Why I keep my stash in a tin in the garden

Oh boy, can't you just smell the patchouli-scented reek of revolution in the air? As the leaves in southern gardens start to fall, the rising sap of spring is beginning to galvanise the salary slaves of the Mediterranean.

Can't wait. It's been a long time since we saw a righteous uprising.

There is no fun in waving banners and throwing Molotov cocktails when your tail is freezing. You could see the news from Syntagma Square dry up as winter drove in to the heart of Greece. Now, with the whiff of summer, Athens can look forward to a fresh assault.

Why not just Greece? Hell, the boulevards of Paris, Madrid, Lisbon, Rome and London could do with a spot of ritual cleansing, mobs running riot - heaven knows, the fat suits in charge of the Western economy and government deserve public disembowelment. If ever there was a case for a proletarian revolt, decades of their mendacity provides it in spades.

Naturally, we speak here with the autumnal peace that comes with a manageable budget deficit and a crew of technocrats who mean business. Did you see the picture of Pravin Gordhan and his Treasury and Revenue Service team marching to Parliament on Wednesday? Yeah! I like those guys.

This column spent much of 2011 being pilloried for daring to say South Africa was receiving its righteous reward for fiscal and monetary prudence, let alone for praising the exceptional managers in charge of our best companies. But why not pat ourselves on the back? Just look at the rot besetting our chums up north.

Outside of the mainstream media, the biggest concern expressed is that the "decoupling" of markets and major economies cannot continue much longer. For much of the past three years, stocks and bonds have stoutly managed to ignore the horrors of real life on the ground. Beyond the simple forces of supply and demand, there are several reasons why this happened.

Mainly, as more than one sceptic has said, central banks in the developed world flooded the system with cash not simply to bail out bankrupt banks: it was intended to flush through the markets, buoying prices and giving participants the impression that listed entities were "profitable".

We all know that lie: why on earth should the sovereign paper (bonds) issued by demonstrably insolvent governments reward investors with such ridiculously inflated notions of value?

Because every notion of value has become horse manure, that's why. The freshly issued money, via any number of quantitative easing efforts by the US, Europe, Britain and Japan, sought out "risk-free" havens like US treasury bills. Quite simply, by the weight of desperate need, these hollow men of investment were deemed to be the last bastion of safety. What value do US bonds really represent? Zilch.

A similar story has played out in developed-world stock markets. All that government issued money had to go somewhere, and the chunks that weren't seeking "risk-free" zero returns in government bonds had to find real yields somewhere. Hence the fantastical, Ponzi-fed chimera that is the bull market in stocks post-2008.

The chasm between the high prices put on companies and the broke state of global economies cannot continue. Fewer and fewer people have faith in the promises made by Western and Japanese statesmen, and even less in their fiat currencies - which continue to exist solely because of the vain belief among their holders that the governments who issue the notes will honour the pledge that they have unimpeachable value.

This all sounds terribly grim, and it is. The world is dangling on the edge of seeing the most wretched degradation of its savings, whether you measure them in yen, dollars or euros.

Which leaves us, you probably guessed, with gold. Down at the bottom of my garden, under the lawn shavings and dog-do, is a little tin ...