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Mouse-Clicked vs. Gold-Backed, Lies vs. Trust

January 12, 2026

Matthew Piepenburg, Partner at VON GREYERZ AG, joins Dunugan Kaiser on the final day of 2025 for a sober look back as well as forward into 2026. Piepenburg begins with a look at two Eurozone nations, Switzerland and Sweden, whose citizens are openly pushing back on digitalization efforts to make nations effectively cashless.

Looking back on 2025, Piepenburg gives proper weight to the year’s headline economic events, including record-high gold and silver prices, but argues that these headlines pale in comparison to the real drivers behind precious metal moves today and tomorrow. That is, the real tailwind began decades ago when the World Reserve Currency welched on its gold backing in 1971. The subsequent and undeniable “prosperity” which followed due to unfettered debt expansion paid for by mouse-clicked rather than gold-backed dollars sure boosted risk asset markets, real estate and the oxy-moronic notion of debt-based “growth.”

But beneath this façade of debt-driven prosperity lay much darker forces of debt addiction and the undeniable currency debasement which always follows. Today, the world in general, and the US in particular, is experiencing the karmic reckoning of debt gone too far and hence paper money melting like an ice cube. This, more than anything else, explains the exponential moves in real money metals like gold and silver.

Piepenburg also addresses the flashing signals coming from sovereign bond markets, investor FOMO and pull-back fears in precious metal price directions, and perhaps the most important yet difficult metric to measure in all failing and dishonest economic systems: Trust.

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.