Chris Vermeulen, chief market strategist at The Technical Traders, argues markets are likely in a final euphoric blow-off phase with roughly 7.5% upside to the S&P 500’s first Fibonacci target and up to 20% total upside potentially playing out over the next 2-3 months, driven by short covering, FOMO, and a possible parabolic move in semiconductors like SMH and Nvidia. He warns this melt-up sets up a 2008-style reset where the S&P 500 could crash 44-54%, with private credit contagion from Blackstone, BlackRock, and Blue Owl redemption freezes likely triggering banking system stress, and he’s currently 70% in cash after trimming 30% of his portfolio. On metals, he sees gold targeting $8,000 (aligning with Wells Fargo’s 2027 forecast) but only after it either breaks out cleanly or first corrects to the critical $3,400-3,500 support zone, while silver faces a binary setup between a drop to $40 or a moonshot to $166-175, and he prefers physical metals over miners since miners are “stuck in the stock market.”
Near-term melt-up with Fibonacci targets: Vermeulen uses the Fibonacci extension tool to identify roughly 7.5% upside to the S&P 500’s first target (618 golden ratio) and around 19-20% to the 100% measured move, with the NASDAQ showing slightly more potential, and he flags that SpaceX, OpenAI, and other mega-IPOs rushing to market simultaneously historically precedes major corrections — exactly as happened before past economic resets.
Private credit as the 2008-style contagion trigger: He warns the credit market “is not a healthy market” and will create contagion, pointing to BlackRock, Blackstone, and Blue Owl limiting withdrawals and redemptions as defaults rise, and predicts the government will try to “pawn it off onto the investors” before banks get slaughtered — projecting a potential 44-54% S&P 500 crash that could take 8-16 years to recover from, matching the 2000 tech bubble and 2008 timelines.
Gold’s binary setup: $8,000 target vs. $3,500 support: Vermeulen sees gold either continuing higher to roughly $8,000 by 2027 (matching Wells Fargo’s debasement trade call) via a bull flag breakout, or first correcting to the $3,400-$3,500 breakout zone where emotional late buyers get shaken out — he sold his gold position just above $5,000 and silver at $113, is currently neutral on metals, and warns the current chart pattern mirrors 2011, which took 14 years to break to new all-time highs.
Silver’s volatile binary: $40 floor or $166-175 moonshot: He projects silver could crash to roughly $40 an ounce (after already falling about 50%) or moonshot to $166-175 and potentially blow past those targets due to silver’s emotional, momentum-driven nature, and he notes waiting for the $40 entry instead of buying now could turn a roughly 100% return into a 300% return — hence his preference for patient “train station” entries over chasing.
Dollar breakout above 100 as the reset signal: Vermeulen’s single most important chart is the US Dollar Index, which has been channeling higher since the early 2000s and is carving a rounding bottom at the 100 resistance level — a breakout would signal 14-20% dollar upside over the next year, confirm global chaos, crush precious metals, and mark the start of the major reset; he’s currently 70% in cash, trimmed 30% of his portfolio, and favors semiconductors (SMH) as the “pick-and-shovel” AI play while avoiding miners because they’re tethered to a stock market he expects to crater.
Mark Thornton, senior fellow at the Mises Institute, argues that 15-16 years of central bank intervention, cheap money, and runaway deficits have built a synthetic boom where pain has been delayed rather than removed, creating a fragile capital structure vulnerable to a black swan event — with private equity, private credit, and AI as leading candidates — likely to reveal cracks later in 2025 via his skyscraper index. He contends the 1980-2024 downtrend in interest rates is broken, predicting rising rates for a decade or more that will damage bond prices and stock valuations, while commodities and commodity stocks should outperform technology over the next 10-15 years, and he remains bullish on gold and silver as central banks no longer trust each other. Thornton blames an “Epstein class” of political elites who profit from kicking the can down the road, calls the abandonment of the gold standard under Nixon in 1971 the root cause of modern socialism, strife, and runaway spending, and insists no US politician will voluntarily return to balanced budgets because the adjustment would be too painful.
Austrian business cycle theory and fragile capital structures: Thornton argues that Fed-suppressed interest rates push credit into less creditworthy borrowers and speculative high-tech investments, creating fragility across banks, credit cards, and corporate balance sheets, and this distortion has now run roughly 15-16 years across the S&P 500 and NASDAQ without a proper cleansing recession — the 2020 COVID downturn was papered over by $5 trillion in Fed printing and another $5 trillion in Treasury borrowing.
Private credit as “sequestered capital” and potential black swan: Thornton calls the roughly $3 trillion private credit and private equity market a classic case of sequestered investments fenced off from normal market observation, comparable to mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps before 2008 or junk bonds before that, and he points to the Fed’s mid-December bond-buying program — officially framed as a “liquidity” operation rather than QE — as evidence the Fed is already quietly backstopping private equity and commercial real estate stress.
The broken interest rate downtrend and Treasury auction failures: Thornton believes the multi-decade downtrend in interest rates from 1980 to 2024 has decisively broken, meaning a decade-plus of rising rates ahead that will crush bond prices and compress stock valuations, and he notes recent Treasury auctions have been so weak the government effectively had to buy up most of the issuance itself — raising the prospect the Fed becomes a permanent monetizer like the Bank of Japan, which would push inflation higher faster than Americans are used to.
Commodities, gold, and silver as the long-term trade: Because investment capital poured into technology rather than commodities over the past 10-15 years, Thornton expects a mean-reversion where underinvested commodities, commodity stocks, and energy outperform tech for the next 10-15 years, and he has been bullish on gold and silver from the start of his podcast, citing central bank gold buying and the telling fact that central banks no longer trust other central banks.
The “Epstein class,” 1971, and no political fix coming: Thornton directly names a political elite he calls the “Epstein class” that controls politicians globally, profits from kicking the can down the road, and will never voluntarily cut spending or balance budgets — he says even Trump “didn’t turn out the way everybody had hoped,” blames Nixon’s 1971 abandonment of gold for the Vietnam War as the origin of modern socialism, strife, war, and protectionism, and argues the only path out is Americans themselves rejecting government-run-for-them, possibly catalyzed by public disgust over Trump’s involvement with Israel in the Middle East.
The speaker argues that five weeks into the US-Israeli campaign against Iran, the Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed, collapsing tanker traffic from 60-70 transits per day to near zero and triggering a global energy crisis that has knocked out 17% of Qatar’s LNG capacity for up to 5 years, vanished 50% of global polyethylene supply, and forced countries like Slovenia and South Korea into fuel rationing. Simultaneously, a hidden second war is unfolding in the bond market, where foreign central banks holding $9.4 trillion in US Treasuries — including Japan’s $1.2 trillion and the UK’s $895 billion — are dumping them to raise dollars for oil, driving yields toward the critical 4.4% threshold where servicing America’s $36 trillion debt spirals out of control. The speaker concludes America faces two doors and both are bad: stay in Iran and the bond market bleeds from oil shocks, or leave and watch the petro-yuan replace the petrodollar as Iran already runs a toll-booth system charging passage in yuan and crypto.
Hormuz closure and cascading energy collapse: Tanker traffic through the 21-mile corridor carrying 1/5 of global oil has fallen to near zero, with Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG complex suffering missile damage that removes 17% of export capacity for up to 5 years, leaving Taiwan with an 11-day LNG stockpile and forcing Slovenia into EU-first fuel rationing and South Korea into 5-day vehicle rotations and 4-day government work weeks.
The polyethylene and consumer price shock: Dow Chemical doubled polyethylene prices overnight after roughly 50% of global supply vanished with Hormuz’s closure, which matters because polyethylene touches grocery bags, water bottles, food packaging, and medical equipment — meaning Middle East energy disruption flows directly into everything consumers buy, eat, and build.
Military stalemate and the death of naval supremacy: US and Israeli interceptor stockpiles are roughly a month from exhaustion with a 5-year rebuild timeline, 13 American bases in the region are deemed uninhabitable due to 20-30 daily missile and drone attacks, and the speaker argues Iran’s cheap missiles, drones, and Russian satellite targeting have ended the 400-year-old assumption — dating to the Dutch Empire — that a superior navy controls critical waterways.
The Treasury debt spiral and the 4.4% red line: Foreign central bank Treasury holdings at the NY Fed have dropped to their lowest level since 2012 as Japan, UK, and South Korea dump bonds for dollars, and the speaker claims Trump visibly dials back military action every time the 10-year yield approaches 4.4% because that’s the threshold where interest costs on $36 trillion in debt begin spiraling uncontrollably, with March’s 2-year and 5-year auctions showing the weakest demand in years.
The petro-yuan trap and the unwinnable quagmire: Iran is already running a toll-booth system in Hormuz where Chinese and French-owned vessels pay passage in yuan and cryptocurrency vetted by the IRGC, and Deutsche Bank has flagged the Iran war as a potential catalyst for the petro-yuan replacing dollar reserve status — meaning withdrawal kills the dollar’s premium while staying bleeds the bond market, with the only stabilizing scenario being US reconquest of the strait on American terms.
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