Gordon Brown is looking a bit of a mug. He stands accused of selling the bulk of Britain's gold reserves too cheaply. Selling at all was heinous, according to gold fans, who see near-magical financial properties in the yellow metal. Selling at rock-bottom prices then magnified the sin.
Each day that the gold price goes up, the notional loss mounts. In March, the World Gold Council, the mouthpiece of the gold industry, calculated that the Chancellor had "squandered" £175m by selling when he did.
By the end of last month, the cost of Brown's timing had ballooned to £500m, according to a report from the precious metals news service thebulliondesk.com. Sabre-rattling in Kashmir, banking jitters in Japan and a sliding US dollar - all are adding to gold's allure and value, and to Brown's discomfort.
It is all very inconvenient for the Chancellor, who sold 395 tonnes of the stuff - a chunk the size of a small caravan - in a series of auctions between May 1999 and March 2002 and bought foreign government bonds with the proceeds.
He received an average price of $275 an ounce. You have to go back to 1979 to find the price languishing that low. The price today has bounced back to $325.
The shadow chancellor, Michael Howard, calls it "gross incompetence which has cost the British taxpayer dear". This is a bit cheeky. If Brown was a mug for selling when the price was low, it follows that his Tory predecessors were double mugs for not selling when the price was high. Step forward Ken Clarke, Norman Lamont and John Major, past chancellors who all failed to offload so much as a doubloon in the 1990s, when they could have got more than $400 an ounce. Before them, Nigel Lawson wasn't tempted by $500 an ounce.
Then there was Geoffrey Howe, who was chancellor in 1980, when the gold market succumbed to its own form of dotcom madness, spiking at $850 an ounce (worth far more than that in today's money). Howe clung on to every bar.
Arguing about timing rather misses the point. If gold reserves have any purpose, it is as insurance against an emergency of barely imaginable proportions - for example, a collapse of the international financial system so calamitous that conventional money has no meaning.
Gold - Keynes's "barbarous relic" - long ago lost its role as a backer of the currency. Its supposed value as a prop to the exchange rate is also bogus. The pound's strength and stability depend on the health of the economy and the public finances, not on a few ingots gathering cobwebs under Threadneedle Street.
The test of Brown's decision will come only if catastrophe befalls the financial world. It is not at all certain that the metal would make the slightest difference, but we must hope that the test never comes. Zhou Enlai's verdict on the French revolution ("too early to say") is about right for Brown's gold disposal.
There was one omission from Management Today's latest 50 Most Powerful Women list. The usual business suspects were there, from Marjorie Scardino of Pearson in first place through to Martha Lane Fox of lastminute.com, who scraped in at number 50.
But there was no mention of Robin Saunders. Saunders is probably the most interesting woman in the City at the moment, and certainly one of the most sniped at by her peers. She leads an innovative finance team at the German-owned Westdeutsche Landesbank.
She out-Horlicks the superwoman Nicola Horlick (number 11 in the list). A 39-year-old American, Saunders raises two-year-old twins and finds time to go hip-hop dancing, while scrapping with rival financiers in one of the fiercest parts of the City. Horlick, by contrast, works among the herbivores in the comparatively gentle world of fund management, as did that other female former City superstar, Carol Galley.
Saunders has just signed an exclusive agreement with the Football Association to bankroll the new £400m Wembley Stadium, snatching the deal from the jaws of a miffed Barclays. She has landed other deals with some of Britain's more colourful businessmen. She came to the rescue of Bernie Ecclestone when Formula One needed cash. She backed Philip Green, now dubbed our fastest billionaire, in his bid for Bhs.
She loves maverick entrepreneurs: "They have amazing energy and drive and they don't want a wimpy banker that only does what they are told and doesn't push the edge of the envelope," she says, in her very unbankerish way.
Her enemies like to point to the deals that didn't come off: Green's putative tilt at Marks & Spencer and an overambitious plan to buy Railtrack from the administrators, to name two. They also argue that the Wembley deal - the wrong stadium in the wrong place - will be a disaster for all concerned.
Certainly, Saunders will need envelope-pushing skills to contain that can of worms. But if she succeeds, she will be among the best-known faces in the City.
