Lyn Alden is a macro analyst and portfolio researcher who writes about monetary systems and long fiscal cycles. Luke Gromen runs a macroeconomic research firm focused on dollar dynamics and the mechanics of US sovereign debt. Doomberg writes on energy markets and industrial commodities, and has built one of the larger independent financial readerships in Europe and North America. They come from different disciplines, read different data, and speak to different audiences.
They keep arriving at the same conclusion.
Across their respective bodies of work in recent years, all three have been pointing toward physical, tangible assets as a rational structural position for the decade ahead. Not as a crisis trade or a contrarian bet, but as a direct consequence of how the financial system is currently configured and where supply and demand dynamics in physical markets are headed.
Alden: the five-decade debasement trade
Lyn Alden’s framework starts with a long arc. She describes the decades since 1971 as a single continuous debasement trade: a slow, structural erosion of currency purchasing power that was partly concealed by declining interest rates. When rates fall, bond prices rise and holders of financial assets feel wealthier in nominal terms even as the underlying currency weakens. That tailwind has now reversed.
The numbers are concrete. Sovereign bonds produced their worst five-year real return in over a century between 2020 and 2025. Nominal losses were painful enough; inflation-adjusted losses were worse still. Meanwhile, gold tripled over the same period. The US dollar depreciated roughly 10% against a basket of major currencies in the first half of 2025 alone.
Alden calls the current environment “fiscal dominance”: a regime in which government debt has grown large enough that monetary policy cannot easily contain inflation without making the debt-service burden unmanageable. In this environment, gradual currency debasement is not an accident. It is the pressure-release valve. The practical conclusion she draws is consistent: the assets most likely to hold purchasing power are hard and scarce ones. Things that cannot be manufactured by a policy decision.
Gromen: when foreign central banks stop buying
Luke Gromen frames the same situation through one data point that arrived in 2025: for the first time since 1995, foreign central banks collectively hold more of their reserves in gold than in US Treasury debt. For thirty years, automatic foreign demand for US government bonds suppressed borrowing costs and allowed fiscal deficits to run at levels that would otherwise have triggered inflation. That automatic demand has quietly shifted.
The underlying arithmetic is blunt. The US government is currently spending more than 100% of its tax receipts on entitlements and interest payments before a single dollar reaches anything discretionary. At those ratios, the only exit that avoids a sharp deflationary shock is persistent inflation: negative real interest rates that erode the debt load gradually while penalising holders of cash and bonds and rewarding holders of physical things.
Gromen reaches Alden’s destination by a different route. Real assets, commodities, and productive physical capacity are the assets that benefit from a world in which dollar dominance wanes and real rates stay negative.
Doomberg: supply does not lie
Doomberg approaches the same conclusion from the supply side rather than the monetary side. His focus is the physical economy: energy markets, industrial metals, and the infrastructure that moves both. Where monetary analysts point to debasement as the primary driver of real asset performance, Doomberg adds a second, independent layer: physical scarcity. That layer operates regardless of what central banks do.
The clearest current example is copper. Banks are projecting the largest copper supply deficit in 22 years in 2026, driven by rising demand from AI data centres, electrification, and industrial buildout, against a background of sustained underinvestment in new mine supply. A copper mine takes roughly a decade to develop from discovery to production. The deficit does not close in a cycle.
His broader observation is that the long period in which financial assets outperformed physical ones created systematic underinvestment in real productive capacity. That underinvestment is now showing up in supply tightness across energy infrastructure, industrial metals, and manufactured goods. The repricing is slow, structural, and largely independent of any central bank decision.
What the convergence means
Three independent analysts, three different starting points, one consistent direction. Physical assets have been systematically underpriced relative to financial ones, and the conditions driving that underpricing are ending. Alden’s debasement trade, Gromen’s gold-and-treasury reserve flip, and Doomberg’s supply scarcity argument are not the same claim made three times. They are independent observations from different vantage points that point at the same structural reality.
The practical implication extends beyond gold, which is where most coverage of this thesis stops. If anything produced by bounded physical inputs holds value better than anything produced by intelligence and labour, then energy storage systems, precision hand tools, repairable hardware, and the materials that go into manufactured goods all sit on the right side of the divide.
We have covered what that means for energy infrastructure in the energy sovereignty explainer, and the specific risk of owning hardware that depreciates on business timescales rather than physical ones in the deprecation-risk piece. The macro frame that Alden, Gromen, and Doomberg share is the foundation that connects those arguments.
The analysis has been consistent for years. The window in which physical things are still priced as if the old regime continues is the window this publication exists to help you use.
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