According to your report “Rich countries plan to buy more gold despite surge in prices to record levels” (June 19) it would seem advanced economies are now behaving much like Russian aristocrats or British buccaneers.
Banknotes can be inflated by a crooked government exactly as milk is diluted by a crooked milkman. So in books by great Russian authors only a thoroughbred racehorse is sold for gold or silver roubles while a hack or jade (broken-down horse) is sold for cash.
As a Russian, reading that our builders occasionally found coins hidden while renovating old mansions, I remember the pirates in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island whose loot was in “doubloons and double guineas and moidores and sequins . . .”
If one wants undiluted milk, buying a cow and milking it is the only possible belt and braces approach.
And if a stable reserve currency is what you want living in a huge country mainly unchanged since the Pleistocene, then extracting gold is the answer.
And that’s what Russia is doing.
Mergen Mongush
Moscow, Russia
