Grant Williams & Egon von Greyerz discuss the COMING PARADIGM SHIFT IN GOLD

By Egon von Greyerz

Founder and Chairman

December 26, 2024

This 32-minute discussion between Grant Williams and me covers my 55-year professional journey from banking in Switzerland, building and running a major UK FTSE 100 company (DIXONS), and setting up a major business in wealth preservation based on physical gold. 

I explained to Grant how I learned to manage risk early in my UK corporate career. In the 1973-1974 global oil crisis, the coal miners’ strike in the UK and the stock market crashed around the world. There was only electricity 3 days a week in our Dixons shops, and the rest of the time, we sold televisions and other electrical goods in candlelight. 

As a consumer durable retailer, Dixons’ shares fell by 93%. However, the company was very well managed and not highly leveraged, so although investors deserted our shares, the company was always financially strong. So, that was my first encounter with managing financial risk in periods of crisis.

Having been part of building Dixons into a major company, I set up my own investment company in the 1990s. 

Having followed the gold market closely since the early 1970s, watching gold going from $35 in 1971 to $850 in 1980 and then back to $250 in 1999, I knew that physical gold would be the foundation of my future wealth preservation activities. So when gold stabilised around $300 in early 2002, we invested major amounts at that level. 

A few years later, many investors asked us for help investing in and storing physical property safely. So, in 2005, we opened  Matterhorn Asset Management / GoldSwitzerland for outside investors. In early 2024, we changed the name to VON GREYERZ, and today, we are probably the biggest global company, assisting HNWIs wishing to preserve wealth through direct ownership of physical gold. 

In the interview, I discuss with Grant that gold is nature’s money and, therefore, the only money that has ever survived in its original form. This 5,000-year record is unlikely to be broken by any new form of money, whether CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) or electronic money like Bitcoin. 

Throughout my golden journey, many in the gold industry have been supportive of our passion for helping people preserve wealth through physical gold. The late Jim Sinclair – Mr Gold – was a great friend, and so was Eric King of King World News. There are many others, like James Turk, Eric Sprott and John Embry, to mention but a few. 

Grant and I discuss how gold was unloved and undervalued in 2002 at $300, but even today, at $2,600, it is massively undervalued in relation to the current and coming debt explosion. 

I explain to Grant why gold is going to go up by multiples.  But as we both stress, gold is actually not going up, but the value of fiat money is down, as it has for millennia. 

We also discuss the fact that all the gold in the world ever produced is valued at $17 trillion, less than the top 10 US companies, and that total global central bank gold holdings are just over $3 trillion, which is the current value of Microsoft. 

Just think about that fact: all the global gold holdings of central banks, which back all the paper money in the world,  are valued at the same level as Microsoft. THIS IS OBVIOUSLY ABSURD.  

So is the fact that only 0.5% of global financial assets are in gold. 

Grant and I discuss why this will change, leading to gold going up by multiples. 

At the same time, I make it clear that I am no longer interested in forecasting time and price. Instead, I focus on RISK and DIRECTION.

There is a lot more valuable information in this discussion between Grant and myself. 

I would recommend it to anyone who hasn’t focused on wealth preservation until now. Moreover, this is not just a strongly recommended watch, but it could be an epiphany.