It is a year now since Mario Draghi, the euro's bank manager, improvised a promise to do everything it took to hold his currency together. In that time, although Europe's economic troubles have worsened, he has been able to keep his promise, or his bluff has not been called. Perhaps he has taken his cue from Otmar Emminger, late of the Bundesbank, who defined an optimistic central banker as one who believed that the world was coming to pieces, but slowly. 

In that time, too, investors have become more reconciled to risk. As their search for income widens and intensifies, they have returned to some fallen favourites, and are even flirting with junk bonds. Share prices in London, New York and Tokyo have gone steaming ahead. After all, that newly-printed money has had to find a home somewhere.

No one who wants more income buys gold. Like a house, gold does not generate income — though, like a house, it can be rented out for profit. No one buys gold to feed an appetite for risk. Gold comes into its own when risks are real and immediate. So the market in gold, as its veterans say, can be quiescent for long periods and then burst into life. It reacts to the Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times.

One specific risk has been with us ever since Mahmoud's fateful invention. The printers of money will always be tempted to abuse their monopolies. They can set out as a matter of policy to make it lose some of its purchasing power — for the pound, in theory, at present, a loss of 2 per cent every year. So governments can sit and watch as their liabilities are inflated away. This can work wonders.