At first glance, this is curious. As an investment proposition, the gold price tends mainly to reflect interest rate and inflation expectations. There is no dividend or coupon on gold, so when interest rates are high it loses its relative attractiveness.
Over the past two to three years, however, the gold price has almost entirely decoupled from this relationship, surging anew right through a period of strongly rising interest rates.
Something much more fundamental is at work here, and primarily it is about gold as a safe haven alternative to the dollar in troubled times.
The big buyers of recent years have been emerging market central banks, and just recently particularly China, which has increased its gold reserves by an astonishing 316 tonnes, or 16pc, over the last 18 months alone.
In doing so, China has highlighted an historic misjudgement by the presiding UK chancellor of the time, Gordon Brown – the sale some 25 years ago of around half the nation’s gold reserves at rock-bottom prices.
In mitigation, it should be pointed out that thanks to the wonders of compound interest, the computed net loss on those sales relative to the price today is not quite as disastrous as it seems, with the proceeds instead invested in interest bearing securities.
All the same, the price of bullion has risen nearly 12-fold since then, so there is no quarrelling with the notion that this was an extremely poor decision.
At that point, the trend among Western central banks was very much to diversify away from gold into a portfolio of foreign exchange alternatives.
Subject to decay, expensive to keep, and no longer the linchpin of the international financial system, gold seemed to have had its time.
One of the founders of the IMF, the British economist John Maynard Keynes, in 1924 called the prevailing system for maintaining currency stability – the gold standard – a “barbaric relic”.