Few commentators are aware that the dynamics leading to an inevitable collapse of credit are increasing. When these dynamics begin to unfurl, there is bound to be a global rush out of fiat credit into gold. This is why prescient central banks have been accumulating bullion.

This week, the more observant among us will have detected a fork in the road of credit creation. Major nations are now officially in recession, suggesting that interest rates should be reduced according to the Keynesian playbook. But inflation is showing signs of rising again, mandating the opposite. These are a rerun of the conditions which discredited Keynesianism in the 1970s, leading to a common description of something that was to statist economists impossible: stagflation.

The only reason that the US is not in an official recession is the massive amounts of government spending in excess of tax revenue: in other words, it is printing its way out of recession. Inevitably, this will continually undermine the dollar's purchasing power even further, an effect which feeds into the inflation pipeline. Any hopes of a sustainable reduction in interest rates can be dismissed on these grounds alone.