The Facts and Math Are Clear: Gold’s Rise is Only Beginning

By Matthew Piepenburg

Partner

March 13, 2024

In this fact-packed, 30-minute conversation, VON GREYERZ partner, Matthew Piepenburg, joins Jesse Day of Commodity Culture to make sense of the growing list of dislocations in debt, currency and financial markets, all of which serve as longer-term tailwinds for gold.

Piepenburg begins with a blunt analysis of the broad market, drawing from his own prior experiences on Wall Street in general and within the hedge fund space in particular. Taking both sides of the S&P bull and bear case, Piepenburg concludes, with evidence, that we are in fact seeing a classic “bubble” in equities. Toward this end, he explains how bubbles rise on net-income expansions and then pop on net-income contractions. The current S&P, which is comically narrow and what he describes as little more than a veritable “tech ETF,” offers far greater risk today than in prior bubbles (2001, 2008). This is because we are now seeing an equity melt-up in the backdrop of technical recessions from Germany to China (and ignored in the US…). In short, the timing, and irony, of a Fed-driven bubble in the backdrop of record-high global debt and recessionary trends could not be worse. Piepenburg then provides certain warnings and insights for those chasing the current tops.

Naturally, the core of the conversation turns to gold matters, which equally involves currency matters. In particular, Piepenburg offers his evolving views on de-dollarization themes/realities, but does not foresee a gold-backed BRICS currency. Instead, and equally bullish for gold, he sees more and more nations trading outside of the USD and/or net-settling trades in gold. The evidence of this growing trend is now openly undeniable, and he makes a clear case of this evidence, point by point, event by event—including dramatically important changes in the USD oil trade, which he addresses in detail.

Silver, Piepenburg quotes Egon von Greyerz, is “not for widows and orphans,” but is coiled for an inevitable spring forward based on the hard math of supply constraints and radical (one-way) physical silver deliveries out of the NY and London exchanges.

The conversation further includes key insights on recessionary, currency and inflation forces, all of which foretell a mathematically inevitable rise in the gold price. Piepenburg closes by reminding listeners to not only understand why one should own gold, but as importantly, HOW one should own gold, a theme which VON GREYERZ, AG (and Egon von Greyerz himself) has understood since its inception.