In this podcast, Motley Fool host Ricky Mulvey caught up with Jan van Eck, CEO of investment management firm VanEck, for a conversation about:
- The future of Social Security, de-dollarization, and demand for gold.
- Opportunities in China, India, and Brazil.
- What falls into Jan’s “hated things” bucket.
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This podcast was recorded on May 31, 2025.
Jan van Eck: When you look at certain parts of our economy, you just have to realize that they’re going to be more and more affected by things outside the United States. If I’m right, and India is a major economy in 10 years, India’s economy and China’s economy is completely delinked to the US dollar. They don’t want to be part of the US dollar ecosystem at all. That’s all I’m saying. There’s got to be another global currency that people want to store value in, and one of those is gold.
Mary Long: I’m Mary Long, and that’s Jan van Eck. He’s a CEO of VanEck, an investment management firm focused on mutual funds, ETFs, and more. They’ve got $100 billion in assets under management. My colleague Ricky Mulvey Mulvey caught up with Jan about the multi decade trends Jan’s got his eyes on, government spending, de-dollarization, and a bit of a debate about the benefits of gold, plus what goes into Jan’s hated things bucket?
Ricky Mulvey: Jan, first question is, I think, a foolish question, and something you like to focus on is multi decade trends, not weekly or quarterly trends, and that’s something we like to think about as being long term investors, holding on to stocks and investments for a minimum of three years and hopefully, much, much longer. As you’re thinking about the markets, not even right now, but just in general, what are the multi decade trends that you’re paying close attention to that you think investors should watch?
Jan van Eck: Yeah, thank you. Our firm has been around for 70 years, and we’ve been through so many different market cycles. A lot of attention in the media and whatnot is focused on, Well, what’s happening today with interest rate cuts or tomorrow or next week or even this year. One of the things I’d like to point out is there are actually some very long term trends that should affect your portfolio thinking, and I’ll just give you a couple examples. First of all, the rise of China. A major country moves toward capitalism, it creates a whole new asset class called emerging markets. That’s something that you would want to have included in your portfolio as one example. That’s how I look at these longer term trends. Taking a multi decade view, I think we’re here in 10 years looking back, one thing that will strike us is that the US government spending has been out of control. It’s been at historic highs, never in US history, never in almost 250 years have we spent this much more money than we’re taking in in tax receipts. I think that has implications for the markets.
The second major trend that I like to look at going around the world is we have the emergence of a fourth major consumer market in the form of India. India’s growth rate’s got the population, but it’s got the pro business policies that should make it as big as Europe in 10 years, meaning when we’re sitting here in 10 years, we will be talking about the Indian economy a lot more than we do. Stocks are reflections of the value of companies, and companies are more likely to become valuable if they have a big consumer market. We’re going to go to a fourth. We have the US, we have China, we have Europe, and then we’ll add India to that. I think investors can take advantage of that now.
Ricky Mulvey: We can stay on emerging markets for a minute. You mentioned China, and that’s something that I’m going to push back on because you said that investors would have wanted to pay attention to it. I just looked up the iShares, China ETF, and going back from 2011 to today April 1st, 2011, about $53 for a share of the ETF. Today, it’s $55. There is maybe a benefit to staying within your circle of competence, and investors, there have been ups and downs with that, but those who have held on for a decade, which is well within the long term thinking here, have not been rewarded for investing in China, particularly American investors. I don’t know. I’ll let you go there. We can go more emerging [inaudible] .
Jan van Eck: No. Listen, probably the most important component besides identifying those big factors is also getting the timing right. I was talking, if you look at China from the emergence into, I would call it, a market based economy in the early 1990s, for the next 20 years, you made a lot more money than you made in the US. Now, you’re absolutely right. Politics matters. When I say the three things I look at outside the financial markets, politics, economics, and technology, are there major events in any of them? The politics in China changed dramatically about ten years ago with Xi Jinping, and absolutely, China no longer has what I call an equity culture where shareholders can make a good return and corporate profitability grow.
Ricky Mulvey: Then we can talk about India, then. I know you recently got back from a trip there, and this is a spot. I know you have a couple of ETFs focused on India, something for our listeners to be aware of. We always want to know where our biases are whenever you’re listening to any piece of media, and that includes myself as I talk about stocks I own on the show, but we also have some ETFs. I know you have different emerging markets ETFs, but give us the pitch. You got back from India, what did you see?
Jan van Eck: Well, actually, it’s easier to talk about something far away than it is sometimes when you get close up because when you actually go there, you realize how much you really don’t know. But I did confirm, I would say, my major thesis about India. Its growth rate seems sustainable, so that’s number one. Its political system, they’ve done a lot of economic reforms, like a lot of emerging markets. They have now everyone is digitized. It used to be in your typical emerging markets country, only half or less of the population even had a bank account. Now everyone’s got a Huawei phone for 100 bucks, and you’re seeing participation in the digital economy up to like 90% of a population, even in Peru, which I was in recently, as well. India has created this digitized identity system. They’ve also eliminated taxes between different provinces, so you have a true national economy.
You basically have a lot of infrastructure spending. You have all the ingredients for sustained long term economic growth. I met a lot of companies there that are profiting from it. There’s a lot of failures as well. I just think also, as an ETF firm, VanEck thinks about indices very closely, and I just don’t think international equity indices, per se, are how you should invest. I just think most things are noise, and you want to ignore them, but I do think that the emergence of India will be something. At some point, maybe in five years or 10 years, you want to kind of sell that position. I’m not saying it’s a forever position. Their returns, also, by the way, Ricky, since you’re poking me about China, match that of the United States. If you look at the Indian stock market against the US stock market over the last 10, 25 years, we’ve actually matched. I know we all feel burned by China, but India at least is different. They have a lot of companies wanting to go public. They go about 2-400 companies a year go public in India.
Ricky Mulvey: I appreciate the transparency there and also,
