Doug Casey Has Warned About Debt for Years. Now He’s Warning About Oil.

The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve is now at its lowest level since 1982, and it’s still being drawn down at roughly a million barrels a day to offset disruptions from the ongoing conflict with Iran. Doug Casey, the veteran contrarian investor behind International Man, argues the reserve’s very existence gave Washington the confidence to escalate in the first place — and that its depletion, with its rated capacity now around 43% full, leaves a thinner buffer if the situation worsens before the reserve could ever be meaningfully refilled.

Casey’s more specific point is about where the actual bottleneck sits. Raw crude isn’t the constraint — it’s refining capacity, and the shipping routes that get oil there. Considerable Middle East refining capacity has already been damaged, the Houthis are keeping the Bab el-Mandeb corridor effectively closed, and Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries are compounding the squeeze from an entirely separate direction. That combination, in his view, is what could turn a regional conflict into a broader energy shock — regardless of how much crude technically remains in the ground.

For investors, Casey’s case centers on producers outside the conflict zone and on mining companies more broadly — sectors he sees as undervalued and positioned to benefit if further currency creation is needed to keep debt-heavy balance sheets serviced through an economic slowdown. He’s notably wary of government bonds, arguing they haven’t reliably been the safe harbor investors assume during this kind of stress. Whether or not his more dramatic scenarios play out, the underlying signal is a familiar one: geopolitical shocks are, by definition, impossible to time. It’s exactly the kind of environment a diversified, long-term plan is built to absorb rather than react to.