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Making Sense of Precious Metals Highs & Volatility

February 6, 2026

In a candid discussion at the VRIC event in Vancouver last week, Matthew Piepenburg, Partner at VON GREYERZ, makes clear that the 2025 surge in precious metals is not speculation, but the consequence of a fiat monetary system under increasing strain. Decades of debt accumulation, monetary expansion and currency debasement are now manifesting openly in the gold and silver markets.

Piepenburg traces the recent price action back to the pivotal 1971 break, examines the decisive shift in central bank behaviour, and explains why trust in sovereign debt and paper currencies continues to erode. He also addresses the growing role of stablecoins, the diminishing but still active ability of futures markets to suppress genuine price discovery, and the structural forces driving capital away from paper promises.

The discussion further highlights the widening disconnect between financial markets and the real economy, identifies the bond market – not equities – as the true barometer of systemic risk, and explains why physical gold remains an essential tool for long-term wealth preservation in an increasingly unstable monetary environment.

VonGreyerz.gold

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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.