Has The Fed Lost Control: Matthew Piepenburg on 5% Yields and the Debt Trap

Is the latest 3.8% CPI print just another energy-driven inflation scare, or is the $40 trillion U.S. debt trap finally springing? Matthew Piepenburg, Partner at Von Greyerz, joins Jeremy Szafron, Senior Anchor at Kitco News, to break down the massive disconnect between Main Street reality and Wall Street fantasy.

As 30-year U.S. Treasury yields hover near 5% and real wages fall, Piepenburg explains why the bond market has taken control away from the Federal Reserve. They discuss the immediate spot price disconnect in precious metals, why physical gold is migrating East, and the "invisible tax" of inflation that is actively destroying the middle class. Finally, Piepenburg reveals the hard math behind a $20,000 gold target—arguing that gold is not in a bubble, but rather paper currency is in a terminal decline.

Recorded May 12 2026

Follow Jeremy Szafron on X: @JeremySzafron (https://twitter.com/JeremySzafron) 
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CHAPTERS 
00:00 Energy Shock Or Debt Trap
02:02 Bond Market Warning Signs
06:06 Ten Year Sets The Rules
09:08 Recession Versus Stagflation
12:08 Cantillon Effect And Inequality
14:57 Hidden QE And Data Games
18:30 End Of Dollar Privilege
22:54 COMEX Delivery Breakdown
26:13 Physical Gold Moves East
30:31 Gold vs Money Supply
34:11 Silver Deficit Debate
37:41 Main Street Inflation Reality
42:27 Fed Driven Markets
49:21 Wealth Preservation Playbook
53:11 How High Can Gold Go?
55:59 Closing Thoughts

#Gold #Silver #Inflation #MatthewPiepenburg #FederalReserve #CPI #USDebt #MacroEconomics #TreasuryYields #WealthPreservation #Investing #Finance #KitcoNews
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The videos are not intended to provide trading advice, and the views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Kitco Metals Inc. Kitco News, its anchors, producers, and reporters are not responsible in any way for the performance or actions of any sponsor, advertiser or affiliate of Kitco News. In no event will Kitco and its employees be held liable for any indirect, special, incidental, or consequential damages arising out of the use of the content in this video.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

For Kitco News in Focus with Jeremy Staffron.

SPEAKER_03 0:03

Welcome back. I'm Jeremy Stafford. Well, if you turn on the mainstream financial networks this morning, the narrative is focused on one thing, an energy shock. By taking a look, according to the Bureau of Labor statistics, the consumer price index rose 0.6 percent in April and 3.8 percent from a year earlier, the fastest annual pace we've seen since 2023. And look at that energy alone, it accounted for more than 40 percent of that monthly increase. But if you look past the gas pump, the bond market is telling a much bigger story. Look at this 30-year treasury yields are hovering around 5%. Interest rate swaps are now pricing roughly a 70 percent chance of a quarter point Fed hike rather by April of 2027 as markets reassessed policy under incoming Fed chair Kevin Warsh. The market was banking on rate cuts instead. Investors are staring at tighter policy, and for the middle class, the pressure is already visible. Real average hourly earnings just fell for the first time in over three years. So the question today is simple. Is this just another oil-driven inflation scare, or is this debt trap finally showing up in the official data? To break down, of course, what this means for your capital, we're joined by a Kitko favorite, of course, Matthew Pfeifenberg, partner at Von Greyers. Uh Matt, great to see you. Good to have you back.

SPEAKER_00 1:19

Well, it's great to be back, Jeremy. I always look forward to these conversations, and as always, there's plenty to talk about. So it's great to be here.

SPEAKER_03 1:26

I don't know how you keep up uh over there, but uh I'll tell you, it's early mornings for us over here at Kiko News. And Matt, I mean, I saw you last what? Vancouver, I think it was VRIC, end of January. Um we were talking about this. I mean, you called rising yields the shark fin warning in risk assets. And today, you know, what I just said on that intro, I mean, inflation is accelerating, 30 years near five, the markets are kind of pricing impossible Fed hikes instead of cuts. Um, are we seeing the system debt trap you warned about? Or is this still an energy-driven inflation scare the Fed can manage, as we hear everywhere else?

SPEAKER_00 2:04

I think it's energy-driven acceleration, but the destination, the direction was set long ago. And um, you know, I look at the, I mean, everyone knows I say it so many times, the bond market is the thing. I know it's boring. I know bond yields are boring. It's fascinating to see the 10-year at 4.46 and the DXY at 98 at the same time. And I think it's it's fascinating for so many reasons. I think the Fed is really losing control of the curve, and I think that's because the bond market speaks more honestly than the pundits. You know, I'm talking about the political pundits. I think, you know, there's so much that needs to be discussed here, and any topic could take hours. But I look at what no one wants to see that I really believe that the post-Breton Woods world, the rules or the order has ended. Uh, you know, there was a time post-44 when the Fed was very powerful, uh, when the dollar was powerful, when the Fed really could, like a dial control rates and control economies. I think that really began to disintegrate in in 2020. Uh, with now the government running 7% deficits to GDP, the Fed is no longer the main actor. The debt is. The US Treasury is the main actor. And the war has certainly accelerated some of these tendencies, but the sickness was there long before this latest new headache. I think one of the best ways to see that in the bond market is, you know, traditionally, again, in the post-44 Bretton Woods, you know, New World Order with America, the Fed really could anchor or influence the long end of the yield curve, even though it only controls the overnight rate, the Fed funds rate. In the past, for most, certainly during my career and for the last 80 years, but really says 44. When the Fed funds rate was up, all maturities were up. And when the Fed funds rate was down, yields on all maturities were down. But if you notice this year, we've had no cuts yet by the Fed. In fact, there was a very dovish mood pre-war. And yet, you know, as of March to April, the 10-year yield, it was fascinating. It went from under 4% to now over 4.4%. And this was done with no rate hikes or no announced rate hikes. And this is what the fancy lads on Wall Street call a bare steepener. But what it really means is the bond market is now taking control of itself and the Fed has very few tools left. There's a risk premium that's alive and well, and it's back. Um, between 2015 and 2023, the premium was zero. Now, not just for the U.S. Treasury, but certainly the US 10-year in particular, the world wants to see uh more yield for the risk. And the 10-year U.S. Treasury is no exception. It's really trading like a banana republic uh sovereign bond now. And it's fascinating because that is the 10-year, the sacred 10-year U.S. Treasury, the most important 10-year bond. We can talk about boons and gilts and others, but it's actually behaving outside of the control of the Fed or the Fed announcements. And I think that's a dramatic sign. You can say the war accelerated this distrust of U.S. IOUs or government IOUs in general. But for the 10-year to be getting this embarrassed is fairly, fairly convincing to me that that's a watershed moment. And I'll say, in all fairness, the U.S. Treasury, that Bloomberg just came out with a chart a couple, I guess a week ago, um, that really sovereign bonds in the aggregate have had the worst five-year annualized returns in modern history. And on record for the Bloomberg Index, the Bloomberg markets that's been tracking this, that's a very compelling sign. Again, it's the bond market, it's boring, but to your point earlier, those rising yields are shark fins. They represent the cost of debt. When the cost of debt gets higher in a world that literally lives and breathes off debt, whether that's at the private or the corporate or the national level, uh, things couldn't be more telling and I think more distressing for a system that's already, I think, radically changing, not going to change, not in futuro, but changing right in front of our eyes. And again, I know the bond market's boring, but it's such an important indicator and it's screaming at us that there's uh pain ahead, pain now and pain to come. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 6:09

I know uh we were laughing about that last time about it. You know, you talked to the about the bond market, every once in a while you lose people. But stick with us because I kind of want to focus on that, on that 10-year, I mean, because that is the real benchmark for the system, as you mentioned. I mean, the Fed controls the overnight rate, but the 10 years where mortgages, I mean, corporate credit, uh, equity, all of it, right? I mean, it's a all get real price. If the 10-year is now trading outside the Fed's preferred narrative, does that mean the market just no longer taking instructions from the Fed, as you kind of mentioned? Is the long end now setting policy for Washington?

SPEAKER_00 6:41

Exactly, Jeremy. I mean, the bond market gets the final say, not uh the FOMC and 12 unelected officials in in Washington, D.C. at the Eccles building. I've been warning of this since about 2019. We saw that a little bit during the COVID crisis because of the massive fiscal spending and monetary policy expansion. But now, with no movement in 2026 at all by the Fed, and even the year opening with a dovish approach, uh, we've seen a massive move on the yields on that 10-year. And that 10-year is, as you said, extremely important, not just optically, it is everything is derivative of that 10-year. Certainly the direction of the dollar, the directive rates, overnight rates, risk premiums in the broader euro dollar markets and the derivative markets, it's collateral. You know, like it or not, love it or not, the US dollar and the U.S. Treasury still are part of the world reserve currency. They have that exorbitant privilege, but that privilege is weakening. I'm not saying that as a gold bug or as a gloom and doomer. I'm actually saying that as a former bond trader. I'm not alone. Uh far smarter folks than me on the bond desk see this. Jeffrey Gunlack sees this. Uh, some of the smarter guys in the room in equity see this, Grantham, Dalio. Uh we all see this. So this isn't a gold bug kind of scare tactic uh to warn about the Fed losing control of this so-called yield curve. Uh they don't really have it anymore, and that's because trust in that over-indebted Uncle Sam, that over-issued IOU from the US, just isn't there. And it's been slowly, that trust has been slowly dying since, you know, really, I think COVID, that it was accelerated during the uh 2022, and we weaponized the world reserve currency and we flow froze the FX reserves with major power, the de-dollarization, the BRICS movement, all those things really happened uh post-March and February of 2022, as I said at the time, and I was not not, I was not alone. It was a watershed moment for the US dollar and the US Treasury, and all this is now playing out. America and the USA is not winning a lot of hearts and minds geopolitically right now. But beyond the politics and the headlines and the armchair quarterbacking on the war and all the speculations, what's really happening behind the scenes is nothing new. It's the end of a credit cycle, it's driven by an unsustainable debt level, and the representation of that debt, the IOU from Uncle Sam, just isn't trusted. And the market is saying we want more yield for your promises because we don't believe them anymore. You're too in debt, Uncle Sam.

SPEAKER_03 9:10

Uh, you know, uh to your point, because we talk a little bit of gloom and we're trying to warn people from time to time. But I mean, on the other side, Bloomberg Economics just put out a note this morning, and they're they're saying that there's actually an undercurrent of cooling in the core CPI simply because consumers are pulling back on on and I guess businesses lack pricing power, right? I mean, if demand is weakening, why wouldn't they stand in a standard kind of recessionary demand destruction rather than that kind of currency crisis we've warned about?

SPEAKER_00 9:37

No, that's a fair point. And that's when you think about it, dig deeper into what the implications are there. What is what is the what is DC saying and what are the what are the markets saying? Don't worry about inflation because recession forces and deflationary forces and demand forces are so weak. In other words, the recessionary forces are strong, the middle class, the consumer, which is 70% of GDP, is so weak they can't afford to buy things that will bring prices down. Is that supposed to be good news for the listener? That don't worry about inflation, you're gonna be so tapped out financially that your demand is gonna sink. So the CPI scale could come down a few bips. I mean, it's really, I think, a tragic way to be positive because all we're saying is hopefully a recession will take care of the inflation, really. And we can talk about why I think we're in a recession. But that game has been played really since 2023. The jig is up. I think we're in a recession. Main Street is absolutely quantifiably being crippled. Well, Wall Street in the top 10%, of which I'm a member, is enjoying, has enjoyed the tailwinds of this Fed-driven market. Um, but you know, again, to get the CPI down because Main Street is crippled is hardly good economic news. I still see stagflation coming because no matter what uh happens on Main Street with demand, and it's embarrassing, it's criminal what we've done to the middle class. It's criminal the level of wealth inequality uh we see in the U.S. in particular, that I've watched over the last 20 years. It's it's an insider trade. And if you're not in the trade, you're not inside it, and most Americans aren't. It's criminal. But the bottom line is no matter what happens on Main Street, which I really don't think politicians give too much of a hoot about, they need to save their bond market. And eventually, regardless of how stressed out or demand pulled down inflation can be on Main Street, the central banks and the Fed in particular are gonna have to expand the balance sheets, become dovish at some point to save the bond market because the government runs on those IOUs, and they'll sacrifice the currency to do that. Whether that happens this month, next month, or the end of the year is irrelevant to me. That's the end game, that's the direction. So that's inflationary. And we will see a stagnant economy, of course. They don't really seem to mind. They'll talk about it, they'll talk around it, but it's inevitable. That to me, that combination of a very, very accommodative central bank to save the bond market at the expense of the currency will mean stagflation, recessionary forces on Main Street, currency debasement from DC. It's a perfect storm for a perfectly ugly combination for the listeners, I think.

SPEAKER_03 12:09

Yeah, absolutely. And and you know, the the for wage earners, I mean, this is food, this is rent, this is gas, negative real wages. I mean, for the top percent you mentioned, it is a volatility event kind of inside of a portfolio that still owns equities and real estate and hard assets. Is this the core failure of the system? Policymakers socialize the pain through inflation, then privatize the recovery through the asset inflation.

SPEAKER_00 12:34

Well, it's the Kentilian effect. It's an academic term, but really what it means is inflation is not class bind or colorblind. When you the first the first consequences of a debasement of the currency or inflationary support from the Fed, the Fed put since we had since 2009, 2010, just after the great financial crisis, all that QE, which was supposed to be temporary, became QE2, 3, 4, Operation Twist, then unlimited QE, all that did all was really, all that liquidity went straight into the stock market. And the top 10% of the US has basically 90% of the of the assets in the stock market. So if you were a baby boomer with money when the QE kicked in and the support kicked in, well, stocks and real estate went up. There was inflation. The correlation between QE and the stock market is literally one to one. You can see it on any chart. That's great if you already have a huge stock portfolio. That's great if you already got a loan and paid it off decades ago or years ago because at the time housing was cheap and mortgages were relatively affordable. So that inflation and assets like real estate and stocks benefited the top part of America. For the rest of America, including the younger generation, you can never get into that. Inflation, all it's done is eat away at their wages and purchasing power. So they're not seeing the Cantilian effect that's so positive for the ultra-wealthy or the or the upper classes, uh, and that leaves the lower classes angry and resentful and uh fighting identity politics, as I've said many years, fighting race, fighting transgender, fighting left versus right. They're distracted while they're being robbed by the invisible tax of inflation, which is the intentional debasement of the dollar for Uncle Sam to inflate away as debt. This is nothing new throughout history. It's what's it's what all debt broken, desperate nations do at the end of a cycle. And I've said it many times, it's what Hemingway described as the permanent ruin of currency debasement and war after you've had the temporary prosperity of inflation when it went into the markets and went into real estate. Uh for many who had those assets, it was the best of times. Now it's very Dickinsonian, and we're heading into the worst of times. And I think the worst of times are certainly felt uh by the Main Street indicators, by the jobs report, by the BLS labor report, and frankly, just by the zeitgeist or the mood uh walking through Ann Arbor, Michigan, Cleveland, Ohio, or you know, outside of Martha's Vineyard, Greenwich, Connecticut, or Palm Beach or Park Avenue. There's a whole other America that's getting absolutely robbed right now.

SPEAKER_03 14:58

Yeah, well said. And and you know, you kind of brought up a little bit of QE there and QT. I mean, the Fed has ended QT, and the New York Fed has begun reserve management purchases starting with 40 billion in Treasury bills, I think, monthly, uh, with the pace expected to kind of stay elevated, I think, here. And uh officials say this is not QE, right? I mean, but for markets, I mean, reserves are reserves and liquidity is liquidity. So is the Fed really tightening if it's ending balance sheet runoff? Is it quietly buying bills just to keep this functioning? What are your thoughts?

SPEAKER_00 15:29

Yeah. I love it when they say it's not really QE. Like it's not really inflation, it's transitory inflation. It's not really a recession. We've changed the definition midway into a recession. It's not really QE, it's just another uh, I think, lie. I mean, even the very CPI scale that we use to measure inflation, again, everyone on Wall Street knows that's, as I've said so many times, is bogus as a 42nd Street Rolex. Again, this is another sign of the desperation of a regime or an empire or a system that's breaking down, not ending, but breaking down, losing its hegemony. You have desperation, but one of the key symptoms is dishonesty. The very CPI scale itself is dishonest. The very term quantitative easing is dishonest. The very notion of modern monetary theory as a solution to solve a debt crisis with more debt, paid for with money, printed out of thin air. These are all dishonest things. And to call QE that's not QE is dishonest. We've had backdoor liquidity through the Treasury General account. We've had backdoor liquidity by issuing more from the short end of the yield curve. We've had backdoor liquidity and bailing out the repo markets over and over again since 2019. There's plenty of liquidity for Wall Street, Jeremy, is what I'm trying to say. It's Wall Street socialism and Main Street feudalism. If you're on the inside, it's a great way to front run this. If you're trying to make it, you're you're out of the you're out of the party. And yeah, it's absolutely more liquidity to come because we have no other solution. We're never going to grow our way out of debt at 120% debt to GDP. That's mathematically impossible. We've known that since the 1700s. Jeremy Grant, um, you know, excuse me, John Gresham Gresham or Thomas Gresham, excuse me. Uh this has been known since the 1500s, the 1700s. Uh, it's nothing new in history. Uh, you debase the currency, get your way out of debt. It's an invisible theft, and you inflate your way out. So you need to run inflation higher than than interest rates. But the way the uh the thieves do this in DC is they just lie about the inflation rate. They tell you you've got real positive yields when in fact actual inflation is much higher than the rates, and that's running negative real rates to inflate away the debt. That's great for Uncle Sam again. That doesn't help the man on the street who measures his or her wealth in dollars that are melting right before their eyes. It's a very slow death by a thousand cuts of the purchasing power. And it's a slow form of robbery that eventually leads to social unrest and eventually leads to more centralized control from a government that's afraid of losing its powers. They're more afraid of pitchforks uh than they are anything else, but they avoid that by distorting the data and inflating things out without really uh adequately reporting the inflation. It's again old as history itself.

SPEAKER_03 18:03

Yeah, yeah. And I mean, Matt, you keep coming back to that bigger point. And I think the audience will appreciate it that the language itself has become dishonest. I mean, QE is not called QE bailouts or are called liquidity facilities. I mean, financial repression is called stability now, right? Um is that the final stage of monetary hegemony, the the where the the money still has power but but cannot can no longer kind of describe honestly what it's doing to preserve that power.

SPEAKER_00 18:32

Well, it is. It was it was as Hemiway said, it was temporary prosperity. Um it was an exorbitant privilege, as uh uh a French official said in the 70s, and it was, as John Connolly said, the Treasury Secretary, when we decoupled our currency, your problem. We had this exorbitant privilege uh 55 years ago when we decoupled. The dollar was still the world reserve currency, it was the post-44 dollar, it was the it was the dollar that was part of the country that saved Europe from fascism with the help of the Soviets. It was the dollar of the of the New York Yankees, Clark Gable, and the Golden Age, and it really was an exorbitant privilege for many decades. Um, even after we decoupled from gold, we had that runoff effect of still being the world reserve currency. We could export our inflation, we could print as many dollars as we wanted, the rest of the world had to eat that sandwich because we created a petrodollar system, which we can talk about, it's very important. It's a pillar to our exorbitant privilege. Where the world had to buy our oil, or buy, excuse me, the world's oil, including the Middle East oil, in our currency. That's an amazing sponge for an otherwise debased, watered-down dollar that kept demand for the dollar global and universal and for many, many years uh absorbed that inflation beautifully. Wasn't good for the rest of the world, it was great for us. Again, our problem, our dollar, your problem. Um, and that worked for many, many decades. We also have to remember that the petro state, the Saudis and the OPEC nations that were basically forced on this petrol dollar at gunpoint, also had to take some of their oil revenue and use it to buy U.S. Treasury. So not only was there a great sponge for US dollars, there was a great demand for the U.S. Treasury. That was an absolute win-win for the John Conley era, Nixon era, America. And for decades that worked with some hiccups along the way, that too is coming to a painful and violent end right now for a number of reasons. So that petrodollar is weakening, that six-shooter of the petrodollar is still a gun, but it has less bullets now with the UAE pulling out of OPEC, et cetera, the world buying oil outside of the dollar at an accelerating rate. So we're seeing, in addition to our debt embarrassment, we're seeing a petrodollar system that's weakening. And of course, at the same time, we created the petrodollar. We also added futures contracts through the CME and the COMEX because the biggest threat to the dollar after we decoupled was gold and silver. So we created a permanent short, legalized price fixing on the COMEX and in the LBMA markets in London. That, too, since November of 2024 is getting weaker. It's not the end yet, it's not even the end of the dollar, but the combination of the COMEX weakness, the LBMA weakness, and now the petrodollar weakness and war is just accelerating a historical template, which again has been repeated over and over for centuries. And it's hard for many very proud Americans, of which I am a still, despite it all a patriot, and I am an American. It's hard to see history when you're in it. It's like a fish, you don't see the water when you're swimming in it. But between the mechanizations at the COMEX, the failures at the petrodollar, the failures of our foreign policy, and most importantly, pre-war, the failures of our monetary and fiscal policies, the debt binge we've enjoyed, like children without chaperones for decades, uh, the karma for that is finally coming home to roost. We've just debased our dollar too much after 55 years post 71 of spending without tears, deficits without tears, and lying to the world that monetary theory or money printing would save us from a debt crisis. It's it's shameful. Policy. And it really rests in the bathroom mirrors of our policymakers at the Eccles building and at the White House, red or blue, they're all to blame. We can't blame the world on the fact that we've mismanaged our currency this badly.

SPEAKER_03 22:13

Yeah, yeah. And you know, this is good. I was going to move on to gold, but I want to kind of stick on this. Tie these together for us. You know, the COMEX, the LBMA weakness, war risk, petrodollar weakness. If the old system depended on paper control of gold, dollar settlement for energy and treasury recycling, are we seeing stress in all three legs at once? In other words, if if oil exporters trust the dollar less, if physical gold is harder to source, and if paper markets can't cap price discovery the way that they used to, I mean, is that the real break in the post-Breton Woods order?

SPEAKER_00 22:47

Well, those are great points, Jeremy. They're all legs to a stool, and all of those legs are cracking, and the weight of debt on top of that stool is adding more pressure to it. Absolutely, what we saw in 2024 and really into 2025 on the Comics, again, spend hours on it, it's very boring. Basically, the exchange in New York ran out of the metals. They couldn't make delivery. It was unprecedented. Uh, both in gold and silver, what we were seeing with the ratio of demanded metals versus what was available was unprecedented. So they were running out of the metals to manipulate, so they had to use margin tricks to shorten or to put a permanent or try to put a boot to the to the silver price in particular. So the COMEX is losing credibility to the SpyMex and to the Shanghai exchange. So the flows and the trust and the metals are moving from west to east towards St. Petersburg and uh and uh Shanghai. So that that part of our tool that worked for decades to keep the price of gold and silver from embarrassing the dollar, again, it worked for decades. That really began to crack in 2024 and accelerate in 2025. So that was certainly a pillar uh that was cracking on the gold case because gold is now made a fool out of the dollar and it's it's gonna make more of a fool of the dollar. The petrodollar, again, as I explained, was so critical to absorbing U.S. treasuries and US dollars that gave us tremendous power for half a century. That too is weakening. And so at the same time that you're seeing petrodollar and ComX cracks in the ice, the ice is getting thinner under those, under those powers. You're just seeing uh a central bank that's expanded money balance sheet beyond recognition, but more important, public debt at 40 trillion basically. The interest expense alone on our debt is now over a trillion dollars. When I was a young kid playing baseball, you know, Ronald Reagan was president, Volcker was at the Fed, and our public debt was $1 trillion. Now the interest expense on our public debt is $1 trillion. It's an extraordinary evolution in just the last 40 plus years. Well, I've been uh growing up. So uh these things are hard math. They're stubborn facts. You can use pundits to talk about stimulus or accommodation or quantitative easing or support. You can use uh platitudes to hide math, but eventually the man on the street's gonna feel it. Those of us who track markets can see right through this. We're doing a good job with platforms like yourself to educate people more about these boring topics. They can feel it. Now they can see it. But the public debt, the COMEX cracks and the petrodollar uh changes are all accelerating uh the hangover effect of living for years on too many martinis of easy money and deficit spending. It's the hangover's coming. It's it's here. We're literally seeing it right now. It's only just gonna get worse, I'm afraid.

SPEAKER_03 25:33

Oh, I hate terrible hangovers. Uh hey, Matt, I want to look at the board today and I'll get Louis to bring up gold prices because it's doing exactly what drives precious metals investors crazy. I mean, we get a hot CPI print, 3.8%, gold and silver dipping today because the paper market immediately prices higher rates and a stronger dollar. And then you just talked about that. Underneath that, physical demand. We got the buying from the central banks. There is that exchange credibility uh kind of moving in the opposite direction. Is this the real split now? Uh futures markets uh in New York and London still kind of trade on the Fed narrative, while physical markets in Shanghai and elsewhere are starting to trade distrust in the system.

SPEAKER_00 26:13

Sure. No, it's it's when you just look at the time zones between New York, London, and then uh Shanghai. Shanghai gets the last say of the trade and they get the more physical metals at the end of the day, and then London wakes up in the morning to see what Shanghai did with silver or gold. Um, there's more physical metals now moving east and west. Doesn't mean that I can trust Shanghai or St. Petersburg not to do some tricks with the gold and silver prices, but they have a long-term interest in being a better broker, so to speak, than London or New York if they want to gain more trust among the bricks and other nations. And many nations are leaving the fold of the West and the G7. But I think, you know, there will always be manipulation on paper exchanges, and there will always be tricks and government interest that are more powerful than even uh the man on the street, or certainly even the man on Wall Street. But when you look at gold, uh, we again at Von Greyers are completely indifferent to the daily price. We certainly didn't reach peak gold in 2025 or in the very first innings because the fundamentals just haven't changed. The central banks, it's their 15th straight month of gold buying. Gold was up in you know 2024 and 2025, predominantly almost exclusive because of central bank buying. And that hasn't changed. The fears, the chaos around the world, none of this has stopped. If anything, what we saw in the Q1 of 26 was a fire sale to buy more gold, which is what many of our clients are doing. The central banks are still the major players. You know, gold production is still, you know, it's a limited supply. It's 3,800 tons last year, and nearly half of that went to central banks. But I think for those who just think us uh commodity folks in general or gold uh investors in particular are just gloom and doomers or cry wolfers, I understand that. I had that same view when I was a risk asset trader in the 90s and early 2000s. But let's just think about it. Since 2000, I was trading dot-com stocks, you know, on the Nasdaq, gold is up 1,580%. Its compounding annual growth rate since 2000 is 11%. And it's been positive 75% of that time. When you compare that extraordinary number to aggregate currencies since 2000, they've lost 94%. They have a negative 10% annual growth rate. And those currencies have only been positive 25% of the time in the last two and a half or two decades, 25 years. So look, when you know, since 1971, right after I was born, US dollar versus commodities, the dollar has fallen 99% versus gold, 96% versus oil, 89% versus copper, I think 75 or 76% versus wheat. So, folks, gold is not rising. Paper money is failing. And, you know, look, these are math statements, not gold bug statements. US M2 went up 40% in two years during COVID, and then thereafter another 30%. So, you know, the M2 gold price ratios are just beginning. We've seen nothing yet. Central bank reserves were 80% dollars and 10% gold years ago. Now the gold reserves have doubled at central banks and the U and the US dollar's gone from 80% to 56%. So, and even with FX reserves, you know, the FX reserve assets are now greater in gold than they are in U.S. treasuries. So we're not making this up. If you look at the signs and the flows, gold isn't going to replace the dollar, become a world reserve currency, or back the dollar again. We can talk about why, but gold is more honest and more trusted than the IOU, some Uncle Sam, or the G7. And that's because we've we've blown that trust through decades of over overspending and mouse clicking money to solve the problem and put a band-aid on a knife wound. Um, but the data, the data is extraordinarily obvious. And again, there are many ratios: gold to Dow, gold to SP, market price of official gold to foreign held US treasuries, gold reserves as a percentage of U.S. debt, blah, blah, blah. We can go on and on to the data and the charts. And they're fascinating, but they're boring to most listeners. And I understand that, but it's very simple. Cut through all the fagoozy fagazi of debt and fog and war and headlines and tariffs and comex. It's really simple. We're in debt beyond imagination. It's unsustainable. We've debased the currency to buy time, buy votes, and buy temporary prosperity and hand that permanent ruin to the man and woman on the street. It's absolutely criminal.

SPEAKER_02 30:32

Yeah.

unknown 30:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 30:33

Uh you kind of brought up uh money supply there. Frame gold against it for us. Not the price, because if US M2 kind of exploded after COVID and gold is simply marking down the purchase power of paper, should investors stop asking how high can gold go and maybe start asking, you know, how much further can currency units be diluted? I mean, what does gold look like when measured against M2 and deficits and debt service instead of dollars?

SPEAKER_00 31:00

That's exactly the key point, Jeremy. When people look at the gold price, and when we were in Vancouver, it was like it was just euphoric. The gold, silver was just, it was scary. It moved too fast. And they were just, how can gold be at 5,500? How can silver be over 120 or 100? This is crazy. This must be a bubble. This is madness. And I understood that. I certainly could understand that sentiment. And um, but I think what they were missing and what they didn't want to see, the cognitive dissonance was what they didn't want to see is how can paper money, Canadian, Australian, American dollars, have gotten this weak? Because it wasn't the gold and silver were in an irrational bubble. They were in a bull market because paper money is in a secular bear market, thanks to our policymakers. So, and you can get into the again, way too boring, M2 versus M0 money supply. Does QE really go into the system and the velocity of money? Is QE really inflationary? It's a very boring debate. It's important, but it'll your eyes will glaze over on it. But the bottom line is you you can't expand the Fed balance sheet to 9 trillion, expand credit at the banking system, and bring M2 money supply in without debasing the currency. And you can argue it five ways to Sunday, but we've printed too much money, we've added too much water to the wine of the US dollar, and we've debased it. It's now it's literally got to name the debasement trade officially on Wall Street. But you know, an M2 money supply expands that dramatically in a period of such a short amount of time. Um, you know, again, M2 uh to gold price, I think the ratio is around 4.6 now. In the 80s, it was as low as 2.5. And believe me, I don't care when or how, whether they QT or go right to QE, whatever semantics they want to use, we're gonna see more liquidity, more money printing. It's gonna continue. So the ratio of M2 to gold is gonna continue to compress, which means the gold price is gonna continue to rise only because the money supply is exorbitant and uh and frankly fatal in terms of purchasing power for the US dollar or any paper currency. And again, that's we can look at the charts, we can do the math and get over the ratios, but I think we all feel it, we all see it. Gold stackers have never thought gold was going to become more shiny, more use for jewelry, or more use for fillings. They just knew the paper dollar was killing itself. And even the Chinese with their yuans see it. But as uh what is it, the Chinese Book of War, Art of War, Sun Tzu, when they, you know, when your enemy is shooting yourself, shooting itself in the foot, just let it keep doing it. So the U.S. is its public debt levels, exacerbated by the COVID policies, which were well beyond necessary at a certain point, and now exacerbated by war costs and a 1.5 trillion budget for 27. China, which has a paper currency, just sits back and watches the U.S. shoot itself over and over in the foot, the chest and the elbow. And they're not gonna have a better yuan, but they're gonna have more gold in their trade settlements. And they are playing 3D chess while we dial up QE or QT or debate uh the Fed funds rate versus the long end of the curve. They're just watching us do what history has always done, watch nations uh destroy themselves with currency debasement and war.

SPEAKER_03 34:12

Yeah. Hey, I'm looking at these numbers today on CPI and some of the manufacturing, too. I mean, I just want to talk about silver for a minute because obviously it has that massive structural deficit story, but but it's also an industrial mettle. If high interest rates finally break the economy and we go into a deep recession, usually manufacturing demand gets hit. What are your thoughts here? I mean, why wouldn't an economic kind of slowdown crush silver before the monetary thesis has time to play out here?

SPEAKER_00 34:38

Well, I mean, that's certainly there are headwinds and tailwinds on any ocean trip, whether you're heading, you know, from east or west, north or south off of any peninsula, you'll see different currents and different winds. You could see demand, industrial demand uh for silver weaken at the same time that it's the supply and demand mismatch, which is really five years of a consecutive, you know, now at this point, really a billion uh ounces of silver and a supply deficit after compounding at 200 million ounces per year. That supply and demand mismatch is extraordinary. That's stronger than even the down, that even the impact of lower demand from the industry if we see a recession. I think the military uh needs alone uh for silver would still keep a natural demand despite a recession. Uh it's not just U.S. markets, even if we have a global recession, you know, you're gonna see in Asia and certainly in China with solar panels and EVs, and again, silver far more in use in the military. That's why we made it a critical minerals uh critical minerals list last year. As we're wasting a lot of our missiles right now, they have to be rebuilt. The silver is still gonna be a part of it. I think the demand for silver and the supply and demand mismatch will be greater forces, bottom line, than any industrial demand slowdown in a recession. But certainly that can affect supply and demand. And certainly uh the paper exchanges can affect the price. But supply and demand, just like everything in the end, finally gets the last laugh. I'm not here to time it. Many in the silver space are far more bullish than I am, but I'm easily a $200 silver, and Egon is extremely bullish. And others who track the technicals and fundamentals aren't worried about trying to time this direction. They're just sitting back and letting the dollar shoot itself and letting the U.S. shoot itself and letting paper money shoot itself. So we're just patiently waiting for silver and gold. Silver will move in a beta trade to gold in a bull market. Gold's bull market is just beginning. So we're not really too worried about the timing. There are forces, of course. I mean, we've seen backwardization in the futures market on silver with other indicators, it's very bullish on silver. We look at what SOCGEN traders are doing. I talk to traders, what they're doing. Their long-term play here is very bullish. But again, if you're a swing trader, a day trader, an arbitrager of precious metals, best of luck to you. I'm no help to you. Uh we're long-term preservationist thinkers, we're long-term cynics on paper money. And that is Ray Dalio's point. If you understand economics and history, you'll have no problem gaining faith in gold and silver. But certainly there can be headwinds and tailwinds as this process moves. None of these metals move in a straight line. But against the dollar, all commodities in general are just ripping in price because the dollar's gotten weaker. But gold and silver are commodities 90% of the time, but they're money 10% of the time. And we're in that moment right now where gold and silver are monetary metals uh at this particular turning point in history. So not only it's commodity profile, but silver and gold's monetary profiles are going to have a heck of a run in the next five years.

SPEAKER_03 37:39

And already, yeah, I was gonna say, because I mean we we let's bring this down to kind of the street level again, because again, according to the BLS, right, food at home rose 0.7% in April, beef specifically up 2.7 percent. Meanwhile, real average earnings just fell 0.3 from a year earlier. When Matt, when we when we talk about the debasement trade, is this the part that matters most to households? Not the gold price or even silver price, but I mean the grocery bill and the paycheck that keeps failing to keep up. I mean, people are are really feeling this, it seems like.

SPEAKER_00 38:12

No, Jeremy, I remember it was, I think it was 2021, it was kind of as COVID was kind of peaking and slowly coming down. I remember Berkshire Hathaway, I read their annual letter. Um, and they literally had the price of, they had like a, it was like two pages long of all the prices, whether it was fuel, housing, toilet paper, groceries, tin foil, uh literally anything you could imagine. It was all up in double-digit increases in price. And this is when uh Buffett was very worried about structural inflation, inflation instability, he called it. He was way ahead of the CPI, he was way ahead of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. What was amazing is you had two pages of just about everything you would have on a grocery list or everything you'd have in your in your portfolio in terms of hard assets up double digits, 15, 20, 25%. And yet the CPI scale at the time said we were at 3% or 3.3 year-over-year inflation. How could literally everything that America needs be up double digits in actual price, but our CPI scale be completely wrong? Again, that's dishonesty because again, you could do a whole hour on the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the fiction writing that goes on in DC and that the Fed uses to misreport inflation. But to your point, the man on the street doesn't need a CPI scale or a PhD in applied math or a statistical analysis from Wharton to feel inflation being much higher than what it's reported out of the official channels. Um I think this disconnect between reality and what feeling is another symptom of the dishonesty. But again, wages are not keeping up with even the CPI scale or the cost of living adjustment, which is often higher than the CPI scale, ironically. But the wages aren't keeping up with the the pace of the melting currency and the pace of the debasement. That that's what creates the working poor, uh, the middle class, which is now, I think, I think Anthony Scaramucci had it, it was the aspirational. That's what he called his parents' generation, the middle class post-war, the aspirational middle class. My children and this generation are in the desperational middle class. They don't see a chance for themselves to live better than their parents. That's the first time in many generations that things have gotten that bad. Again, it's not just a sentimental or an emotional uh sentiment. If you look at the University of Michigan, where I went to law school, their consumer sentiment indicator, they created that scale in I think 1973 or 74, maybe 72, but it's been around for decades. The sentiment on the University of Michigan scale is at its lowest reading ever. It's at the bottom 1%. Consumer sentiment at the University of Michigan is its lowest ever. And every single time since the 1970s, that you saw sentiment at the bottom 1% like this, it was followed within months by a recession. So the disconnect between what's happening on the main street mindset, the mainstream experience, and a ripping SMP is fascinating. It'll be something we'll be reading about generations ahead. It's absolute fiction. So again, I've joked many times, cryptically, you could have mushroom clouds over Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and the markets would still be ripping as long as the Fed was dovish and accommodative and supportive. In other words, creating liquidity. So the markets are absolute fantasies, disconnected, and we could spend a lot of time on the markets too. But Main Street, by sentiment indicators, by non-farmal payrolls, which lost 92,000 jobs, the 13 months of consecutive real-time revisions in employment. We saw zero job growth in 2025. We saw actual losses, we saw destruction of jobs. When you get outside of the BLS and you look at Gray and Christmas, Challenger Gray, or Macro Edge, who give you more honest, we're losing more jobs now. So we have a slowing economy, rising rates, and CPI inflation and wages not keeping up. That's criminal. Again, it's criminal and it's it's math. It's not just my gut feeling or putting my finger in the wind to catch sentiment. It's literally quantifiable. And we continue this charade that uh it's all the fault of Putin or Iran that we're in this mess, some bad guy. It goes much deeper than that. It started a long time before this.

SPEAKER_03 42:26

Yeah, amen. And you know, this is good. I was looking at this report on this topic. Reconcile this contradiction for me, because this is where the thesis kind of gets tested. I mean, we're arguing about debt currency systems that are kind of under severe stress. And I'm just reading this JP Morgan uh report out saying that, you know, prime mortgage balances are hitting record lows, their clients are bullish and actively unwinding hedges to kind of add risk into this volatility. I mean, is this just sophisticated money betting that the policy backstop still works? Uh can can equities and gold both be right here? Go uh stocks obviously pricing liquidity, AI optimism, uh uh and gold, I guess, pricing sovereign risk. Who gets stuck with the bank?

SPEAKER_00 43:08

Well, look, again, you can you can think of the SP as a hedge against inflation. If it's if the central bank is accommodative, uh you can actually see, again, it's no longer a price discovery, supply and demand driven uh SP Dow and NASDAQ. And I'm not, again, the first to suggest this. It is a Fed-driven market. It's no longer a dial, it's a switch. If the Fed is dovish, I'm bullish on the SP. If the Fed is hawkish, I'm net short because it's that simple. We've gotten it that distorted. Uh, and if the Fed wants to accommodate the markets, there's no dip that can't become a V shaped recovery if we're willing to print trillions of dollars, expand the balance sheet, and dump liquidity into the markets. If we're willing to do yield curve control and keep rates down, the SP Dragon Slayers will buy back their own shares with cheap debt. You can always create key. The bubble alive, but you can't do it without without killing the currency. So it's running up pill and roller skates. It's a Pyrrhic victory, but yes, the SP can rise if the Fed wants to effectively nationalize the stock market, which they've really done since 2008. Risk on, risk off, dovish or hawkish. Is that sad? Is that simple? To me, that's not that's not that's not capitalism. Again, that's just a centralized market. We also have, truthfully, if there's a war dividend, you can trade the war dividend. War typically feeds U.S. markets. When there's conflicts overseas, we see massive capital flows into the at least the perceived relative safety of the U.S. uh between 203 and 208 during the Iraq War, hundreds of billions of Middle Eastern dollars or assets rushed into U.S. markets and the Dow rose steadily upwards. During the Vietnam War, where many of my family members were at, the Dow gained 53% while people were dropping like flies in Laos and Cambodia and North Vietnam. In World War I, the Dow nearly doubled. Uh, in World War II, it rose by 160%. And then as soon as those wars ended, that war dividend came crashing down. So, you know, again, the combination of this temporary prosperity, permanent ruin of war, war can create a little bit of a tailwind for markets. The central banks can certainly support a market. There is no market uh correction that the Fed can't save, but not without killing the currency. So it's a pyrrhic victory. Uh you could you could try to hedge inflation in a very risky stock market that's at all-time highs by literally every metric. You know, you look at the Buffett indicator with the equities, the market cap, the GDP. I think the bigger market equity and indicator, or the bigger buffet indicator, is the fact that Berkshire Hathaway's $360 billion in cash. Again, these people aren't trying. Brilliant traders like Grantham and Buffett and Dalio aren't trying to time the market because it's a Fed-driven market. They simply don't trust it anymore. They can't value it, they can't evaluate it. As Charlie McKay says, valuation still matters. Price to book, price to earnings, all the things I learned in school don't matter if the Fed is supportive. But at some point, mean reversion returns, I can't time it. Nobody can. I do think the the needle is in private credit and private equity in the private markets, just like it was in 08. I can't time the day, but the signals will be that 10-year yield when it gets above 4.8, I'd I'd be very, very bearish. And I'd be very concerned about leverage over leverage to try and get more yield, which is what Wall Street's doing. They don't learn a thing. They never do.

SPEAKER_03 46:34

And when it gets close, you sure see a good headline to pop that 10-year down a little bit. Uh, you know, speaking of which, well, one odd headline this morning perfectly kind of highlights how Wall Street operates. CME Group is developing futures tied to computing power, and its CEO called uh Compute now, the new oil of the 21st century. Is that useful innovation or another sign that Wall Street will financialize every scarce input while ignoring the foundational debt problems?

SPEAKER_00 47:02

I mean, Jeremy, you've answered the question. I mean, come on, we all know that this is, I mean, it's becoming worse than a Vegas casino. They'll try and find any way to financialize and expand risk and appeal to that addiction to try and get more yield or more return in a world that doesn't give you much, to speculate your way to safety. That's a very dangerous way to build wealth. It will be the best of times until it's not. I mean, I know, I know even the Fed was going to do, if you if you trust the Fed to do an investigation, because a lot of folks are trying to package some of this uh private equity and private credit bad loans or illiquid loans into asset back securities. Again, there's no shame in these people. They did the same thing with subprime mortgages in 2006-2007, packaging horse crap and putting it in tinfoil and marking it as investment grade. Uh, they'll try anything to get someone to go farther on the risk branch for some kind of return. And for a while, that'll pump until it dumps. And again, I've always said Wall Street will do this distribution phase where they'll use uh retail investors as plankton for their own distribution liquidity. And uh, if you're not an insider, you're probably not gonna win on that. You'll catch the first few hours of the fun and you'll get the last hours of the headache. And uh again, this is nothing new. I've seen it so many times. Um, but you know, packaging ABS uh subprime crap is nothing new. But they're even even private credit is taking out loans to match redemption requests. They're putting leverage on leverage, taking out more debt to pay for bad debt. And heck, you can even use Harvard, the great Harvard. Its endowment has a massive uh private credit illiquidity problem. And they're taking out billions in loans because they can't get any liquidity on their crappy private credit. So the smartest guys in the room, the smartest guys in the classroom, the smartest endowment is stuck in a debt trap in a liquidity trap, too. Uh, this is not a time to be chasing tops and hoping for fantasy solutions. Yes, you can pick up dimes and quarters in front of this train, but I'm just not interested at this point. And I'd I'd rather just sit back and watch gold and silver get the last laugh.

unknown 49:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 49:12

Yeah, it sounds like you know, the risk has just been moved off balance sheets, renamed, rated, and sold. Um, okay, well, listen, our time always goes too fast, my friend. It always does. And I could talk to you forever. Let's wrap this up. But I guess we kind of laid out that macro challenge. I mean, real wages falling, inflation being sticky, yields rising, trust gone, as it appears, or at least uh weakening, I should say. Now, without giving personal financial advice, what what is the practical wealth preservation playbook here? I mean, how do how should people think about physical metal, cash, risk assets, allocation, but also liquidity and the emotional risk of buying after a major run?

SPEAKER_00 49:49

Right. No, these are the important questions. And I think obviously take gold and silver out. You already know my answer to that. We think very strong and high allocations of gold and silver. That's obvious. Uh, and we're not alone. Even the big banks, even Morgan Stanley, UBS, Goldman Sachs, they're represent they're even in some cases more bullish on year-end price targets, but we're not looking at the price, but their allocation levels are extremely uh expanding, which is fascinating in and of itself. In Switzerland, 20% gold and silver is a minimum, you know, 80-20 gold and silver, 20% allocation, that's a minimum. Um, when you get beyond the obvious conviction, not bias I have uh for gold and silver that Igon and I have, that all of us have at Von Greyers, the other assets are what our grandparents told us, our grandparents who went through, especially here in Europe, who went through inflation, debasement, military crisis, distrusted governments. Um, you want an asset that can't be printed or mass-produced or paper claimed. You want hard assets. I think, as Ronnie Sterfless said years ago, uh, we are heading into a commodity super cycle. You don't have to get the day right, you have to get the direction right. I think hard assets in general are a safer store of value in a longer-term play if you're not a speculator, but an investor, if you do understand the direction of the hockey puck here. I think real estate in particular, uh, agricultural real estate, massively important. These are important assets. Uh it's, it's, it's the hard assets, it's the things that can't be manipulated and claimed and debased that I think are the longer-term plays. Obviously, you want to have dry powder, but dry powder for what? Dry powder for when there's a mean reversion in this market, if the markets aren't nationalized. But dry powder can be sucked away by inflation. So I get that there's a real sense of no place to hide in an absolutely bloated bond market. It's a bug looking for a windshield and a massively overstock, overvalued stock market. It's kind of hard to hide and wait for a mean reversion or hide in a safe value asset or a safe value stock. Of course, there's going to be speculation opportunities in tech. There always will be. But I think for the patient investor, I would do what central banks are doing. I would save in stores of value, commodities and precious metals in particular. I would spend in fiat when you actually see a buy signal. I've always said if you go duck hunting, you don't walk out to a duck blind or row out in a boat and just point your 12 gauge into the air and shoot. You actually wait for a duck. And so sometimes the hardest thing is to do nothing. Once you've preserved your purchasing power and hard assets and precious metals, then you have to do what a patient sniper or a patient hunter does. Wait for your target. Don't just be shooting at everything that moves. That's very hard to do when you're trying to get some type of return, when you're stressed out and you're and you're speculating like a gambler in a casino to get through the year. And I understand that pressure. I don't think speculation is the safest way to get it at this point in the SP's history, in this point in the bond market's condition. I think it's a dangerous game.

SPEAKER_03 52:50

Yeah, we saw that slight correction on both silver and gold. Obviously, at the you know, March-ish, uh it got frothy there for a moment. And even though obviously it's a Kitko news audience and and people understand debasement here, where we we like metals, but people also want to know, and I'm curious what you think about this. At what point does someone have too much gold or silver?

SPEAKER_00 53:12

Look, I think when gold is fairly priced, um, and I think we didn't have time, but I I see I'm not alone. You you look at where these ratios have been in the past, what the future price of gold looks like, whether it's with me or Pierre Lesand or Luke Grohman or uh Frank Zuster and certainly Igon von Griers or even Scott Bissent, it is not at all unusual anymore to say gold will easily get to 20,000 in the next year, over the next cycle. That's not because it's going to get shinier, it's that's because of the debasement trade. That's because actually the U.S. for the first time has a vested interest in a higher gold price to run its deficits. Again, I'm not alone. I completely share that view that we actually, unlike the Volcker era where gold was uh to the dollar, what Sun was to vampires, you know, Volcker called it his enemy. But under the Scott Bissent $40 trillion debt regime of America circa 2026, we actually need to revalue our gold. We need to see gold run, we need to revalue our certificates to push down some of our debt. We don't need to make a gold-backed dollar, but we need to monetize gold uh desperately. I think that will happen. I also just think the mean reversions in the markets, I think we'll see uh the, as Pierre Lason says, uh a Dow gold ratio, maybe not one to one, but two to one. And that would put gold at 17,500 very soon, very easily. That's not extreme anymore. Um, again, I think uh even if you look at the uh gold ratio to public debt, uh Ronnie Sturfala, again, I'm talking Ronnie Sturfala, Pierre Lesson, Luke Groman, myself, we're not quacks. We're not just gold bugs, we're looking at the implied numbers. If we wanted to have the same ratio of gold to public debt, we should have an implied gold price of around 30,000 over the next few years. That may seem extreme to many, uh, but when when Bitcoin went from $10 to $100,000, no one seemed to mind. It's going to be shocking when they see uh gold reach these prices. Again, not because gold was in a bubble, but because that's how sick and beaten down and distrusted uh US IOUs and US paper money and other paper money systems have become. That is to me very sober long-term play. So when you look at the short-term moves and the mechanizations in March or any price in gold and silver, I do understand that if you're a trader that can break some hearts. Uh if you're an investor, uh, the most important skill you need to have, other than an understanding of history and math, is basic patience, like a good duck hunter.

SPEAKER_03 55:44

Yeah, basic patience. I like it. And to your point, I mean, I feel like we had here at the studio a graphic on standby for a year that said breaking $2,000 gold. And then, you know, here we are a few years later talking about five. So uh I hear you on that one, Matt. All right. Uh, Matthew, always appreciate your perspective. Thanks for taking the time and stress testing this thesis with us today. Of course, uh, Matt Pipenberg is uh with von Gray's uh great work out there, fantastic year. Uh still some room to go. It feels like it's gonna just it's gonna be a busy one for you.

SPEAKER_00 56:17

Well, very busy. We've got smart money, smart investors. They they see the long blade, they see the direction of the hockey puck, and uh, you know, we are we're very proud because we do have high conviction. Egon started this decades ago with a fundamental understanding of gold and history and money, and he was buying gold at 300, and people were laughing at laughing at him at weddings. It's not an I Told You So moment, but it uh it feels good to at least say what we think. We're not constrained by a board of directors at a big bank anymore. We can actually say what we really think. And uh we're very proud, even for those who aren't clients of ours, who can't afford our minimums, to talk as much as we can, not just about gold, but sound money and uh sound policy and what unsound money and what unsound policy means so that people can make their own decisions beyond just gold and silver.

SPEAKER_03 57:04

Yeah, education is a beauty. Uh all right, mate. Well, thanks for making the time. Appreciate your time. Thanks.

SPEAKER_00 57:09

Thank you, Jeremy.

SPEAKER_03 57:10

Cheers, Matt. And thank you for watching Kitco News. Now I want to hear from you. What are you watching most closely right now? Is it the 30-year treasury? Is it oil? Is it gold, silver, or the Fed's next move? Drop your thoughts in the comments below. I read as many as I can, believe it or not. And if you want real data behind the headlines, hit that subscribe button. I'm Jeremy Saffron. We'll see you next time.

SPEAKER_02 57:28

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SPEAKER_01 57:33

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