Mark Spitznagel, one of Wall Street’s most prominent skeptics, is sounding the alarm once again—insisting that the recent market volatility is not the long-awaited reckoning he has been predicting for years, but rather a harbinger of something far worse.
“This is a trap,” Spitznagel told MarketWatch, dismissing the latest downturn as a mere tremor before a true financial earthquake. “I expect an 80% crash when this is over. I just don’t think this is it.”
As founder and chief investment officer of Universa Investments—a hedge fund explicitly built to profit from extreme market dislocations—Spitznagel has long warned that the U.S. financial system is dangerously overleveraged and perched atop an unsustainable bubble. His firm famously posted a 4,144% return during the market chaos of early 2020.
Last week’s steep selloff, triggered in part by former President Donald Trump’s announcement of new tariffs, saw the S&P 500 suffer its sharpest two-day decline since the COVID crash in March 2020, falling more than 10%. Monday brought further volatility, with the Dow losing over 200 points and major indexes continuing to swing wildly. Yet Spitznagel remains unfazed.
“This isn’t Armageddon,” he continued. “That time will come as the bubble bursts.”
Spitznagel’s central argument—unmoved by short-term fluctuations—is that decades of monetary intervention and runaway debt have hollowed out the foundations of the U.S. economy. While he refrains from assigning a specific timeline, he views the eventual collapse as both inevitable and potentially historic in scale—on par with or surpassing the crash of 1929.
In characteristic fashion, he also cast doubt on other market pessimists who have declared the recent correction a culmination. “All the doom and gloomers think it’s over and they have this figured out. Take it from a professional doomer: they don’t.”
For regular investors, Spitznagel offered advice that runs counter to his own apocalyptic viewpoint, however. In a 2023 Fortune interview, he recommended that long-term investors stay the course—holding broad, low-cost index funds and continuing to buy through downturns, provided they can withstand the psychological pressure.
The bottom line, in Spitznagel’s view, is not whether a major crash will come, but when—and whether investors will be positioned to endure it. For now, he says, the calamity has not yet arrived.
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