No one would quite admit it, but the announcement yesterday by the Bundesbank that it was undertaking a huge transport operation to move gold bars worth €27bn from Paris and New York to Frankfurt signalled that the proudly independent central bank was, for once, heeding public opinion.

Having built up the world’s second-biggest gold currency reserves after the US since 1951, when it had no holdings, postwar Germany has never kept most of its gold on its own -territory.

Before German reunification, as much as 98 per cent of the precious metal was in foreign vaults, partly because it was also being earned abroad in the form of trade surpluses, which, until the collapse of Bretton Woods agreement in 1971, were converted by the US Federal Reserve into gold.