Mike Norman, anchor, HardAssetsInvestor.com (Norman): Hi everybody, and welcome back to HardAssetsInvestor.com. I’m Mike Norman, your host.

We’re here for the second part of my interview with Matt McCall, author of the book “The Next Great Bull Market.”

All right, Matt, in our last discussion, we talked about commodities; you’re bullish on commodities. Half your book is focused on that. But you also talk about emerging markets; lots of potential there, right?

Matt McCall, CEO, Penn Financial Group (McCall): Absolutely. And they really go hand-and-hand, because the demand for commodities over the next decade really is going to come from the emerging markets. Here in the U.S., demand for oil’s been pretty stagnant the last couple of years. It should pick up over the next decade.

However, the real growth’s going to come from China, Brazil, India … Russia is a big natural gas commodity play. So the BRIC, as they call it: the big four emerging markets. And then there’s the frontier markets, more like Vietnam and some of the smaller countries, such as smaller countries in Africa, that are going to have some demand as well.

So combine that with the facts we talked about earlier with commodities, and it’s just another reason that we’re in that next great bull market.

Norman: So you’re not concerned that, say, slow economic growth in the United States – the world’s largest economy – is going to impact, in a negative way, some of these emerging economies? You feel that they’re kind of breaking out on their own, right?

McCall: They are breaking out on their own. You know, the U.S. is still the leader. We’re still going to have that coupling between the U.S. and some of the emerging markets with China and Brazil. However, we’re going to see some demand coming from within those countries as the middle class grows, especially in a country such as Brazil, where you have a better chance of a middle class actually growing than you do in a country such as China. With that middle class growing, that’s going to be more demand for higher-quality foods, that’s going to be more demand for heat to heat their homes that they could not before.

So you’re going to see demand for some energy, you’re going to see demand for agriculture. And, you know, that eventually leads to a stronger stock market. And, again, it’s this ripple effect where it goes through and the demand for all commodities should increase.

Norman: And it’s almost as if in the United States, if our economy stays on the weak side, those countries have no other choice, right, but to stimulate domestically, to get their own domestic consumption up? I agree with you. I think probably that’s where the strong growth is going to come from, just because we’re sort of signaling to them that that is the path they have to go down. For example, with China now, you see the big stimulus, fiscal stimulus in China, which is designed to really raise incomes and the standard of living of their own people. So I agree with you.

McCall: Yeah. In the past, Mike, what it is, they concentrate on exports. You know, China had to rely on exports to the United States. When the United States slowed down, China slowed down a bit last year. However, they picked right back up. And they’re looking close to 10 percent growth in 2010. Well, we’re not going to see anything close to that in the United States.

So the stimulus that they did – I think over $600 billion equivalent in China – they actually spent it, No. 1; No. 2, they spent within their country on infrastructure. So when you’re building infrastructure, what do you need? You need steel, you need copper, you need these base metals. So we’re seeing a big demand from that.

And if you’ve been to China recently, all you see is the big cranes everywhere building. I was in Europe last week, all over. Even in Europe – in Spain – you see the cranes everywhere. So you don’t see that as much in the United States, but outside the U.S., there still is amazing growth. And this goes back to a point we talked about earlier: being underinvested in commodities. You talk about underinvestment, look at foreign investment.

We are so uninvested as Americans outside the U.S. Take Germany, for example, the third-largest economy. If somebody in Germany said, “You know what, I invest 90 percent in Germany,” they’d say, “You’re crazy. Why don’t you invest outside of Germany?” Well, that’s what we do here in the United States. We invest too much in our country; we need to look to the emerging markets to really diversify and for growth.