The gold reserves of Italy and France have each risen in value by roughly $85bn (£65) over the last two years. Lucky them.
The Italians never accepted the “end of history” ideology, the beguiling notion at the end of the Cold War that there were no longer serious enemies and that bullion had become superfluous, a barbarous relic in a globalist age of financial sophistication.
This realism is rooted in hard experience. Italy entered the Second World War with depleted gold reserves, and quickly came to regret it. The country’s post-war gold was used as collateral for an emergency loan from the Bundesbank in the 1970s, and was later used to shoehorn the soft lira into union with the hard D-Mark.
The Bank of France did sell 589 tonnes during the false calm of the early 2000s for a pittance, but kept the lion’s share.