As Jayant Bhandari observed in his Precious Metals Investment Symposium presentation, India is a negative-yielding economy, with nominal yields on property and stocks below the 10 year government bond (even cows return -6% assuming zero labour costs). In such an environment, a zero-yielding asset like gold is better than a negative yielding asset.

The Indian government’s gold monetisation schemes, however, are more about addressing the symptom rather than the disease, which is the lack of trust in “payback”. Jayant says that high levels of corruption, superstition and irrationality in India “discourages accumulation of financial and intellectual capital”. But dealing with that, I guess, is a lot harder than trying to hoodwink “its population to take a leap of faith on the trust front”.