The US will add roughly $30 trillion to the debt over the next decade, reaching about $67 trillion.

Pento expects a dovish Treasury/Fed appointee next year to cut the Fed funds rate from the current 4.25-4.5% to around 3%, pushing the two-year note toward ~3.5%, leaving some room to profit in shorter-duration bonds.

Cutting short-term interest rates into $2 trillion-and-rising deficits while inflation has been above target for 50 straight months—combined with foreigners no longer recycling trade surpluses into US bonds—leaves only gamblers and meme-stock buyers funding the market, and risks a long-end bond revolt that the Fed cannot fix without printing even more money.

A weak economy may briefly rally the long end of the bond market (prices up, yields down), but this will be truncated because once the Fed cuts to 1% and resumes QE and ZIRP, inflation will move well into the double digits and long-end yields will go much higher.

The Warren Buffett indicator (total market cap of equities to GDP) is now ~209%, far above the 140% reached before the NASDAQ lost 80% and the S&P lost 50%, and far above the 104% at the start of the Global Financial Crisis—placing valuations in 'the thermosphere.'

The argument that the market is 'only' at 20x earnings once you strip out tech stocks is self-defeating, because removing everything in a bubble still leaves rich 20x valuations, meaning the broad market is in a bubble; AI is real and a productivity boost, but like the internet in 2000 that does not prevent a 40-50% decline.

By the immutable law of reversion to the mean, the stock market must fall by roughly 50% to reach fair value; either the market crashes or it goes nowhere for a decade while GDP and incomes catch up, but the current gap between market and GDP cannot persist.

Once inflation is no longer treated as the pernicious issue, there is political logic to simply raising the inflation target—if 2% is the goal, why not 3% or 5%, since higher is 'better'—a sardonic warning about the erosion of monetary discipline.

The average monthly jobs revision under the Trump administration in 2025 has been 77,000 jobs reduced, and the BLS systematically overstates job growth and revises down later because its birth-death model is broken—not because of any political conspiracy against Republicans.

Gold is uniquely valuable because it cannot be created, is increasingly difficult to mine, is virtually indestructible, malleable and tangible; platinum is even rarer and more durable, and hard assets generally will 'explode' in coming years as the US lacks the desire or ability to balance budgets or maintain positive real interest rates.

If the Fed cuts rates next year and the long end of the bond market revolts and spikes—as it did in 2024 when 100bp of cuts failed to lower long yields—it would be devastating because mortgage debt, auto loans, student loans, and corporate bonds are all priced off the long end, leaving the Fed no good options other than yet more money printing (operation twist / balance sheet to $20T).

GDP growth has only two inputs—productivity growth and labor force growth—so deportations, border closures, and a shrinking labor force (with continuing jobless claims at their highest since end-2021) directly cut potential growth roughly in half.

Pento has been dead wrong on the price of cryptocurrencies and tells listeners to 'do the opposite' of his crypto calls, viewing crypto as merely a glorified passcode—numbers and letters—with an unlimited number of coins and blockchains that can be created.

Cryptocurrencies are rising primarily because the president has a large personal investment in them and is now promoting their inclusion in retirement plans.

The August 2024 BLS revision removed roughly 800,000 jobs, showing the agency repeatedly overstates job growth before revealing the truth later.

Market cap of equities is now over twice the level of GDP, something that has only happened once before (post-COVID), versus a historical average around 100%; this can only be explained by decades of falsified interest rates that have been negative in real terms for most of the past 20 years.

Record quarterly corporate earnings are misleading because they are pro-forma and inflated by buybacks; on a NIPA basis Q1 earnings were actually negative.

Tariffs function as a large tax increase paid not by foreign exporters but by the importing company and ultimately the consumer; the fact that tariff revenue is flowing to the government proves exporters are not absorbing the cost.

There are three concurrent epic bubbles—an equity bubble (the most overvalued and concentrated in history), a credit bubble, and a real estate bubble—and all three will pop with devastating effect; the only uncertainty is timing.

Cisco Systems in 1999 was a real company building real technology (fiber optic cable, switches, routers) yet still dropped 80% between 2001 and 2003, illustrating that a technology being genuine does not prevent the stock from collapsing.