Kenneth Rogoff, the Harvard economist, has been arguing that emerging markets should shift a chunk of their official reserves away from dollars into gold.

His reasoning is that emerging markets as a group are competing for rich-country bonds, which is driving the interest rates they receive exceptionally low. At the same time, rich-country governments are so heavily indebted they cannot increase the supply of IOUs significantly. So bond prices cannot be expected to appreciate much further. Gold, despite being in close-to fixed supply, does not suffer from this problem, because there is no upper limit on its price. Mr Rogoff also believes a case can be made that gold is “an extremely low-risk asset” with average real returns comparable to very short-term debt.