When the markets are faltering, a certain silence descends upon a Mayfair wealth management office. No, phones don’t ring louder. The terminals on Bloomberg don’t flash any redder than normal. However, the discussions change. People begin discussing preservation instead of returns. If you’ve been around long enough, you’ll be able to identify this almost imperceptible shift in tone, much like a sailor can read the sky before a squall.
Whatever you interpret that term to mean, the elite have always viewed risk differently than the rest of us. They don’t actually worry about missing the next rally. The trapdoor—the SVB moment, the Lehman weekend, the COVID-shaped meteor that no one priced in—is what keeps them awake. As a result, the answers to the question of where money is truly safe—which has been the topic of discussion lately—are more bizarre and illuminating than the standard discussion of Treasuries.
| Category | Detail |
|---|---|
| Concept Origin | Black Swan Theory, coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
| Most Cited Modern Examples | 2008 financial crisis, COVID-19 pandemic, SVB collapse |
| Traditional Safe Havens | US Treasuries, German Bunds, physical gold, Swiss francs |
| Emerging Safe Havens | Farmland, fine art, watches, rare wine, private credit |
| Strategist Quoted in Source Material | Alberto Matellán, Mapfre Inversión |
| Average Allocation to “Protection” Assets (UHNW) | Reportedly 15–25% of portfolio |
| Authors of The Last Safe Investment | Bryan Franklin & Michael Ellsberg |
| Publisher | Portfolio / Penguin, January 2016 |
| Core Thesis of the Book | Invest in yourself, your skills, and your relationships |
| Current Investor Sentiment | Cautious; record cash holdings in money market funds |
The most obvious is gold, which central banks have been hoarding at a rate not seen in fifty years. This seems to be a silent vote of no confidence in something rather than merely hedging. To be precise, it depends on who you ask. Sovereign debt levels are mentioned by some. Some whisper about de-dollarization, but they don’t really believe it. The actual gold is kept in vaults in Zurich and London. It is sometimes transported by armored truck during the wee hours of the day, which seems almost theatrical until you consider the amount of weight involved.
The other peaceful sweetheart is farmland. The family offices that monitor these developments have observed that Bill Gates did not happen to become the largest private farmland owner in America by accident. During a banking crisis, land does not disappear. It creates food, which people obstinately still require. As this has developed over the past few years, it’s difficult to avoid seeing some sort of pre-industrial reasoning reappearing in extremely contemporary portfolios. The wealthy are purchasing dirt.
And then there’s the stranger stuff. uncommon wine. Patek Philippe timepieces. The value of a 1962 Ferrari doubled while the S&P had a rough afternoon. These are the resources that people do not post on LinkedIn. They are kept in temperature-controlled warehouses in Geneva freeports, which operate in a sort of legal limbo—technically outside the nation, unreported, and untaxed. This geography of wealth is an interesting phenomenon. Money is typically thought of as numbers on a screen. More and more, the extremely wealthy envision it as things, in rooms, behind doors.
The more difficult argument is that all of this is still missing the mark, as stated by Bryan Franklin and Michael Ellsberg in their book The Last Safe Investment years ago. They argued that a person’s abilities, connections, and ability to create value when systems falter are what make an asset truly resilient. When the book was released in 2016, it sounded somewhat Californian. Now it sounds less like that.
It’s remarkable how infrequently financial advisors bring this up. It’s unclear if the next black swan will show up in the upcoming quarter or decade. However, those who stand to lose the most appear to be simultaneously hedging across three dimensions: themselves, geographic dispersion, and hard assets. Most of us are still holding out hope that the index will continue to rise.