GOLD: The Lifeboat Amid $300 Trillion Debt Crisis (Uncut) 05-10-2025

GOLD: The Lifeboat Amid $300 Trillion Debt Crisis, “The Dollar War is Over” | Matthew Piepenburg

The U.S. dollar is now in its Stalingrad moment or its Waterloo moment or its Gettysburg moment, where it’s not going to just end tomorrow, but the clear war is over for the dollar. It is no longer centric and the U.S. treasury is no longer centric like it was post Bretton Woods 1944 or even post 1971 Nixon. The slow decline in trust and love and faith and use in that once sacred U.S. 10-year and that once hegemonic U.S. dollar is having its Stalingrad moment.

Again, not dying, but losing the war. Gold was $750 lower per ounce than it is today. So we have to catch up with them.

Is the world burning around us? What are we not seeing? What is happening? And maybe we are seeing it by ignoring it. So lots to discuss, lots going on. But before I switch over to my guest, hit that like and subscribe button.

It helps us out tremendously and it’s a free way to support our channel. Thank you so much. Now, Matthew, it’s great to have you back on the program.

It’s good to see you. It’s always good to speak, Kai. Lots to discuss as always do.

Lots to discuss. Absolutely. Historic week as well.

Lots going on. May 8th, Germany surrendered World War II. So really historic.

Exactly 80 years ago, World War II ended. And maybe we’ll start with some geopolitics here first, Matthew. But the global deck of cards is being reshuffled as we speak.

Tariff wars, religious wars, a lot is going on. Not even to speak, I mentioned the BRICS here and what’s happening in Russia and Ukraine. So many global conflicts have been erupting over the last two, three years here.

Where is this all leading? How do you see the new world order looking like or the new world map? It’s interesting, of course. I mean, none of us need an expert or a pundit to tell us that the world feels like there’s a disturbance in the force, that things are very different and crazier by the day and the headlines change, but they’re all symptomatic of a common crisis, a debt crisis. When I was in Cape Town, we got together, we were talking about central bank policies and a group out of the Netherlands is doing a think tank project with the central banks in Europe and in the US.

And the way we were describing the future is it’s a global, it’s a new global disorder coming. And this global disorder is really not a new direction. It’s a consequence of the most common four-letter word that you and I have talked about for years, and the ramifications just keep getting worse.

And that four-letter word, of course, is debt. And the reason things are falling apart is because the debt globally, which is now reaching towards $400 trillion, but the debt at the home of the world reserve currency in the US, when you add public and government debt, when you add that to corporate and household debt, and then you add on unfunded liabilities and military expenses, it becomes abstract levels of debt. I call it the banality of debt.

And the debt is simply now at that point of unsustainability. And when the home of the world reserve currency is destabilized and desperate, and we see that desperation through the tariff policies, through the Bitcoin strategic reserve policies, through good optics like US aid, cleaning up the mess or the doge programs, and certainly these executive order after executive order out of Trump, we’re seeing a lot of activity, but it’s a lot of desperation. And the desperation and the disturbances in the force and the geopolitical disturbances, whether it’s military or trade, because we’re tearing apart partnership, long-term trade partnership relations we’ve had for decades.

All of this, Kai, just comes back to the fact that the US has its back into a wall. It’s desperate. I call it like a headless chicken, trying to come up with policies, trying to come up with excuses.

But it really comes down to this debt. You mentioned Germany at the end of the war, and Germany kind of came into that war because it was desperate. There were desperate measures in the 30s.

There were desperate policies. There was desperate inflation post Versailles. And opportunists and demagogues came in with crazy policies.

And Europe and Germany lost its mind in the 30s, and then the war came in 39 to 45. And, of course, I have a German background, German family, German veterans. It was a horrific time.

But today, of course, isn’t Dresden, Hamburg. It isn’t Rotterdam. It isn’t the Blitz.

It isn’t the Ukraine war with the Barbarossa. It isn’t the Battle of Britain. It’s not nearly as grotesque militarily yet in Europe.

But financially, geopolitically, it is very, very fractured and polarized, as the coalition government in Germany is an example, or the disaster that is in the UK, or what’s happening in other parts of Europe with these band-aid governments that don’t really represent the majority of the people. There is just desperation, and there’s panic, and there’s a lot of fluffy words and fluffy promises to hide really, really horrific and objectively, quantifiably bad math. And again, home in the world reserve currency, back in the U.S., where I’m also from, is even more desperation.

And it’s more important because the U.S. is the home of the world reserve currency in that sacred 10-year treasury, that Tier 1 asset of the BIS. All of those things are falling apart. And this isn’t gloom and doom.

This is objective fact, which we can get into. I mean, the U.S. Treasuries have lost 50% in the last five years. It’s the worst-performing asset.

And yet debt is the rotten wind beneath the wings of U.S. growth and global growth. And trust in that IOU, that U.S. Treasury, is falling, and there’s evidence of which is all around us. We can get into the details, not just long statements.

But again, this disturbance, this panic, this fracturing, this polarization, this desperation comes from the fact that the U.S. in particular, and the world in general, is spending way beyond its income, way beyond its GDP, way beyond its tax receipts. It’s inflating its way out of that debt. Whenever there’s a delta between tax receipts and GDP and current accounts, they fill that gap with artificial money, which is inflationary, which affects the man on the street.

I mean, you know, the Stammtisch discussions, the Alltagsleben, it’s absolutely real. And it’s not a gold bug case. It’s not a stock and bond bull or bear case.

It’s not a DXY up or down case. It’s not an inflation or deflation debate. It is a debt crisis, which, of course, always leads to a liquidity crisis, which always leads to a market crisis.

And as Hemingway said, you know, when you have that temporary prosperity of debasing your currency, it usually ends with a market bubble collapsing and war. We’re in a nuclear era now, so war is a far more dangerous topic. Another great German name that we can talk about on this anniversary of the 80-year since the war is Clausewitz, that, you know, war is just an extension of politics by another means.

But in a nuclear era, that is absurd. To me, war is the most grotesque of all absurdities. But to even think about it and the way we’re waging it, whether it’s direct or proxy, in a nuclear era is not only madness, but it’s not surprising, because when governments are desperate, they do look to military distraction or military means to justify increasingly desperate measures.

And the most desperate measure, again, is to try and solve a debt crisis with more debt and then pay for that debt with mouse click money. That is a generalization, but we can go into the math of it if you want. But it is absolutely real.

It is not a gold bug argument. It is a moment in history. And I was reading, I think it was Sir Glubb.

His name was Sir Galbig Glubb. I’m probably butchering the word. He was a British military man who wrote a book about the rise and fall of empires.

And he talked about these stages of decadence and these stages of decline. And in the stages of decadence, you see whether it was Rome or the modern UK, you saw the rise of this kind of decadent behavior, this frivolity and this desperation and inflation. And you saw the rise of like celebrity chefs and distraction and the military conflicts, which is kind of right that period of decadence and stupidity right before decline.

I think Europe and the U.S. is in that final stage of decadence towards decline. And again, there’s all kinds of simple and more mathematical and wonky Wall Street indicators of this. But it’s obvious, it’s augenscheinlich klar, it’s everywhere.

And yet we can’t talk about it or if we do, we’re considered anti-American or anti-West, we’re considered gloom and doomers or gold bugs. I think that’s an oversimplification. It’s getting away from the reality that debt is causing social unrest, geopolitical unrest, is causing crazy policies out of the State Department, is causing crazy policies out of the central banks.

And we see the future. The future is, to me, more currency debasement to fill the debt delta and eventually more centralization in the form of CBDC, which the IMF has projected in 2020. And they’ve telegraphed, the BIS is telegraphing it, even the Basel III Accords are telegraphing it.

We’re heading towards more centralization, more programmable, trackable money. And nothing you and I can do or say is going to change that. What we can do is be at least aware of these problems.

And again, we have to get into the wonky, boring things like the U.S. bond market and the actual facts to make this clear. But the stock market follows the credit markets and the currency markets follow the credit markets, and the precious metals markets follow the currency markets. So all is connected, all is fibbled, and all is together.

And again, in this very interesting time, in the anniversary of this horrific war in World War II and what happened to Germany, a country that I love very much, and the conversations I have with Germans today, it’s a very tense time. Of course it’s not the same as World War II. But in terms of our deficits, in terms of our debt to GDP, we are acting, our central bank policies, our debt to GDP ratios, our deficits to GDP ratios in the U.S. are the same as they were during World War II.

What’s the emergency today? You can certainly understand that during a war against fascism and a war in Europe, and the millions, the 80-plus millions who died. So you can’t compare the two. But at the same time, we’re running in the U.S. a debt level and monetary policy equivalent to where we were in World War II, adjusted for current rates and current dollar values.

And yet we’re not in World War II. We’re not fighting the fascists. We’re not in North Africa.

We’re not in Italy. We’re not in Normandy. And yet we’re spending as if we were.

So what’s the crisis? And the crisis again, Kai, is incredibly unsustainable debt. And the fault lies in the bathroom mirrors of our Congress, of our White House, and of our central banks. And so, yeah, long answer to a short question, crazy times, desperate times, debt-driven times.

Reinhart Rogoff knew this. Hemingway knew this. Schumpeter von Mises knew this.

David Hume knew this in the 1750s. Thomas Jefferson knew this. Countries die and countries decline when they get over their skis in debt, and they no longer can sustain that debt naturally.

So they have to sustain it artificially through debasing the currency and through also geopolitical means by going further and further into war to distract the masses from their own failures and criminal negligence and their own sovereign mismanagement of money and debt. It’s that simple. We should end the conversation right here.

You made excellent points there, Matthew. Now, lots to follow up on. And I’ve had the brilliant Neil Howell on the program yesterday talking about the fourth churning and what he is seeing.

And he was talking about the rise of autocrats. And we’re seeing that in the US. Trump, you can call him an autocrat probably with all the executive orders, but also in other countries as well.

She’s an autocrat. And we’re seeing that sort of in the Ukraine and Russia, even in parts of Europe, like Hungary or so, we’ve got autocrats. Is that really just a consequence of debt pressures and desperation of rise of populism here? Or is that oversimplified? You always have to start at 30,000 feet with grand statements.

And yes, maybe oversimplification, but it is nothing new. It’s nothing new under the sun in terms of historical cycles. When there’s desperate men on the street or desperate times in the invisible tax of inflation, which we lie about in every country and specifically in the US, when that invisible tax comes, you always have, you know, as I’ve said many times throughout history, without exception, ohne ausnahme, in honor to the Germans, without exception, whenever you have a debt crisis, that always leads to a financial crisis of some form and a credit crisis.

And that credit crisis is always solved by debasing the currency. So that always leads to an inflation crisis. Again, we’re going from ancient Rome to Weimar, Germany, Yugoslavia in the 90s, Castro, the 60s, anytime in history, any place on the map.

And when you have that inflation crisis, you then have that social crisis, that unrest, that soziale unruhe. And when you have social unrest, that’s always, without exception, certainly we saw that in Germany in the 30s and in Italy and in Spain and Franco and Mussolini. But again, I’m not trying to compare every politician today to Mussolini, Franco and Hitler, that’s extreme.

But whenever you have that social unrest, it is always, it is always, always followed by extreme political control and centralization from the extreme left or the extreme right. And that is without exceptions throughout history. And that’s what we’re seeing today, whether it’s the extreme left under certain regimes or the extreme right.

We’re seeing more autocracy. I’ve joked and many people have said, even America, I’ve written about this many times, this is really not a democracy. It hasn’t been a democracy for a long time.

It’s an autocracy with elections. And that’s not even about fake or real elections. It’s just about each party is basically two stirrups to the same saddle.

It’s the same policies. It’s the same bribery through what we call lobbying in the US, which is just legalized bribery. All our congressmen and senators are bought and paid for by big pharma, big media, big tech, big crypto.

That to me isn’t democracy. The way we, the DNC or the RNC picks a leader, that really isn’t democracy. I think you go to the phone book in Massachusetts and Boston, take the first 50 names and be just as good in Congress or the first hundred names is who we elect.

But again, this idea of your question about autocracy, is that too simple? No, it’s history repeating itself. It’s immediately like, because whenever you have these, these terrifically painful times on Main Street, this invisible tax inflation, the working poor, which is everywhere, especially in the US, the middle class is dying quantifiably. You need desperate solutions.

You need more powerful or more centralized leaders. And that’s what we’re seeing in Europe from Canada or certainly in Canada under Trudeau and that fiasco or Macron in France, what’s happening in Germany, all these bandaid coalitions, what you have, regardless of whether, whatever you think of the various parties they’re patching together, what you have though, is no leader in any European country, including Canada, actually has the voice or the vote of the majority of the population. So to me, that isn’t democracy.

We have some kind of facade of democracy, but we do have more autocracy and autocracy, you could say is necessary. Churchill said that democracy is awful. It’s better than everything else, but we don’t even really have democracy quantifiably, in my opinion.

And that’s whole other rabbit hole. We have this kind of facade of it, but we do have more autocratic executive orders. We do have more desperate measures because things are that desperate.

Again, I don’t think it’s an oversimplification. I think it’s just history repeating itself. And no, I’m not comparing any current politician to Adolf Hitler.

And I think every conversation gets ruined when you’re either a fascist, if you have a conservative view, or you’re a communist, if you have a liberal view, that is really unfair. But yes, we’re getting more autocratic in the sense that we’re getting more desperate. And these executive orders, Trump has had many of, they only last 90 days.

Even tariffs under Article 1, Section 8 of our US Constitution, that those duties are the home of Congress, not the home of the White House. So technically, that’s moving beyond your powers. Many would say, well, we need that today.

We need to do something. Certainly Biden was not sharp as a tack. He was asleep.

He was a comatose president for four years, some would say. And anything Trump does is better than what we had. So don’t criticize.

At least he’s trying with USAID, with DOJ, with tariffs. Again, whether they’re smart or stupid is a larger question, but at least he’s trying. I think he’s extremely dedicated, extremely serious about it.

I think he’s, you can respect the intent. I think he’s incredibly naïve about the consequences. I think Besant is, as much as I respect him over Yellen, is equally naïve if they think this is going to be short-term pain, long-term gain.

I see long-term pain and a real risk of no long-term gain. But yes, it is very autocratic. These executive orders do have to eventually be approved.

Even the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve, which is holding a rabbit hole, at some point, that executive order has to be approved by Congress and it has to be voted in. It can’t just be fiat from above. But right now we’re seeing a lot of fiat from above.

And it is, it is autocratic. And some would say we need that. But again, definitionally, I think so.

I think we’re absolutely in that place right now in the world and certainly in the US. Love or hate Trump. He’s not your typical leader.

He’s not even left or right. He’s Trump. Love him or hate him.

He’s Trump. And so he’s just trying to do what he thinks best for America. As I’ve said many times, Santa Claus or Papa Smurf, though, can’t solve the debt crisis.

And so we’re in a real pickle in the US, to put it mildly. Absolutely. Absolutely.

I love your analogies, by the way, like you use like reshuffling the chairs on the deck of the Titanic, for example. You know, it seems like, you know, the US government at least is trying to keep the Titanic afloat. You know, it’s trying to patch things up, doge tariffs, various different things to increase potentially revenue, reduce the deficit.

What do you make of those efforts? Are they just, you know, it was like, again, pointless? I can respect them. But as I’ve said, I’ve said in another analogy, that is really a Band-Aid solution to a gaping knife wound. OK, even even as much as I respect what we need to do with the corruption and the overspending USAID or the need by doge to cut two trillion off of our spending by the anniversary of our country in two years, optically and substantively, I’m all in favor of cutting two trillion spending or cutting the waste at USAID.

But relative to our military budget and relative to our entitlements and relative to our public debt, which is really thirty seven trillion, and we’re paying a trillion on more than a trillion on interest on our US treasuries every year. It’s higher than our military spending, which is about 900 billion and our unfunded liabilities. So, yes, these are wonderfully good endeavors at Doge and USAID, but they’re they’re nothing.

They’re a guppy solution to a whale of a much bigger debt problem. And the other desperate measures, like a strategic Bitcoin reserve, which is an El Salvador model of speculation to pay down debt, is a third world solution to a first world problem. That’s desperate.

And the tariffs, the tariffs themselves, it’s really not about protecting U.S. industry. It’s about forced repatriation of American labor from the east side of China. And I understand the optics of that.

I actually am all in favor of bringing the P back in the GDP in the U.S., bringing productivity, bringing labor back, bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. But that’s the real that’s the real intent, one of the one of the main intents behind these tariffs. But that’s expensive. That takes more than a couple of years.

It takes more than four years. And you can’t do that without deflation inflation cycles that are brutal to the man on the street. And that’s where the risk of, again, going back to your point, social unrest, more autocracy, more controls and more lies to replace Matt and hopefully not more military distractions to keep the man on the street from from being tricked out of this.

I’ve always said the middle class in America is the first to be drafted and the first to be shafted. Whenever there’s a military crisis, it’s always the working poor, the middle class or lower middle class who either volunteer or go to war because they have less options. So they’re the fodder.

And then when markets mean revert and crash and there’s crushing 401k and pension losses, the quote unquote R.I.A. industrial complex consensus think wealth advisors just blame on extraneous events. They’re not protecting wealth. They’re just long a Fed supported market.

And when those markets mean revert and crash, it’s the middle class and the pensioners who get shafted. And if there’s a war, it’s the middle class who get drafted. So, you know, that’s why it’s really important to talk about market risk and bond risk and precious metal support, even for the middle class, because they have to protect themselves in ways their governments won’t.

The governments won’t protect them from inflation by having a sound money policy or understanding gold better. And so you have to do that yourself. Again, that shouldn’t be a gold bug apology or gold bug book selling.

It should be common sense, because throughout history, gold has always held its value, stored its value better. It’s always been the life raft when the Titanic sinks. And as we’re seeing with the BRICS and other nations, as we’re seeing with the comics flows and the outflows of the comics, as we’re seeing with the oil trade and the slow waning of the petrodollar, as we’re seeing with repatriation of gold into the zip codes of these countries, gold is emerging as that new life raft as opposed to the U.S. Treasury, that other tier one asset, the BIS.

Gold is clearly the new direction. And now as that Titanic is sinking, the world is catching on. The U.S. dollar and U.S. Treasury isn’t what it used to be.

And I joked in South Africa, you know, when the Titanic was sinking, a lot of guys were in their tuxedos thinking they were going to go back to the aid deck and finish their brandies until they started to see the water really rising. And then it was a controlled panic to get the women and children on the lifeboats. That was very chivalrous.

And then it was all panic, every man for himself. And I think what we’re seeing now is a slow move that Titanic sinking from, OK, now there is rising water, rising debt. Things are getting bad.

Now let’s get those lifeboats, the BRICS, if the evidence is clear from the comics of the BRICS, the oil trade, even to what we just saw in the Liberation Day tariffs that gold outshined every other asset. That’s the new life raft. And now everyone’s scurrying for it.

Certainly the whales are. The bigger money is. The retail audience hasn’t figured it out yet.

It’s sad. But now there is a scurrying, every man for himself, every nation for himself. And as you and I were talking before, this is like Kissinger said, to be an enemy of America is dangerous.

To be a friend is fatal. And Germany and the EU and other countries that followed and believed in the gold standard before we welched on that in 71, or believed in trading partners with the U.S. until Trump just welched on that in April. You know, America has neither friends nor enemies, just interests like every country.

And we’re seeing that very clearly now. And so every country is now either banding together on the BRICS, who don’t necessarily trust each other clearly, but they trust gold and the net settling in gold. And the BIS has now forewarned us for years that gold is going to replace the U.S. Treasury as a tier one asset.

The IMF has told us that whenever we do this awful thing called central bank digital currency, for it to have any credibility at all, it has to have some gold coverage in it. So gold is clearly, even the Basel Reg 3s we can discuss, it’s signaling that gold is a better store of value than that infinitely worthless asset called the U.S. Treasury, which really doesn’t beat inflation and is a declining asset from an issuer that’s over its skis in debt. And it’s also weaponized that U.S. Treasury in 2022.

So the move away from the dollar isn’t a gold bug argument. It is an absolute reality. It’s happening right now in real time.

Sometimes history is harder to see when you’re in it, but it is simply obvious. And the indicators of that, again, are literally everywhere. And so, you know, that is why the world is changing.

We’re going from a monocentric U.S.-led trade, U.S.-led currency, U.S.-led Treasury or safe bond or safe haven to everyone now thinking time to find a better life raft than that U.S. Treasury. Again, not just a gloom and doom argument. The evidence is everywhere.

And so from the IMF to Basel to the Bank of International Settlements to our own Fed. And so, yeah, crazy, crazy times, running for life rafts. The gold is emerging.

It’s not replacing the dollar. There isn’t going to be a ruble world reserve currency or yuan world reserve currency. There’s just going to be, going back to my original point, a new order.

And that new order will be very disorderly for a long time. And it’s very hard. Let’s use this other analogy, since we’re talking about World War II, Stalingrad, winter of 1943.

The war was clearly over when Paulus was losing on the Eastern Front. It was a brutal war. Hundreds of thousands of German prisoners were taken.

They disappeared in the Soviet Union, never came home. And it was a waste of lives. And yet the war was clearly over in 1943.

Yet the Germans fought for two more years and millions more died. But they didn’t want to see that it was over, but it was over. And the U.S. dollar is now in its Stalingrad moment or its Waterloo moment or its Gettysburg moment, where it’s not going to just end tomorrow.

But the clear war is over for the dollar. It is no longer centric. And the U.S. treasury is no longer centric like it was post Bretton Woods, 1944, or even post 1971 Nixon.

The slow decline in trust and love and faith and use in that once sacred U.S. 10-year and that once hegemonic U.S. dollar is having its Stalingrad moment. Again, not dying, but losing the war. Germany didn’t die after May of 1945.

It was a very different Germany, and hopefully a better one. But there was a huge mess between now and then. There’s going to be a huge mess between now and sound money.

And it will last for years before we see anything remotely green shooting towards common sense, transparency, honesty about debt, honesty about censorship, honesty about free speech, and honesty about sound money. We are just not there yet. Not even close.

Oh, definitely not. Definitely not. The question is, Matthew, lots of follow-up on what you just said, of course, again, as well.

But in terms of temperature, you’re using the water levels on the Titanic, but really make it even simpler, because I can’t remember how many decks the Titanic had, right? But where are we? Last we spoke, I mentioned in the intro, gold was $750 lower. Where are we headed? What’s the water temperature right now? If 100 was the max you could get, boiling point is 100. Where are we? Look, I mean, we’re at 85 degrees, and the evidence is clear that we’re trapped.

Again, look at two simple examples of how trapped we are, that there is no easy way out, that there’s no solution. There’s no easy solution. Powell’s War on Inflation, which he clearly lost.

Again, not even getting into how we measure inflation is an open lie in the US. The CPI scale is an open lie. We’re really at about 13%, using the same scale that Volcker used in the 1980s.

So US inflation is much higher than it was. Powell could not beat inflation. He tried in 22 and 23 to raise rates to fight inflation, and all he did was create a banking crisis and a market crisis, because when he raised rates, the bond market tanked.

When the bond market tanked, bond yields went up. And since bond yields are the cost of debt, we hit what was called fiscal dominance, that by trying to fight inflation by raising rates, he actually made Uncle Sam’s bar tab more expensive. So he had to pivot to lower rates.

He couldn’t even win the war on inflation. That’s how out of ammunition the Fed really is. It’s completely broken.

When Trump announced Liberation Day on April 2nd, what no one talked about, what the headlines didn’t discuss, just like Powell was trapped by debt in 2022 and 2023 in the failed war against inflation, the lie, the absolute lie that was transitory and fixable, it isn’t. Well, when Trump announced Liberation Day, what didn’t make the headlines, when he announced all these harsh tariffs and he changed his mind within hours, there was a reversal of that. In the meantime, the markets lost $10 trillion in market cap just on the announcement, and then got $4 trillion back when Trump kind of became more dovish.

But the real reason Trump couldn’t really push those tariffs wasn’t the art of the deal or pushing really hard and then pulling back. The reason Trump had to pull back, although there’s still 10% tariffs, and China certainly got hit even harder, but the reason Trump quote-unquote pulled back wasn’t because of the art of the deal or a negotiation tactic or strong army and carry a big stick, talk softly. The reason Trump pulled back is what no one saw, is the next day after Liberation Day at the Treasury auctions, no one showed up.

It was buying U.S. Treasuries, that one sacred cow, that one essential safe haven when markets are volatile. In fact, the U.S. Treasuries went down in price and yields went up on Liberation Day. Gold did not go down very far.

In fact, it went up. In other words, what was supposed to happen didn’t happen. And why Trump and Bassett had to pivot and be a little more dovish on the tariffs, at least for 90 days, is because there was no one showing up at the Treasury auctions, no one buying U.S. Treasuries.

In fact, there was a dumping of U.S. Treasuries during that April crisis, that peak moment of volatility. And again, so what I’m saying is just like Powell couldn’t fight inflation because his bond market wouldn’t let him, Trump can’t really exercise or prosecute a trade war without creating tremendous volatility in the bond market, because the bond market is everything and no one wants to talk about it, but the bond market is everything. And yields started to spike.

And when Uncle Sam sees rising yields, that makes it impossible for him to pay his own bar tab. So the Fed and the White House have to keep those yields down. And since no one’s buying them naturally and since GDP isn’t high enough and tax receipts can’t pay for them, that just means at some point we’re going to have to print more money.

I mean, I think, what was it, Bernanke printed in four years. What was the number? I mean, it was like, you know, Bernanke, I think it was in four years, two and a half trillion, and then Powell in 18 months, five trillion. And now the Congressional Budget Office is thinking for us to keep yields control, we’re probably looking at 10 trillion more.

So the point is, our only solution to a debt crisis is more debt paid for with literally synthetic money created out of nowhere, which is highly inflationary. And so if whether we’re trying to fight a war on inflation or puff our chests with a tariff war, every time we try to do anything disruptive, it sends the bond markets into a and yields go up. And I’ll just end with this, rising yields, so everyone knows this, are shark fins to a debt-soaked nation.

It’s shark fins because those rising yields, it’s like blood in the water and you see those shark fins coming. Uncle Sam, corporate America and the man in the street cannot afford rising yields. So we have to always pull back or give up because our debt levels are so high that anything we do to try and fix them naturally just causes yields to spike and the cost of debt to get higher.

So we’re damned if we do, damned if we don’t. That’s why I said Papa Smurf, Mother Teresa, Albert Einstein, no one’s going to solve this debt crisis overnight. And we’re finding all kinds of ways to distract ourselves from that, but that’s the bottom line.

Absolutely. The question now is how far can the White House push the envelope before the Southern debt holders start to strike back? You touched on the April 2nd, let’s call it Liberation Day fiasco in the bond market, which put a ceiling or which moved 10-year yields back to 4.3, 4.4, even higher. When does the debt come home? Meaning China owns $760 billion, Taiwan, Japan, who are starting to piss off a little bit.

I say we, but the US is starting to piss off and many others, of course. But how far can they push the envelope, Matthew? They’re running out of envelope, Kai. I mean, let’s think about that.

Trump is really, really ripping apart longstanding trade partnerships and foreigners own about 30% of current outstanding debt. Now, we could see a foreign dumping, which was once a foreign dumping of US Treasuries, which was once unthinkable. Again, this was the Tier 1 World Reserve safe haven asset, the risk-free return of the US 10-year.

I call it return-free risk based on actual honest inflation. The 10-year is useless, 10 to 30-year. So we could see this dumping, this unthinkable thing could happen.

Liberation Day, we certainly saw it. But then you have to look again at the bathroom mirror of the US Fed or the US White House, the US Congress and our deficits. After the great financial crisis in 2008, we were running deficits, annual deficits, which is, again, the delta between tax receipts and spending at about $500 billion.

Then during the COVID hysteria, the COVID nightmare, those annual deficits went to about a trillion. And this year we’re looking at annual deficits. I want to make sure I got this number about 2 trillion.

And again, I don’t want to get too wonky into the bottom mark, but there’s a thing called the term premium, which is the return or the reward you get for going long US Treasuries for the 10-year, the 20-year, the 30-year. And the 50-year average for that term premium was usually 1.5%. As of today, the term premium for going long US Treasuries is 0%. There’s no advantage to owning that one sacred 10-year, 20-year, 30-year US Treasury.

There’s literally zero return for that. And the only way to get us back to that 50-year average of 1.5% term premium would have to mean we’d have to bring the yield up to about 6%. If we brought the yield on the 10-year to 6%, that would actually force bond prices down even more, maybe 20%, 30% more, and yields go up even higher.

So the only way to get more demand for the US Treasury is to get better yield. And the only way to get better yield is to bring the prices down. And if we get better yield to get more demand, Uncle Sam can’t afford his own bar tab.

So to try and get more demand, we have to have yields up. But then if we get what we ask for, be careful what you get for because then our bar tab becomes unpayable. So again, the only solution is in this trap, damned if you don’t, damned if you don’t, is to fill that delta with mouse click money.

And then comes after that fails, bazooka money fails and the currency is reduced and inflation is undeniable regardless of how they report it. Then we get what Caterina Giorgiva, the IMF warned in 2020, and what the Basel III regs are already signalling. Then we get central bank digital currency, programmable, trackable, civil liberties gone.

And then we get into a whole brave new world of a global reset, which will come after the bazooka money fails. And that’s a whole other rabbit hole of awful. And yet even the IMF though, and the BIS is going to have to have some kind of coverage ratio on this beast, the central bank digital currency.

They said in 2020, that’s going to be physical gold. That’s why Basel III brought in physical gold as a tier one asset, made more coverage ratio for Basel, more segregated gold. That’s why the IMF telegraphed in 2022 that physical gold has to be part of the CBDC to make it credible after there’s a reset, after the deck chairs in the Titanic are sunk and they have to reshuffle something new, it will be this new CBDC, which I said five years ago is a train we can’t stop.

And that’s true. But regardless of whether you love or hate central bank digital currencies, the BIS or the IMF, which I don’t love, I’m no fan of, it’s coming. And regardless of whether you like it or not, gold is going to be emerging more and more as a central part of that.

It’s the good part of a bad idea, but it’s coming. And that’s why gold is rising in price exponentially since the last time we spoke, $750 higher. Why? Because central banks are buying it because they trust it more than U.S. Treasury and U.S. 10-year and more than the U.S. dollar.

That’s a quantifiable fact. Before we weaponized the U.S. dollar in whatever you think of Putin, whatever you think of Zelensky, that’s another rabbit hole. But when we weaponized the U.S. dollar, which Robert Triffin said not to do, which John Maynard Keynes said never to do, which Barack Obama said never to do, when we weaponized the U.S. world reserve currency and the FX reserves of a major power like Russia in 2022, central banks went from buying about 118 tons of gold a year to 290 tons today.

So central banks are saying, you know what? That U.S. Treasury, in addition to being debt soaked, is weaponized. The trust and love for that U.S. Treasury is not the same. And so there is less demand for that U.S. Treasury, a real problem for Uncle Sam and the Trump White House.

And that’s why we’re seeing all this craziness. But again, this is not a gold bug case, folks. Look at the flows.

Look at the yields. Look at the central bank buying. This is not a gold bug case.

This is history happening right now. Big watershed moments, as Neil talked about. And as you know, and as all of us who’ve studied history and math know, this is nothing new.

It’s a desperate time. And it’ll get more difficult before it gets better. And let’s just hope it’s not a military component to that nonsense that we’re already in.

But I can’t predict that. No one can. Yeah, absolutely.

Let’s let’s hope, you know, global conflicts flaring up everywhere. Russia, Ukraine still not solved. Israel, Iran, India, Pakistan is the latest one, which seems to be headed towards disaster unless cooler heads prevail there.

We got to talk international order. I want to come back to that real quick, because the World War Two brought out a lot of interesting treaties and new organizations that are seemingly being reorganized, abandoned as well. And Bretton Woods was one of them.

It was an agreement, not an organization. But the IMF was an organization that came out of that. Did you see that happening in the next two to three years? Let’s say under the trunk term.

He’s going to be in office till, what is it, 28, the end of 28. Do you see a new, like a Bretton Woods agreement, for example, that maybe favors the dollar or puts it in a different light emerge here? Well, that’s a great question. I mean, think about the as we head towards the end of that horrific war, right, World War Two.

And again, whether you’re in France, Switzerland, Germany, you go to any cemetery, certainly in France where I live or in Germany where I travel, it’s appalling, the sections for the war dead. But after that horrific war, where most of the average age was less than 20 years old, a whole generation was basically effaced. And that was just after World War, you know, two decades after World War One, which was another horrific moment in humankind.

But what we did have in 1944, Bretton Woods, and what we did have with the Marshall Plan was some great ideas. After World War Two, rather than just seek revenge on Japan or revenge on Germany and its citizens, there was this great General Marshall, brilliant man, like Eisenhower, brilliant, not like Patton or MacArthur, who were brilliant in other ways, but not necessarily astute. But you had these brilliant ideas of a gold-backed U.S. dollar leading the world as the world’s reserve currency, which came out of Bretton Woods.

And you had the Marshall Plan where we were going to try to cooperate to make the world more cooperative, certainly led by the dollar. But there was a sense of we’re in this together. We don’t want another Versailles moment where we upset Germany so much that we created space for demagoguery and desperation.

We didn’t want to repeat the mistakes of thinking only about ourselves and punishing the bad guy. We wanted to cooperate. That was the mood of the Marshall Plan.

That was the mood of the IMF. That was the intent. And that was certainly the intent of having a sound money-based world-reserve currency backed by gold.

Well, fast forward to 2025, we welched on the Bretton Woods, which didn’t even make it 30 years, from 1944 to 1971. We just welched. If you were looking for a dollar that was dreaming on gold, well, Nixon got rid of that overnight.

That was the end of constitutional money. That was the end of the Bretton Woods. And the Marshall Plan idea of cooperation and the IMF, the idea of helping other countries come back to life, if you read John Perkins, the Confessions of an Economic Hitman, all the IMF did was give usurious loans, unpayable loans, and effectively colonize developing countries from their natural resources under the name of, you know, friendly loans.

So that cooperative spirit of Marshall and the Marshall Plan and the IMF’s optics of being cooperative actually created more and more wealth inequality, more and more financial colonization of the developing economies, and more hedging money for the U.S. for a short period. It was absolutely the opposite of cooperation. And now under Trump, love him or hate him, it’s every man for himself.

It’s America first. It’s quote-unquote protectionism. Protecting what? Our industry’s been offshore to China for years.

He’s not protecting American industries. He’s forcing labor back in, which again, some can applaud. But this idea of cooperation, this idea of peaceful resolution, this idea of third party, not, you know, governmental organizations helping the world, whether it was NATO or whether it was the League of Nations before then, it always collapses because of human nature.

Every man for himself, my country first, no permanent friends, no permanent interest, just my interest. You know, no permanent friends or anything, just my interest. What Kissinger said, to be a friend, you know, is fatal to America, because America really is about America.

It always was. There was a shining star. There was a period after World War II where we were really trying to cooperate.

What we have now is a world where all of those cooperative models, all of that organization and all of the corruption at the IMF and the BIS and the World Bank and the ECB and the EU in Brussels, these bureaucrats, these fonctionaires, all of that is clearly failing because we’ve lost that cooperative John Nash, beautiful mind idea of cooperation makes the world better to it’s every man for himself on the Titanic. Now grab your own lightboats and let’s make gold part of this equation. We’re also going to centralize the currencies and digitalize them, tokenize them and basically make you a slave to our system where you have no freedom, no autonomy, everything’s programmable.

That’s what’s coming. So it’s a long answer to your way of saying those ideals that came out of World War II didn’t last very long. And what we have today is the exact opposite of those ideals.

We’re having more of a Versailles like post-America than we have a Marshall Plan. It’s very, very different now. Absolutely.

No, it’s definitely very interesting times and curious like if any currency agreements are going to be structured at some point as well. Matthew, we got to talk BRICS real quick as well. It was very loud last year because Russia was head of the BRICS committee.

Brazil now, it seems like they don’t want to stir the pot. It’s what is it, May 7th and I haven’t heard much about the BRICS. It’s all about China and that’s pretty much it.

What do you make of the BRICS right now? Are we underestimating them? Is the bow and arrow thing, are we starting to stretch it and then eventually it’ll just come out zooming? What do you make of it? Look, I said in March of 2022 when we sanctioned Russia, I wrote an article called How the West Was Lost and it wasn’t meant to be extreme. It didn’t mean the end of the dollar, the end of the reserve currency. It didn’t mean the BRICS were going to take over the world.

But I said it was an absolutely critical pivot point and that the BRICS now looking at the weaponization of US dollar and the debt levels of the US Treasury said, you know what, we’re tired of what they call seniorage, of being the dog wagged by the tail of the US Fed and the US dollar and the US Treasury and the US yields. And we’re going to just start trading among ourselves and we’re going to net sell our trades in physical gold. We’re going to come up with this Enbridge idea, which is a very strong symbol of what they’re really thinking, not a BRICS-backed currency, but a BRICS-backed trading, a gold-backed trading currency, not a gold-backed BRICS currency, but a gold-backed trading settlement currency, which is what came out last year in Kazan when Russia hosted.

To me, it’s irrelevant whether Brazil is now the new host of the new center for the BRICS. The real power in the BRICS is China and the real threat to the US is China. And the real motive behind these tariffs clearly is China.

And it’s a gamble because, you know, Trump is basically gambling. He sees the right on the wall. America’s lost its hegemony.

It’s lost its productivity. It’s losing its dollar to these BRICS. China’s leading the way.

China’s playing the long chess game. They see that. We’ve got to punish China now with these tariffs.

And we’ve got to do it now because America still has 26 percent of global GDP and China only has 17 percent, despite its bigger population. So if we’re going to strike in a financial war, let’s do it now. Because the real threat is China and the real threat is the BRICS as a team, as a group.

They are clearly moving the hockey puck away from the dollar. That is a tremendous threat to the US dollar. Just as the BRICS met last year, there were also UAE and Saudi Arabia was there talking about selling oil outside of the US dollar.

And already 20 percent of global oil is settled outside the US dollar. Again, unthinkable five years ago before we weaponized the dollar. So all these signs from the BRICS and outside the BRICS of moving away from the dollar has Trump and the US incredibly scared.

So these tariffs are a desperate attempt to try and bring China down. What you’ve got to understand is the Chinese, only 12 percent of their exports go to the USA. They obviously don’t like these tariffs, but they’re creative and they’re long seeding.

China has a lot of problems, but these tariffs aren’t going to cripple China. They’re going to hurt America more than China. And I’m not the only one who believes that.

But I’m all in favor of bringing all those jobs back from China into the US and all those companies like Apple to start manufacturing in the US and John Deere out of Mexico and back into Iowa. I’m all in favor of that. But we’re underestimating the power of the BRICS to get creative, to net settle outside of the dollar and to find new trading arrangements, which they’ll definitely do in Europe.

Germans, whether they’re selling Volkswagen, lumber or car parts or whether they’re selling chemicals, they need a buyer for that. And if China is a buyer for that, they’re going to have to make their own trade arrangements with China. They’re not going to let Volkswagen fail.

They’re not going to let chemical companies fail just because America says don’t trade with China. They need a market for their products. So we’re going to see creative new trade agreements regardless of what Trump tries to flex.

It’s a matter of survival that companies find trade arrangements. And I’ve talked to Germans. I went to school in Germany with some friends that are now executives in weird companies, whether it’s chemicals or whether it’s lumber, for God’s sakes.

That’s another leading indicator. One of my friends who runs a big company out of Liechtenstein says, you know, we’re not going to go to the US anymore to do our corporate retreats. We’re not going to have 47 hotel rooms in an American hotel because these tariffs are absurd.

And by the way, if we can’t sell our product in America as much because of these tariffs, we’re going to start selling them more in the East. Why? Because it’s a matter of survival for their company, for their employees and for their balance sheets. They’re not going to say, well, Trump told us so.

I think Trump is underestimating the creativity of the West. And they’re certainly certainly underestimating the creativity of the BRICS nations to find ways to cooperate more if America tries to push them into cooperating. Some say the world will kiss the ring of the US and Trump.

And you already saw that when he announced these tariffs. Everyone can run into America. We’re going to cooperate any way we can.

That’s debatable. I think from the conversations I’m having, whether it’s in Germany or whether it’s in Asia or whether it’s in South Americans is, look, we understand why Trump is doing this. He has to bring manufacturing back to America.

Percent has said it’s going to be expensive, short term pain, long term gain. But the BRICS and other countries are not going to simply be the kneeling to the US dollar and the US White House in the next 10 years the way they have in the last 10 years. And that doesn’t mean they’re going to win or that China is going to emerge as the only power.

Again, it’s going to a new order, a new disorder, a new set of creative and uncreative good and bad ideas to keep the US hegemony and supremacy out of the picture. And that is hard for Americans. Like it is hard for the Wehrmacht or hard for Napoleon’s army or hard for Robert E. Lee’s army to admit that they’re at Gettysburg, Stalingrad moment.

It’s hard to see that, not that you’re dying, not that the war is over, but you’re not as strong as you thought you were. It’s not the country you thought it was. We are not the America that raised the flag on Iwo Jima, that was the world’s largest creditor.

And now we’re the world’s largest debtor. And we were the world’s largest manufacturer. Now we’re the world’s largest outsourcer.

We are not the America of Clark Gable and the flag on Iwo Jima and the Marshall Plan and those iconic moments. We are a broke, debt-soaked, desperate America led by donkeys and elephants, where our soldiers are lions being led by donkeys, and we’re in wars that we shouldn’t be in. And every veteran I’ve talked to would say the same thing.

So yeah, crazy times. But the BRICs, it isn’t relevant whether it’s Brazil or Russia or South Africa or China hosting the meeting. The real BRIC is C. The BRIC in China is the real letter.

That’s the real threat. That’s the real target of these financial sanctions, what we call tariffs. And it’s to be determined.

And again, I’m not trying to be totally critical. I absolutely am appalled by the U.S. CEOs who outsource 6 million jobs overseas, where the American dream is clearly now made in China. And you also can’t blame China for wanting a non-dollar energy solution.

They don’t want to use U.S. Treasuries to buy U.S. oil and petrodollars. They’re tired of that. So you see, they both have legitimate interests and they’re not cooperating.

And so there’s going to be tension and there’s going to be more and more BRICs influence, more and more BRICs creativity. Again, it doesn’t mean the end of America. A very, very different America, a very, very different dollar.

And that’s obvious to me. Gold at $3,400, Matthew. When are we allowed to do our Schadenfreude dance? As we, as the gold investors, let’s call us gold bugs.

Yes. Okay. I get it.

The doom and gloomers. We’ve been always prophesying what is happening. At what point, and maybe you’ve heard that before, but Matthew, our clients are coming to you.

Matthew, thank you so much. You’ve been telling us about this for years. When do you get to that? When does the world get to that point? The gold community might’ve actually been right about where this is headed for the last 50 years.

Of course, stuff doesn’t unfold tomorrow. And I’m not trying to say, Hey, we told you. This is not the point, but it’s like, when do we get to feel vindicated here? Well, Kai, how can you come before the fall? Hubris comes before the fall.

You don’t want to get cocky here and say, I told you so. There’s a couple of ways to answer this. First of all, it depends on who your audience or who your clients are.

If they’re investors in gold thinking 10, 20 years out, 3,500, 2,800, 1,700, 4,200 is irrelevant to them. They don’t care because they’re thinking legacy, generational wealth, their grandkids and their kids. So yeah, it’s awesome to see gold go from 22 to 25 to 26 to 28 to 32 to 35.

If you look at the cup and handle, we get past all the fundamental reasons why gold is going to go much higher because world reserve currency is going to be debased and because all fiat money eventually gets debased to monetize debts. You get past the fundamentals, the bond yields, the bond markets, look at the technicals on a cup and handle formation, which has a 13, 14 year base. Just technically, we hit the $3,000 target.

The next technical average move on the cup and handle formation is gold at $4,000, which to me is not at all unlikely. It’s absolutely certain. Does that mean gold only goes in a straight line? Absolutely not.

It typically, once it hits that target, it can retrace on a 200 movie day average, go back and then launch again much higher. But again, for a long term investor, that’s irrelevant. Of course, it’s going to go to $4,000.

It’s going to go much higher than $4,000. I’m absolutely convinced. I remember it was at $1,600.

I said it’s going to double in the next five years. And it did. And it wasn’t because I was some guru or some technical or fundamental psychic.

It was just gold rises because paper money isn’t falling. So to your question, schadenfreude? No, it actually makes me sad because the only people really benefiting from this gold rise are the whales, the central banks, the big banks, the big buyers, the big institutional buyers, the man on the street. Those crazy stackers are still a strong minority.

And for them, I would like to see more men in the industry understand gold and have the ability to pay for it and wait it out. To your question, what am I seeing? Not schadenfreude. This is just chapter one, in my opinion, of a much larger book on the gold price.

And for most of my clients in 90 countries, our clients in 90 countries, I never get a call about the gold price. They’re buying at $32,000, they’re buying at $34,000, they’re buying at $18,000. They’re just buying.

They’re always buying when they have liquidity. Of course, some who bought at $1,200,000 or Egon who bought it at $300,000 30 years ago, 25 years ago. He’s not a gold bug.

He’s a banker. He was a guy who understood sound money. Gold has gone up 10x since he bought gold.

And he’s not yelling schadenfreude or I told you so. He’s been saying this for 25 years. And so to your point, yeah, of course, some clients who bought really low and have made so much money on the just price optionality are taking out some liquidity.

They’re saving in gold and spending in fiat to buy a house, pay for a wedding. We see that. And some are wondering, are we peak gold? Should I wait for a pullback to buy? Again, if you’re a trader and you’re looking to make money in a quarterly or monthly basis, very dangerous trade to try and time the gold market.

But that’s a very different conversation. If you’re an investor who’s looking 10, 20, 30 years out, gold at $3,500 compared to the empty money supply is cheap. And compared to where it’s getting, it’s still cheap.

So if you’re an investor, there’s no schadenfreude right now because it’s going to go much, much higher. And if you’re a trader, yeah, there is schadenfreude. People that said gold was an analog pet rock, dead asset, useless.

It’s up 25 percent. The S&P is down. The dollar is down.

Treasuries are down. And by the way, for the last 25 years, it’s outperformed the S&P. So I’m kind of tired of being called a gold bug when you understand bond and credit risk and equity risk.

It doesn’t mean gold always goes in a straight line. But of course, it’s an outperforming asset. Of course it is.

And yet it’s crickets in the media. It’s cricket on the Wall Street Journal. It’s cricket at the Fed discussions.

It’s crickets in Congress, for the most part, because you’re not supposed to understand gold. You’re not supposed to understand some money. At Harvard, at Wharton, at the business schools, the econ classes I took, no one talks about gold.

No one talked to you about the Fed when I was in grad school. But it’s because they don’t want you to know that. These are lies of omission.

They’re very deliberate. It’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s survival.

What was the biggest question when we went up the gold standard that book three days at Camp David? What’s the gold price? What’s the terrified of a rising gold price? But now they just can’t ignore it. And now that narrative no longer works. And now the BAS, the ComEx, the central banks, they’re buying gold.

It’s just that simple. Because the debt is now that unbelievably high. Now, maybe I phrased my question wrong.

It isn’t really Schadenfreude, but it’s like we’ve been telling people for years where things are headed. And it seems like that thesis is starting to play out. That’s sort of what I’m getting at.

I’m not saying it’s too late. So it’s not about, hey, told you so, and trying to indulge ourselves. But it’s really because we had dinner like two years ago, Matthew, and we all sat down and I told you my biggest fear was that we’re wrong for the longest time.

And it seems like our thesis, though, is starting to play out slowly here. That’s sort of what I’m hinting at. Fair point.

Yeah, absolutely. And it is. And again, I don’t want us or anyone to think that gold only goes in a straight line.

But if you’re an investor, absolutely, it will go much higher in the years to come than it is right now. That doesn’t mean it never goes down. But yeah, you and I, we’re all just flabbergasted.

But at some point, as we’ve been, you know, as Rick Rule said about silver, you have to be patient. There’s rewards infrequently, but extravagantly. But I remember during the 2008 crisis with the subprime mortgages and as mortgages were defaulting, the APX index was going up.

It was crazy. Like, how long can this last? You’ve got mortgages defaulting and failing en masse. And the CDO, the collateralized debt obligation that Morgan Stanley was pushing, was going up in price as the underlying asset was tanking.

And we were looking, you and I talking this for years, central bank balance sheets, the debt levels, the treasury markets, why isn’t gold ripping? And it was just that moment between trapezes where it didn’t make sense. But it actually was gradually, gradually rising. And now with the debt and the inflation and the undeniable inability to cover that debt, the unsustainability of that debt, the unsustainable.

Now it is becoming so obvious that not even those jackals that run the media or the Wall Street Journal or the mainstream kind of RIA industrial complex can hide what’s happening in the comics, what’s happening behind the scenes of the central banks, what’s happening with central bank gold demand. It’s mathematically exponential. What’s sad and what’s deliberate is how the retail investor is still not being told about this.

How you can’t go to your advisor in a major bank and get sound advice. Oh, gold is too volatile. Gold is too volatile.

It’s outperformed the S&P for 25 years. Gold is too volatile. It’s a tier one asset by the central bank of all central banks, the BIS.

Gold is too volatile. The Basel III Accords just made banks hold more of it in physical form because they know it’s far safer than US Treasuries, the former safe haven. I’m not making this up.

This is what’s happening right now. Gold is replacing the US 10-year. It’s happening right in front of our eyes.

And yeah, now the gold price is undeniable for those of us who’ve been paying attention. What’s sad though, Kai, is a lot of people that still trust their brick and mortar advisor or their consensus think advisor at bank X, Y or Z, they’re still being told to diversify into stocks and bonds when gold just broke a 10-year base on how it’s outperforming the 60-40 portfolio. I know it’s contrary to your prior guess, but this is math.

It’s not an opinion. It’s just a fact. It just is.

Now also one of my prior guests says gold finally broke the cartel, and I think he’s right on that. They couldn’t keep the genie in the bottle much longer. So that genie is out.

Matthew, what a wonderful conversation as always. I tremendously appreciate your time. Where can we send our audience? I know you don’t write a blog or a newsletter or anything, but where can people get a hold of you? Yeah, I certainly read a lot of articles, and Egon von Greyer does a lot.

We have a lot of articles and interviews like this posted on our website at vongreyers.gold or vg.gold. We still use the URL of goldswitzerland.com. And yeah, all the articles that we’re writing, all our common thoughts are on there. We have a whole section on the website that talks not just about why gold, but how to own gold. And that’s free for anyone to look at.

What jurisdictions, gold versus physical gold versus ETF gold, the risks of holding gold in a commercial bank. Again, whether you should have a Folgers can under your bed or in a legal jurisdiction, a legal firewall between you and your country. All that’s there for free.

All our articles and interviews are there. It’s a good education. It’s free, and certainly Egon was decades ahead of this curve.

And thank God that this service is available. And thank God that the information is out there. You don’t have to become a client of ours.

Our minimums are very high, but anyone can be educated on physical precious metals, and anyone can find some grams and ounces when they have the opportunity. And I know that’s hard for many people because life is expensive and times are scary. But those that have been thinking far ahead know this already, and those are trying to make sense of it need to think about it now.

Absolutely. Matthew, thank you so much for coming on. It was great to catch up.

We’ll have to do this again soon, hopefully in person again. Yeah, fantastic, Kai. My pleasure as always.

Matthew, so good to see you, everybody else. Thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Matthew Piepenburg.

I always do. Really, really great insights and love the analogies, you know, reshuffling the chairs on the deck of the Titanic. Awesome.

Love it. If you enjoyed this conversation, leave a comment, leave a like down below and subscribe to this channel. It helps us out tremendously, and it’s a free way to support us.

Thank you so much for tuning in. We’ll be back with lots, lots more. Take care out there.