Disinflation and the spikes
Viktor Shvets says technology pulls inflation down and policy stacks it back up. Gold fell more than 25% in the Iran war. Neither fact settles the regime.
Gold corrected more than 25% during the Iran war, Viktor Shvets told Macro Voices. Investors who wanted liquidity went to dollars and Treasuries. That is not what a war hedge is supposed to do.
Shvets’s split, from one Macro Voices conversation, is that the fall was not a regime change. The long-run backdrop is technological disinflation. Every product, he says, finds a zero-marginal-cost curve. Kevin Warsh and Scott Bessent are right about that backdrop. The inflation people feel is a stack of policy spikes sitting on top of it: COVID, Russia and Ukraine, Iran, chaotic trade, immigration.
The backdrop is disinflationary, but we’re creating spikes.
Viktor Shvets, Macro Voices, August 2026
Stop creating the spikes, on this telling, and disinflation reasserts. Transient stacked on transient can still feel permanent in a business plan. Shvets’s own 2026 stagflation call is the easy misread: he treats it as spikes on a disinflation backdrop, not as a new inflation regime.
He still calls gold “the ultimate safety asset in a case of an absolute destruction” — a reset hedge, not a war hedge. A reset hedge is unfalsifiable until a reset. The dated observation is the Iran correction. The next geopolitical spike is the test: if gold then outperforms dollars and Treasuries the way the simple war-hedge rule predicted, this split is in trouble. If core inflation unanchors in surveys and in 5y5y and 10-year swaps at the same time, and stays there after the spikes stop, the backdrop itself is in trouble.