Incrementum’s Stoeferle on The Big Long
- 1 June 2025
Michael Burry and Steve Eisman are not heavily into gold at the moment – physical or paper – but then, says Incrementum managing partner Ronald-Peter Stoeferle, “somebody told me there’s actually more people in the United States that believe that Elvis is still alive than people that actually own any physical gold”.
Two of the central characters in Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, which became a hit 2015 movie about the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and contrarian investors who profited from it, Burry and Eisman are (apparently) among Western financiers who continue to shun the yellow metal, though the former’s Scion Asset Management reportedly checked in and out of a Sprott gold trust last year.
Stoeferle, the Austrian economist and managing partner at Incrementum AG, has been out selling the firm’s latest annual In Gold We Trust report, released in May.
The 2025 edition has the sub-title, “The Big Long”, which Stoeferle says pays homage to The Big Short and the unorthodox beliefs of its protagonists who effectively shorted public trust in major banks at the centre of the GFC. Interestingly, Burry recently quit a lot of Scion’s equity holdings in what some have reported as alarm about US debt levels and increasing economic instability.
Stoeferle, co-author of In Gold We Trust, writes about fears of a breakdown and reset of the world’s “old monetary order” spurring reserve bank buying of gold and has spoken about a “bear market in credibility and trust … in politics, in the media, in our monetary system, in science”.
He says fear and mistrust have been part of the “perfect storm” for gold, which has seen the metal’s average price nearly double since Incrementum used the 2020 version of In Gold We Trust to forecast a golden decade ahead. “Back then people said, what are those guys drinking or smoking or doing?” Stoeferle says they’re doing the same thing now, with Incrementum maintaining faith in a 2030 gold price range of US$4800-to-$8900 an ounce
Incrementum came up with a “very simple monetary model for gold, because we regard gold as a monetary asset”, with physical demand growth, including central bank stocking, a major driver. “But also what we call, let's say, the trust level in our monetary system,” Stoeferle says.
“Those are basically the two drivers of this model. And on the base case of our projection we’ll see $4800 by the end of this decade. We also have a more optimistic model, which says in an inflationary environment where M2 [money supply] grows more aggressively … then we would come up at $8900 by the end of this decade.
“Now this also sounds pretty outrageous. However, if we compare the market cap of gold to the market cap of US equities we're only slightly above very long-term averages. We’re far away from levels that we’ve seen in 2011 and even further away from levels in the 1930s [and] 1940s and at the beginning of the 1980s.
“We’ve seen gold at an average 45% backing of the monetary base. [It was] 130% in 1980. Now we are around 16%.
“Gold is not super cheap anymore; it’s reasonably priced.
“So I think there’s still lots of leeway for gold if this monetary renaissance that we’re forecasting is really going to play out.”
Stoeferle says while a long position on gold can no longer be regarded as contrarian, he’s still seeing much more hesitancy in the west than the east: “Western financial investors haven't really caught up yet. I think they completely missed the gold party last year. I think that the market in the Western world is still climbing this wall of worry [about buying into gold at historically elevated prices].
“We know that emerging markets are hoarding gold like squirrels preparing for winter.
“And we know that there’s also this enormous trend of gold repatriation happening and we’ve seen the US recently importing more than 2000 tonnes of gold. So if you connect the dots it’s pretty obvious that something big is going on behind the scene.
“[But] is it a crowded trade yet? I don't think so.”
In Gold We Trust: The Big Long can be found at ingoldwetrust.report
Ronnie Stoeferle is a regular speaker at Resourcing Tomorrow in London and will be on stage at this year’s event, December 2-4.
