When The Facts Change....

In a World of Rising Uncertainty, Gold May Be the Last Safe Haven

Nathan Rothschild said in the 18th century...

“It takes a great deal of boldness and a great deal of caution to make a great fortune; and when you have got it, it takes ten times as much wit to keep it”.

Given the wealth destruction for most last week, these words are as true today as they were back then.

A very wise friend said to me yesterday that the tariff noise is distracting investors from the bigger truth.

That you can only get to run deficits and debts that the US has for so long. And they can only do so as long as they are trusted.

But when trust is broken, the emperor can be revealed to have no clothes. The out of control debts suddenly matter.

My wise friend observes that we have grown up in the West taking institutions and the rule of law for granted.

They are essential for securing high asset values and the willingness of banks to lend against these assets. Once trust in those institutions is eroded, everything is destabilised.

In hindsight, perhaps the ongoing strength of gold (real money), particularly in the last year, has been the 'canary in the coal mine'.

IF we are now entering a global recession, more money will have to be printed to save the bond mkt at the expense of the $, decreasing it’s purchasing power vs gold even further.

The gold price is reflecting this.

There is a reason so many central banks in the East have been buying selling treasuries and buying physical gold and continue to do so.

They have been, and are, taking a view on where the $ is going, and perhaps intentionally so by the Trump administration.

I’m obviously not smart enough to be able to predict the future, but what we do know from history is that all debt soaked nations eventually default or reset their monetary systems.

Who's to say that gold won’t be part of a new standard, a re-set monetary system? And that’s what all this is about? It’s just impossible to time or know what the catalyst is.

Scott Bessent, who understands gold fully, has already said he wants to monetise the asset side of the balance sheet, and gold is the obvious candidate.

In the meantime, investors aren’t hanging around to find out what’s next.

Capital controls? Financial repression?

Travelling in Switzerland all last week talking to clients and wealth managers, it’s clear already that a flood of HNW Americans are desperate to allocate part of their wealth offshore and out of the US into ‘safer' jurisdictions like Switzerland in case capital controls come in and financial repression takes hold.

For 25 years, VON GREYERZ has been helping clients protect their wealth by facilitating ownership of physical gold in their own name, with direct access, outside the banking system in the world’d most secure private vaults, located in the Swiss Alps.

Given the chronic under-ownership of the asset today, not only vs other asset classes but also vs history, and given what Liberation Day delivered, I suspect we may look back on that day as marking an important turning point.

I guess the question now is, given how quickly the world is being turned upside down, why wouldn’t you make an allocation to gold to try to protect your wealth?