However, there is a parallel explanation. Covid finally broke our spendthrift governments. The talk in hedge fund land is that some big beasts are taking bets against “fiscal dominance” across the West.

It is a collective judgment that too many countries have pushed public debt beyond 100pc of GDP and beyond the point of no return under prevailing economic ideologies and political regimes. Budget deficits have broken out of historical ranges and are running at structurally untenable levels for this stage of the cycle. 

Central banks will bottle it – under this scenario – in order to mop up issuance of treasury bonds. They will let inflation run hot to help states whittle down debts by stealth default. You might argue that this is what they already did by letting rip with extreme money creation during the pandemic.

The Bank of Japan is refusing to raise rates above zero or halt bond purchases even though core inflation is 2.8pc and the Rengo wage round is running at 5.2pc. This is what a debt trap looks like. With a debt-to-GDP ratio above 260pc, Japan cannot return to sound money without risking a fiscal crisis.

Olivier Blanchard, global debt guru and former IMF chief economist, once told me how this would unfold by the mid-2020s. “One day the BoJ may get a call from the finance ministry saying please think about us – it is a life or death question – and keep rates at zero for a bit longer,” he said. 

The European Central Bank is also in a debt trap. It continued to buy buckets of Club Med bonds even when inflation was over 10pc. This was patently a fiscal rescue for semi-solvent states. The ECB has backed off for now but will be forced to shield Italy again with fiscal transfers disguised as QE in the next downturn.

The Fed has largely monetised the Trump-Biden jumbo deficits. It now faces an invidious choice: either it stays the course against inflation, at the risk of a US funding crisis, a commercial property/banking crisis, and recession, all ending in a return to QE and fiscal dominance; or it cuts rates hard and fast before inflation is under control, also ending in fiscal dominance. Is gold sniffing this out?

Of course, the gold spike may be nothing more than wolf pack speculation by funds orchestrating a squeeze on bullion shorts through the options market, knowing that this sets off a self-fueling feedback loop. If so, the rally will short-circuit soon enough.

My bet is that a big animal with a Chinese accent is bracing for geopolitical or monetary disorder on a traumatic scale.