Marching Toward a Liquidity Cliff

By Matthew Piepenburg

Partner

April 23, 2025

In this lengthy yet substantive/timely discussion with Alex Deluce of Gold Telegraph Conversations, VON GREYERZ partner, Matthew Piepenburg, leads viewers through the fog, confusion and volatility of recent headlines toward a simple lighthouse. 

In short, Piepenburg places tariff headlines, seismic geopolitical shifts, de-dollarization trends, extreme market volatility and recessionary reality into a simple lens: It all boils down to an unprecedented national and global debt crisis.

Or even more simply: A liquidity crisis.

Piepenburg reminds that every market crisis, without exception, boils down to a liquidity crisis. And every liquidity crisis is simply the derivative of a credit crisis, which in turn, is simply the derivative of a debt crisis. Mathematically, global and US markets are facing the greatest debt crisis in the history of capital markets, so it should come as no surprise that we are marching toward a liquidity cliff.

The evidence of this looming crisis has been hiding in plain sight for years. The repo crisis of 2019, the “Covid” crisis/market plunge of 2020, the failed “higher-for-longer” market fall in 2022, the 2023 banking crisis and now, the April volatility of 2025, all boil down to screaming warnings of drying liquidity in the face of unsustainable (and growing) debt levels.

This means only one thing ahead, namely, more bazooka (fake) money/liquidity and more falling fiat purchasing power. In such an obvious backdrop, gold goes up as paper money goes down.