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Think Smarter than the Policy Makers: Become Your Own Gold-Backed Bank

June 7, 2023

In this spritely conversation with The Market Sniper’s Francis Hunt, Matterhorn Asset Management, AG partner, Matthew Piepenburg, discusses a changing global landscape and gold’s critical role in a macro backdrop whose historical (and cyclical) end-game he describes as “increasingly consolidated and centralized.”

Hunt and Piepenburg stray from technical analysis and focus on the objectively undeniable forces of a world slowly evolving from a USD-dominated setting to a world of competing trade and currency blocks. The record dumping of USTs by central banks in 2022 joined by an equally record-breaking year of central bank gold stacking (up 156%) has obvious implications as to the declining global trust in fiat money and the rising awareness that change is not “gonna come,” it’s already here.

As the world divides East and West (as well as North and South) between the G-7 and the BRICS + alliances, Piepenburg reminds that the USD’s reserve status remains important, as does USD demand from the derivative and Eurodollar markets; nevertheless, emerging political and financial alliances suggest revolutionary changes and risks in the broader risk asset and currency markets, which Hunt and Piepenburg unpack with refreshingly plain-spoken realism. Toward this end, they touch upon everything from stocks, bonds and precious metals, to the jurisdictional and regulatory concerns regarding gold ownership. Ultimately, Piepenburg accepts an admitted bias/conviction, and argues against ETF or bank-stored gold while defending privately vaulted gold in Switzerland (and Singapore) as the premier locales in a world offering fewer easy choices.

In the final analysis, investors have to think critically and independently when it comes to preserving their wealth, which boils down to each becoming his/her own “central bank” and his/her own gold-backed sovereign. In short: If governments won’t pursue policies of sound money, individuals will need to do it themselves.

Gold Switzerland

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Matt began his finance career as a transactional attorney before launching his first hedge fund during the NASDAQ bubble of 1999-2001

Thereafter, he began investing his own and other HNW family funds into alternative investment vehicles while operating as a General Counsel, CIO and later Managing Director of a single and multi-family office. Matthew worked closely as well with Morgan Stanley’s hedge fund platform in building a multi-strat/multi-manager fund to better manage risk in a market backdrop of extreme central bank intervention/support. The conviction that precious metals provides the most reliable and longer-term protection against potential systemic risk led Matt to join VON GREYERZ.

The author of the Amazon No#1 Release, Rigged to Fail, Matt is fluent in French, German and English; he is a graduate of Brown (BA), Harvard (MA) and the University of Michigan (JD). His widely respected reports on macro conditions and the changing behaviour of risk assets are published regularly at SignalsMatter.com.