With every data release - no matter how 'juked' by the statisticians - it becomes more painfully obvious that the developed economies of the West will not be able to generate sufficient economic growth to service their accumulated debts and maintain generous welfare provisions, so something will have to give. Possibly both. Desperate administrations are responding to this end-of-empire moment by ever more desperate attempts to reflate, primarily by the politically expedient route of money printing. Forty years after President Nixon took the US dollar off gold, the marginal investor is increasingly keen on getting back on, because gold is the last true haven against currency debauchery. A debt-based monetary system cannot survive widespread default, at least by conventional means (repudiation), so bond market investors in fundamentally less creditworthy sovereign markets will have their wealth appropriated by inflation instead. Investors flocking into conventional Gilts and US Treasuries are going to be horribly burned; it is only a question of when.