Markets Don’t Vote
Every election, investors predict that gold will either collapse or soar.
The short answer:
It doesn’t matter who wins. Since the year 2000, gold has risen under every president, Republican or Democrat, left or right, and through every midterm and presidential cycle in between.
Zoom out further: since 1971, gold has risen more than 11,000%.
This is not a new story.
For thousands of years, rulers have debased their currencies, from Roman emperors shrinking the silver in the denarius to kings clipping their own coins. Only the faces on the money changed; the pattern never did.
Warren Buffett, summing up the idea of his teacher Benjamin Graham, explained why:
“In the short run, the market is a voting machine … but in the long run, the market is a weighing machine.”
Elections are votes. Gold is weighed.
Speedy Gonzales and the National Debt
If you want to picture the US national debt, think of Speedy Gonzales:
The fastest mouse in all Mexico.
He doesn’t slow down for a new administration.
He doesn’t care about the party in the White House.
Every year the debt climbs higher and the deficit gets bigger, and Speedy gets even speedier, racing through every campaign promise and every “balanced budget” pledge, leaving a little cloud of dust behind him.
“I am not worried about the deficit. It is big enough to take care of itself.”
— Ronald Reagan, in one of his famous one-liners
The punchline is that every president is Speedy Gonzales when it comes to debt: whoever takes office, the debt gets higher and higher, and the dust cloud is paid for in dollars that buy a little less every year. And Speedy is only warming up.
The Race Gets Faster
To see how fast a runner like that can get, consider an old legend.
It tells of a king who offered a man any reward he wished.
The man asked for one grain of rice on the first square of a chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, doubling on every square.
For a long while the king smiled, because the numbers were tiny.
By the last square, he owed more rice than the world has ever grown.
Hemingway captured the feeling in a single line:
“Gradually, then suddenly.”
Debt behaves the same way.
The debt does not grow in a straight line; it grows exponentially.
The more debt there is, the more interest it costs, and the more must be borrowed to pay that interest.
The currency depreciation that follows is likely to accelerate too.
Gold’s rise is not a prediction about one election or one party. It is the mirror image of that process, and there is little reason to think a change of president will end it.
Suddenly: The Age of Unpredictability
What is new is the erratic behavior.
Governments have become wildly unpredictable: alliances shift overnight, rules change without warning, and what was unthinkable yesterday becomes policy today.
“Suddenly,” as Hemingway put it, now arrives faster than anyone plans for.
France is a striking example: it recently completed moving the last of its gold from the New York Fed to Paris. Whatever the official reasons, it shows that where gold sits is a decision even governments take seriously.
So Where You Store Your Gold Matters Most
If governments can change their minds overnight, the question for you is no longer whether gold goes up or down.
Its long-term rise has not depended on who is in office.
What matters is how and where you hold it.
Store it outside your own country, directly under your own ownership, and fully insured.
Politicians will come and go, and the debt keeps sprinting, but your gold should sit somewhere that does not depend on any of them.
Jan Baltensweiler
jan.baltensweiler@vongreyerz.gold | +41 44 213 62 45
VON GREYERZ AG has earned the trust of HNWIs and investors in over 90 countries, specializing in the secure, fully segregated gold storage of physical gold—entirely outside the banking system.