January 23, 2026 Advertise | Contact Us | About Us | Search

The Paper Currency System: Open Lies, Open Robbery

January 23, 2026

Matthew Piepenburg, Partner at VON GREYERZ, rejoins Versan & Vandell Aljarrah of the Black Swan Capitalists to unpack the details of a generational wealth transfer unwinding in real-time across global financial markets. In this engaging conversation, Piepenburg places this theme into the broader context of a global debt disfunction leading to a breakdown of the currencies used (debased) to monetize that debt.

For those measuring, saving or trusting in paper currencies and the “experts” who have mismanaged the same, their wealth is being slowly stolen as they effectively “run up-hill in roller skates” with their fiat paper. Gold, of course, is an obvious antidote to this hard reality.

Piepenburg distinguishes fiat bear markets from gold bull markets and addresses how and why gold has been intentionally downplayed in Wall Street and thus understandably misunderstood by Main Street. Today, however, awareness of currency risk is rising, and hence, gold and silver demand are building exponentially. Piepenburg further explains how inflation has been impacting citizens at unequal levels as part of the wealth transfer introduced above.

The trio then discuss how the speed and scope of skyrocketing prices in the precious metals space are in many ways an alarming indicator of a radically changing global financial and monetary system. Demand for a weaponized world reserve currency is openly falling. Piepenburg sees two areas of dollar risk in the UST market and the petrodollar system. As for stablecoin “solutions,” they discuss the supreme irony of a “e-coin” issued to enhance dollar and UST demand while the issuers themselves re-invest their stablecoin profits into gold itself…

The conversation turns to examples of open fictions as to the “data” central bankers and national leaders use to buy time, votes and faith in a debased monetary system that is little more than open robbery being hidden by increasing signs of digitalized centralization. Piepenburg also discusses the profound disconnect between ripping markets and struggling economies.

VonGreyerz.gold

********

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.