Von Greyerz: Cool Perspective on a Heated Ukraine Crisis

By Egon von Greyerz

Founder and Chairman

February 25, 2022

Matterhorn Asset Management founder, Egon von Greyerz, sits down with Lynette Zang of ITM Trading to provide much-needed perspective to the current crisis in the Ukraine. Without taking sides, Egon offers what legacy media outlets lack, namely: A calm and broad (rather than biased and one-sided) perspective on the motives, concerns and risks from all sides (European, Russian, American and even Chinese) in the current and heating crisis. This perspective includes a far broader and more candid discussion about current and future systemic risks in the global paper currency and financial markets, all of which point directly to the need for physical gold ownership.

Always the healthy and honest skeptic, Lynette poses the hard question regarding the all-too-familiar pattern at play here. That is, she asks if the recent move from saber-rattling to actual war in the Ukraine is just another convenient pretext (like the COVID crisis) for more fiat money creation/QE/MMT—i.e., more money “printing”? Egon reminds that long before COVID made the headlines, failures in the U.S. Repo markets (September 2019) were already clear (yet media-ignored) warning signs of drying liquidity in the broader credit markets. Such liquidity failures prompted the need for extreme money printing which COVID merely accelerated and the current war in Ukraine will only continue to justify.

Of course, more money creation, whatever its open or hidden motives or excuses, is inherently inflationary and by extension inherently detrimental to increasingly debased global currencies—all of which have lost >97% of their value against gold since 1971. Lynette and Egon discuss this inflation and hyper-inflation setting –and broader currency risk–in greater detail.

In addition to discussions on the related topics of 1) demagogue risk in power vacuums heightened by financial/military crisis, 2) pension risks, 3) institutional and retail reticence to understand gold, 4) potential next moves from China and 5) the rising tide toward to CBDC, Egon takes audience questions on banking risk, precious metal price manipulations and the longer-term inevitability of gold as sound money in a world of false currencies, be they sovereign or CBDC.

In short, a great deal of relevant ground is covered in this timely discussion on a timeless asset.