Doug Casey: Throughout history, mankind has periodically gone through periods of insanity. The 30 Years' War and the witch trials of the 17th century are examples. Mass psychosis seemed to take over the whole world in the 1930s and '40s. The recent great COVID hysteria is another. What the world is going through now is equally serious.

For instance, Britain is prosecuting over 10,000 people for simply saying something that might make somebody else feel bad. Europe is simultaneously de-industrializing and turning into a police state while it learns to hate itself and imports millions of indigent people from alien cultures, races, languages, and religions. Wokeism is entrenched as a mass psychosis throughout Western Europe and North America. The U.S. launching a sneak attack during negotiations, starting an unprovoked war against a country on the other side of the world because it was using harsh language, is a sign of the times. Hopefully not the End Times. But it appears that elements of the three Abrahamic religions believe they're following orders from Jesus, Yahweh, or Allah to Immanentize the Eschaton. Whether you like it or not.

My view is that, when the world is going crazy, you want to get away from the craziness. Physically distance yourself from irrational people and unstable places.

This is a bad time to be in most stocks. Limit your exposure to fiat currencies and bonds. Avoid living in big cities.

This is a good time to keep a low profile. If I valued the opinions and likely reactions of Boobus americanus, I wouldn't write articles like this. If only because, as a fan of Homer, I'm aware of what happened to the Trojan princess Cassandra.

International Man: In an era of inflation, debt monetization, banking fragility, and growing state intervention, what assets or strategies do you believe offer the best combination of upside potential and downside protection for prudent investors?

Doug Casey: The answer to that question was fairly simple in recent years. Namely, buy gold and accumulate mining and oil stocks. But now, with gold fluctuating wildly, things have changed a bit. As I've been saying for many months, it's higher than it "should" be by historical standards. That's not to say that it won't go to $10,000 or more. The bull market isn't over by any means. The primary trend and all the fundamentals are very much in place. Scary corrections are normal.

That's particularly true of mining stocks, which have all doubled or tripled. Some have gone up 10 or 20 times. Of course, they're now riskier by virtue of that. However, it still seems to me that commodities and resource extraction businesses are the best places to be. Gold has dropped from a high of $5,500 to about $4,400 at present. A normal fluctuation, in the context of The Greater Depression and WW3. Major miners are selling for P/E ratios of from 8 to 1 to 20 to 1. That's considerably less than the average of the S&P 500. And their earnings are likely to skyrocket. Even better, the average investor or fund manager hardly knows they exist. Or if they do know, they care. The same is true for energy stocks.