The turbulences of the last four years turned gold into a last resort. However, the financial innovation, widely practiced by large transnational financial institutions and central banks, calls into question the certainties offered by the papers based on the precious metal and brings the physical gold into spotlight. Lehman Brothers or Greece are only two of the milestones that marked the gold road during the past decade, from less than 400$ to more than 1900$ an ounce. The subprime crisis and the sovereign debt madness are only the peak of the last twenty years in which relaxing the monetary policy, printing money or injecting liquidity into markets were widely used as stimuli for the economy and as a support for stock markets.

In light of this, the gold transformed, slowly but surely, from a commodity to a last resort asset for investors and a supreme reference point for worldwide currencies. This is the reason why, over the last four years of crisis, almost every speech held by Ben Bernanke regarding the necesity of maintaining the interest rates at historically low levels was a new impetus for the growth of the precious metal; this is, actually, the explanation for the fact that the two installments of cheap money offered by the European Central Bank to the commercial banks from the eurozone in the last four months were followed, each of them, by a sprint of the gold price.