Ronald-Peter Stöferle — $8,900 Gold Is Now the BASE CASE, $20,000 Is Possible, But Here's Where the Real Opportunity Lies

3:40 "Creeping remonetization" — gold regaining monetary status by function, not decree

• The 20th In Gold We Trust report's central claim: gold is gradually regaining monetary significance, driven first by the global south — emerging-market central banks and citizens used to high inflation and weak currencies, for whom gold is "the foundation of their portfolios," not a satellite.
• Western institutions still dismiss it ("it's one investment, it's gone up, it's a bubble, it doesn't pay interest") but are "very late in the game" starting to accept that a monetary reorganization is coming.

6:26 Back to the Monetary Future — Doc Brown and the "closet gold bugs"

• The title is a Marty McFly / DeLorean analogy: to understand the present and the future you have to understand history, and history says gold works its way back into the monetary system.
• Three to five years ago the hard-asset-backing argument got "what are those guys smoking?"; now a growing group of "closet gold bugs" concede the system is rotten — and recent Treasury moves are "confirmation signs that we're getting closer to the endgame."

8:37 The six vectors of remonetization

• Reserves · private & institutional demand · balance-sheet recapitalization · anchoring · accumulation · digitalization — and crucially "it is actually kind of a loop… those vectors are reinforcing each other," which is why he insists on viewing gold from several angles at once.

9:04 Vector 1, reserves: 2022 is when the playbook changed

• The historically tight correlation between gold and the direction of real yields broke in 2022 — the moment central banks everywhere began buying aggressively.
• Three consecutive years above 1,000 tonnes; last year "only" 860 t but a record in dollar terms; China bought 40+ t in June alone, so 2026 should land at 800–1,000 t again. The World Gold Council survey found no central banker planning to sell.
• They are also repatriating — a second confirmation that official attitudes toward gold have changed completely.

10:28 The stolen-credit-card problem — why gold and not euros, yen or francs

• If the US and EU can immobilize $350bn of Russian reserves "with the stroke of a pen," every other reserve holder needs a plan B — one that is liquid, globally accepted, neutral, un-inflatable, tight-spread and transferable.
• Hence gold rather than other fiat currencies. His image for central-bank buying: the German tourist rising at 6 a.m. to reserve his sunbed with towels — reserving a seat at the poker table "where the big guys are playing with golden chips" (US 8,000 t, euro system 12,000+ t, IMF 3,000+ t; China, India, Turkey and the Arab region buying their entrance ticket).

16:22 De-treasurization comes before de-dollarization

• Central banks are buying fewer and fewer Treasuries and gold has overtaken them as the second reserve asset by dollar value — the sequence he has always argued for.
• On Bessent's "economic D-Day" against Iran: he doesn't expect the secondary sanctions to work (Iran has lived with them 40+ years and will simply be pushed closer to China and Russia); each new round tightens the Russia–China–India bloc.

20:36 Four consensus assumptions that are extremely vulnerable

• The market currently believes: (1) no economic slowdown, (2) no Fed hikes, (3) no cuts to AI spending, (4) no real political upset before the US midterms.
• "The consensus… is extremely vulnerable, and Donald Trump obviously knows that" — which is why he reads the September 24th Xi Jinping meeting as being conducted from weakness, not strength (China ran down its oil reserves rather than importing, keeping crude calm).

22:42 Not a de-dollarization maximalist — gold is the profiteer of the split

• The dollar's importance has decreased but "it hasn't really collapsed yet," and the US plays sticks-and-carrots (access to its capital and credit markets) well.
• The world splitting into "team USA" and "team China/Russia/Iran" is precisely what creates demand for a neutral settlement asset for monetary communication between the blocks — the biggest beneficiary is gold, not the yuan.

27:12 Bessent the gold bug — a "Bretton Woods moment" he wants to be part of

• Bessent traded alongside Soros, knows Druckenmiller, knows monetary history — and his largest private position is gold; colleagues used to call him a gold bug. He has said a Bretton Woods realignment is coming in Trump's second term and he wants a seat at the table.
• Stöferle reads the "why would I want to blow up the global financial system?" line as media management, not a slip: "I wouldn't overreact to that kind of wording." The gold-bug fact is "much much more interesting than those threats against Iran."

30:29 Vector 4, anchoring: Judy Shelton's 50-year gold-convertible Treasury bond

• The report carries a fresh interview with Shelton (also interviewed in 2017) — one of the very few well-connected economists who "get gold." Her proposal: issue a $1–2bn notional 50-year gold-convertible bond and see whether the market likes it.
• It didn't arrive on July 4th as some expected. Gold-backed sovereign bonds are not new historically and could work — "but I think the more turmoil we're seeing in fixed income markets globally, the more realistic it's going to become."

31:43 "Scare your investors out of bonds" — repression and capital controls ahead

• The mentor's post-it note is finally coming true: sticky inflation, unsustainable debt, and a dynamic that "will lead to much much more financial repression, capital controls."
• The 1940s playbook — several years of >3% negative real yields — is the only solution governments have, "but it doesn't really work." The French-vs-German spread already shows enormous distrust; Bessent's buyback "special operation" achieved the opposite of calming markets.

36:14 Don't fight the Treasury — and who is actually more powerful

• Expects "some sort of yield curve control" to be implemented, and expects the market to test both the Treasury and the Fed.
• "We used to say don't fight the Fed, but perhaps we should talk about not fighting the Treasury… Who's more powerful, Scott Bessent or Kevin Warsh?" The renminbi and the yen strengthening against the dollar are the tell that markets are not calmed.
• Precedent: at the end of the 1970s, when the world lost trust in the US, the Treasury had to issue bonds in Swiss francs and Deutsche Marks.

38:21 Vector 2: the largest institutional demand gap in monetary history

• Family offices 2–3% (a UBS study), pension funds under 2%, insurers and generalists indifferent — "that's not a hedge, that's actually pocket change."
• Where does future demand come from? Fixed income — still the largest liquid asset class at $150tn+. US inflation has been above the 2% target for ~65 months while the Fed hunts for reasons to cut; when the 60/40 stops working because stocks and bonds are positively correlated, gold is the diversifier that does the job.
• Western ETF flows are still procyclical (they dumped ETFs into the correction, back to square one) while Chinese and Indian ETF demand rose countercyclically; a "very powerful buyer, probably from China," showed up at $4,000.

40:41 The new 60/40 goes mainstream — Morgan Stanley's 60/20/20

• Incrementum has pushed a "new 60/40" for years; now Morgan Stanley's CIO is talking about 60% equities / 20% bonds / 20% gold. "That's not little Incrementum, that's Morgan Stanley."

43:06 The tell that it's still early: Swiss pension funds want to sell

• Smaller Swiss pension funds holding 2–4% gold approached him wanting to reduce — "this is not the behavior that you usually see at the end of a big secular bull market."
• His placement: halftime / "fifth or sixth innings," not the beginning and not the end.

47:08 The optimal gold allocation is 14–18%

• Not a YouTube forecaster — Incrementum publishes a daily NAV, so risk gets managed: their paper puts the optimum for a traditional portfolio at 14–18%. Two or 3% "doesn't move the needle"; 30–40% introduces a different risk set.
• The yield objection is answered by the 9% CAGR since 1971 and +64% last year. "Gold can have a down year… gold is not the solution to all of our problems" — and being pro-gold is not being anti-equities.

49:18 Safety gold vs performance gold

• Safety gold = physical metal stored in a safe jurisdiction, ideally outside the banking system: a buy-and-hold asset you leave to your children, never actively timed.
• Performance gold = mining equities and silver: "I lost lots of hair over the last couple of years" — top-down metal risk plus geological, management, ESG and energy-cost risk. Not a buy-and-hold sector; it has to be actively timed.

50:35 The full allocation — and why gold and Bitcoin belong together

• 14–18% safety gold + 10% performance gold (miners and silver) + 10% commodities + 5% Bitcoin + roughly 15% fixed income as a stabilizer (EM local currency and corporates, not developed-market government debt).
• Two Incrementum funds combine gold and Bitcoin: "excellent risk numbers, excellent Sharpe ratios… I know that many people hate Bitcoin in the gold scene and many people hate gold in the Bitcoin scene."
• Live result: the new 60/40 has outperformed the traditional 60/40 by more than 25 percentage points over two years.

52:32 Dow theory — we are in the public-participation phase

• He skipped the CFA for the CMT (Chartered Market Technician) and leans on Charles Dow's three phases of a secular trend.
• Accumulation (only diehard contrarians; the cocktail party says "how can you buy gold?") — left behind over the last few quarters. Public participation (media interest, product launches, career-risk-averse Wall Street analysts writing the trend; the party now says "gold is interesting, you should have 1–2%") — "we're like in the second part of this stage." Distribution/parabolic (contrarians sell to dumb money; the party says take out a mortgage and bet the farm on Latin American and West African juniors) — not yet.

56:17 Two reasons the top isn't in — and where the real mania will happen

• No crazy M&A yet. Balance sheets are pristine, free cash flow is ridiculous, shareholder value is being created, management is conservative. The ending signal is reckless M&A at high premiums — "then it will be time to say goodbye, but it's not yet."
• The gold/silver ratio is nowhere near a top. The last two secular bull markets ended with it at 15–20; silver has outperformed some, but not like that.
• The genuine mania, when it comes, will be in the junior mining space — after years of no capex, an ESG-driven institutional boycott, and countries only now waking up to strategic-metal security.

59:46 $4,800 became $8,900 — climbing monetary Mount Everest

• The 2020 "golden decade" report set a $4,800-by-2030 base case (widely called crazy at the time) and a stagflation case of $8,900. Gold hit the base case years early, so $8,900 is now the base case.
• The model deliberately stays simple — monetary growth is the dominant driver — because his bank colleagues' PhD models "didn't really work in real time."
• The image: ~$4,000 was base camp after a +64% year that had to be digested; Everest is 8,849 m against an $8,900 target — "we're setting the stage for the next part of this expedition."

1:03:29 Why $15,000–$20,000 isn't crazy — the revaluation option

• A US revaluation to current prices is "a topic that has become a little bit more mainstream" (there was even a Federal Reserve study) and would be a >$1tn accounting windfall — which does not fix the fiscal problem. "But if we revalue 10,000, 15,000, 20,000, yes, it solves a lot of problems. It also creates other problems."
• The complacency check: ask 100 people in the west where gold is trading and ~95 couldn't say — at almost $5,000. In India or China the answer is different. Same as 1980, when $850 gold sounded like world war and riots.

1:05:15 Vector 3: the silent recapitalization already under way

• The Deutsche Bundesbank treats its gold revaluation as quasi-equity — nearly €400bn of revaluation profits across the euro system, with a €1.3tn surplus account.
• "Politicians and central bankers, at least the smart ones, actually know what a rising gold price does to the system — that it's silently recapitalizing the system."
• Vector 5, accumulation: the "gold-light" countries — Australia, especially Canada, perhaps Japan — will at some point start buying physical.

1:07:22 Vector 6, digitalization: tokenized gold repackages, it doesn't replace

• Tokenized gold's appeal is as the anti-CBDC: neutral and censorship-resistant instead of programmable and surveillable. But the token market cap is only $6–7bn (up ~5× in 24 months) — "tokenize everything" is a solution for a problem that doesn't really exist (cf. tokenized real estate and Van Gogh paintings).
• The part that matters is the physical demand behind it: Tether is now a significant buyer, vaulting metal outside the banking system in the Swiss mountains (the report has an exclusive with Tether's Juan Sartori). Note the irony the host draws — the largest stablecoin issuer, sold as a Treasury-demand story, is converting that money into gold.

1:11:49 The miners' hidden option — their own decks don't believe the bull market

• "Not even in the gold mining space do management teams actually believe in this bull market" — long-term assumptions in company decks still sit around $2,000–$2,400 gold, so there is "kind of a hidden option on the balance sheets."
• The honest caveat: since 1971 physical gold has beaten mining stocks significantly. Timed right, though, the miners are "gold on steroids."

1:12:35 Newmont's all-time high and the cash-flow case

• Newmont is one of the best-performing S&P 500 stocks and just made new all-time highs — the generalists are arriving and, as always, chasing the most liquid names first.
• Free cash flow last year: Newmont $7.3bn, Agnico $4.5bn, Barrick ~$4bn, up more than 200%; energy-cost inflation back under control; the sector is now net cash and allocating capital smartly.

1:14:09 GDM at 13× vs the S&P at 28

• Valuation: PE 13 for the GDM gold-miners index against 28 for the S&P 500, with better price/cash-flow and price/sales, a 54% gross margin and a 56% EBITDA margin. Current ratio, net debt/EBIT and debt/EV all compare favorably to the index.
• "The sector is at its healthiest as I've ever seen it." He runs an active gold-mining fund and sees clients warming up but not yet committing.

1:16:14 What gold spares its owners — the via-negativa case

• Michael Weeks (son-in-law of Tony Deden): "the value of gold is not what it promises, but what it spares its owners" — a Nassim Taleb-style via negativa.
• No duration risk, no credit risk, no liquidity risk, no balance sheet that can implode, no cash flows to dry up, no management misallocating capital, no counterparty's goodwill required. "You just need a secure storage location. That's basically it."

1:18:13 The corporate gold standard — miners should keep 5–10% of production

• The report chapter ("The Product Is the Solution"), developed with Chris Ritchie of Silvercrest: if gold is the hedge against fiat, why does a producer sell every ounce for fiat? Retaining 5–10% of output as bullion on the balance sheet "will make a difference" — to investors and to the balance sheet — and a first mover gets a competitive advantage. Rob McEwen is one of the very few already doing it.
• The industry's reputation problem starts with communication: "if you can't convince them, confuse them" slide decks full of geological terms and drill results that generalists — who are not geologists — cannot read.

1:21:33 What actually brings the generalists back: hard numbers

• Not narrative — appearing on generalist value screens, then communicating and delivering what management promised, and rebuilding trust.
• Anecdote: the man at a birthday party whose portfolio was full of Agnico, Franco-Nevada, Wheaton and smaller producers turned out to run a deep-value fund, not a mining fund — gold equities screened attractive both absolutely and relative to the hot sectors.
• Reality check: he's heading to the Precious Metals Summit and Denver Gold in Colorado, where "every year people say, well, now the generalists are finally coming. So far, we haven't really seen them" — hopefully not Waiting for Godot.

1:24:28 The bear case — what would derail the gold thesis

• Fiscal policy changing completely, genuinely conservative policy, and a political reversal — plus really aggressive rate hikes, "because we just cannot afford it anymore" at current bond-market stress levels.
• On the Fed: everybody called Kevin Warsh a hawk, "but so far, no, he isn't" — and there was a reason Trump chose him. Warsh is "actually trapped."
• He insists he is not a pessimist — there is a way out — but the visible path is more financial repression and capital controls funnelling capital into fixed income where it would not otherwise go.

1:27:10 Supply-side existential threats and the Lindy effect

• Space mining (a report chapter two years ago) can't be ruled out but is prohibitively expensive; deep-sea mining is the more interesting one, and not only for gold. "There's so much gold around, it's just a question of how much does it cost to get it out of the ground."
• Against a 5,000-year track record — the Lindy effect, centuries of trial and error — "the threats to fiat currencies are significantly higher than the threats to gold."

1:29:34 Twenty years out — the west's "emerging-marketization"

• Studying gold means studying everything — rates, inflation, geopolitics, de-dollarization. He expects a reorganization of the monetary system within 20 years with gold playing a major role, though possibly gradual rather than a big-bang Bretton Woods conference.
• The best audiences are in Turkey and other high-inflation countries where gold is the portfolio foundation. His forecast: developed markets increasingly behave like emerging markets while emerging-market capital markets behave like developed ones — and the western perception of gold changes completely.

1:32:54 Where the research lives

• Incrementum: incrementum.li, a boutique asset manager in Liechtenstein — "one of I think only five countries globally without any debt."
• ingoldwetrust.report carries this year's 480-page edition, a compact version, every previous edition, monthly chartbooks and special publications — all free. He posts macro and charts on X as @RonStoeferle.