Gold, as those who have been pushing its price to record highs well know, is less wired into the wider economy than other potential investments. That’s why it appeals to rich, pessimistic stockpilers and jumpy central bankers. When some great collapse strikes our fragile interconnected world, and your bank accounts and tech stocks are just flickers on a dying iPhone, gold will endure. Hoarding it promises a safe haven in a dangerous world.

Or so it seems. But there are risks, too, in betting against the future. What looks like a haven may turn out to be a trap. In myth and literature, hoarding gold is consistently punished, in brutal, psychologically instructive ways.

Sometimes, your gold is simply stolen, as in Aesop’s fable. A miser (sorry, high net worth individual) excavates his treasure daily, counts it, and reburies it. When it’s taken, he’s distraught. But a passer-by throws a stone in the hole, telling him that, given he was never going to spend his gold, the stone will be worth just as much. And theft can bring salvation: in George Eliot’s 1861 novel Silas Marner, the miser is a wronged man who has soured on the world — until his hard-won hoard is stolen. In its place, a golden-haired child arrives, and rescues him from his misanthropy.