signaling danger, bonds are confirming it, cash will soon follow, and stocks are standing on a trapdoor. The same sequence that has preceded every major market collapse is unfolding again, right now.
I'm David Merkur, CEO of Gold Silver Mart. I've spent years studying these cycles and trying to understand how wealth behaves when paper promises break down. And based on everything I've learned, I believe an 80% stock market crash is not just possible, it's likely.
I'm not here to tell you what to do. My goal is to give you something to think about. And if even part of what I'm saying could be true, then it's worth asking yourself how exposed you are, and whether you should speak with someone who understands how to protect against that risk.
What you choose to do with that is entirely up to you. But ignoring it would be a choice, too, and in my experience, that's the most dangerous choice of all.
And I'll leave you with one final thought: I believe we are now entering Stage 2 of this cycle. Bond prices are rising, yields have been trending lower for the past month or two, and capital is beginning to seek safety. The danger is that there are no clear signals for when we'll transition into Stage 3, when the dollar surge and equity collapse hit full force. That uncertainty is exactly why I think it's worth paying attention, and if there's even a chance I'm right, preparing before that final stage arrives could make all the difference.
About the Author
I'm an entrepreneur and investor with ownership in multiple companies across different sectors. I founded and operate several ventures that reflect my passion for business, finance, and innovation:
脗路 Canada Capital - a business financing platform that helps Canadian companies access working capital, term loans, and lines of credit.
脗路 Appliance Doc- one of Canada's fastest-growing appliance repair services, focused on reliability, fair pricing, and customer trust.
脗路 Gold Silver Mart - a precious metals dealer providing gold and silver bullion, insights, and analysis on global markets.
脗路 TheTreeOfLifeBook - a luxury coffee-table book brand designed to celebrate history, faith, and art through stunning print collections.
脗路 USAmericaCapital - a U.S.-based funding firm focused on connecting entrepreneurs with growth capital and strategic financial solutions.
And many more ventures in development. My focus is on building, investing, and scaling companies that create real value. Whether it's in finance, metals, real estate, or consumer services, my mission is simple: to understand cycles, take calculated risks, and help others see opportunity where most people only see uncertainty.
