Gold: Timeless Chaperone to Openly Drunk Currencies

By Egon von Greyerz

Founder and Chairman

May 6, 2022

In this recent “Wiggins Session” with Consilience Finance’s Addison Wiggins, Matterhorn Asset Management principal Matthew Piepenburg takes a broad look at rapidly changing markets, geopolitics, currencies, cryptos, gold prices and the disorderly path toward a financial “re-set.”

Matthew’s core belief is that consistently rising, post-2008 global debt levels (debacles) have placed the world’s financial system in general, and the world reserve currency in particular, at an historical tipping point. As western sanctions lead directly toward increasing de-dollarization, the sanction-shift of February 2022 is changing systems as rapidly as the dollar-shift of August 1971, when Nixon closed the gold-window. In short: Great systemic change (and pain) is not only coming, it’s already here.

Without a gold “chaperone,” currencies have been expanded and debased by delusional policy makers who convinced the world for over 50 years that nations can solve a debt problem with more debt, and then pay that debt with money created out thin air. Such lies win near-term elections but kill long-term economies.

Although openly disingenuous and unaccountable policy makers will blame today’s 40-year inflationary highs, tanking bond markets, falling equity levels and openly failing currencies on COVID or the war in Ukraine, the facts make it clear that these very same policy makers are entirely responsible for the current economic crisis, whose origins and trends openly pre-date preventable Putin’s war or Wuhan’s mismanaged virus.

Looking ahead, Matthew discusses the ramifications which de-dollarization, declining faith in the USD and crippling inflation will have on currency markets, risk assets and gold pricing. Toward this end, he touches upon crypto issues, the trend toward central bank digital “money” and potential (partial) gold linkage to currencies in an openly changing (deteriorating) global financial system.