Dave Collum

Research profile

Dave Collum is a Cornell chemistry professor who also presents himself as a long-running macro/market commentator. In the supplied interviews he comes across as data-heavy, contrarian, and skeptical of consensus narratives, especially on asset pricing, geopolitics, and institutional claims. He repeatedly references valuation history, passive flows, and demographic change, and he is comfortable moving into speculative or conspiratorial terrain when discussing elite incentives, war, and social instability.

Economic vision

Collum’s recurring economic worldview is that the post-1980s asset boom was driven by a unique mix of demographics, globalization, disinflation, and passive capital flows, and that this regime is now unwinding. He sees U.S. equities as structurally overvalued by many measures, with elevated Shiller PE, price-to-sales, and similar metrics implying weak or negative long-run returns and the possibility of a very large mean reversion. He is especially skeptical of momentum stories such as AI and high-multiple IPOs, arguing that markets have become inelastic and increasingly detached from fundamentals. He thinks interventions like central-bank support, passive indexing, and government backstops can prolong distortions but not prevent a secular decline in returns. His preferred framing is not a near-term crash prediction so much as a long, painful period of stagnation or de-rating. On gold and other hard assets, he is generally constructive as a hedge against paper-market excess and institutional fragility.

Reliability notes

• Admin-validated speaker with linked X / Twitter profile.
• Preview built from 19 analyzed appearances.
• Latest tracked appearance: 2026-07-06 12:44.
• Most often seen on Commodity Culture.