Central banks’ purchases and repatriation of gold are on the rise, and both should be viewed as a symptom of deglobalization. They signal the advent of a more geopolitically fragmented world in which cross-border transactions of all kinds are poised to become more difficult and costly.
NEW YORK—Gold may be a “barbarous relic,” as John Maynard Keynes once observed, but it remains the relic of choice among central banks. Emerging-market central banks have been loading up on gold reserves ever since the 2008 global financial crisis, more than doubling their holdings. Does the anomalous behavior of gold prices since the outbreak of the war with Iran call this strategy into question, or is something else going on?
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