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$5,000 Gold, Rising Yields & the Collapse of Trust

February 4, 2026

Matthew Piepenburg, Partner at VON GREYERZ, explains why the current surge in gold ($5,000+) and silver ($100+) is a symptom of a much deeper, worldwide problem – the accelerating loss of trust in sovereign debt and the fiat currencies which artificially sustain the same.

Speaking with Kitco News at VRIC 2026 in Vancouver, Piepenburg examines the warning signs now emerging across global bond markets. Rising yields in Japan, the US and Europe, even as central banks intervene, signal that sovereign IOUs are being quietly repriced. What has long been labelled “risk-free-return” is increasingly revealing itself as return-free-risk.

These developments are not isolated events. They are the inevitable consequence of decades of debt accumulation, monetary expansion and deliberate currency debasement. Physical gold’s rise is therefore not speculative excess, but the market’s inevitable response to a system stretched beyond its limits.

As trust in paper promises continues to deteriorate, central banks are repositioning gold not as a currency for spending, but as a neutral settlement asset that mitigates counterparty risk with greater trust and value than paper currencies and promises.

This interview explores why the bond market (not equity indices) is the true signal investors should watch, and why physical gold is once again emerging as the ultimate form of wealth preservation.

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.