Today we’re into day one of #BrusselsAttacks recovery and we’ll see how the city reacts as its airport remains closed and with major damage, as do the main thoroughfares through the European Quarter, while the metro reopens with major holes in its structure, and the like. Actually, even at what we could call the “day one-half” point – that is, yesterday evening – there was a heartening and spontaneous mass-gathering around the Bourse, the now-unused Stock Exchange building at the center of town, where people wrote encouraging and defiant messages in chalk on the pavement and otherwise showed general solidarity (considerably aided by the fact that that part of the city was turned into a pedestrian-only zone last summer).

Further, it seems that next Sunday, Easter Sunday, there is to be a “white march” through the city, to show more solidarity, an absence of fear, etc. In that link that is the spokesman for the European Parliament in the video who is announcing it; perhaps it will be organized by that institution (which would make it not so spontaneous).

By now, though, I’ve learned to be leery of most post-terrorist attack public gestures. We saw how those could turn out with the Charlie Hebdo killings fourteen months ago, and in particular that incident’s own marche blanche down the Champs Elysées: an event meant to reassert freedom of speech in the face of murderous threats turned out to feature – in the marchers’ front row! – more national leaders responsible for beating down free speech in their own countries than you could shake a stick at. Thereafter, as treated on this very blog, the French authorities made clear that “freedom of speech” would thenceforth only be permitted along narrow lines that they allowed, namely only speech against Muslims. Sadly, I later noted how no less than Denmark seemed to be following suit.

Still, this looks like a cheeky gesture:

“Why many Belgians are posting pictures of french-fries, of all things.”

Black-yellow-red: the colors of the Belgian flag, of course. In front of that, “french” fries, which you might be aware were (probably) invented in Belgium. Finally, you might also recognize there a very familiar gesture of contempt, usually executed by the fingers of one hand.

Quite clever! – although, to be fair, the HuffPo Germany traces this original “meme” back to advertising by Burger King brought out around ten years ago – and quickly withdrawn, in the face of public outrage (in that commercial context). Still, the HuffPo piece goes on to report that “Garde la frite!” (FR: “Hold on to your french-fry!”) is French slang for “keep your chin up!”

So, all told, very appropriate, and shrewd. Nonetheless, when evaluating the effect these attacks have on Belgian society I intend to continue to focus on what is done rather than what is expressed, be it through social media emissions or city-marches. We all realize that to a large part such post-attack gestures of defiance serve to mask the fear that the attacked society feels; will that fear translate into restrictions on freedom (e.g. France’s seemingly never-ending state of emergency after the November Paris attacks) and/or useless security measures just for show, such as metal detectors stationed at the doors of subway stations? If so, then we will know that society has capitulated to what the terrorists were trying to bring about in the first place, no matter what that society says.

Gold: it’s not just for money anymore. Actually, it’s not much about money anymore! Yes, people always watch the gold price, but that’s more about gold as a commodity subject to price speculation. And gold remains a central bank reserve asset into which such national authorities can dip when they want to intervene in the currency markets – again, by selling their gold-as-commodity in order to gain supplies of the currency they want to strengthen – but they will sooner do that using reserves of other foreign currencies they have accumulated.

This is a far cry from those long-ago days of the gold standard, when the value of a nation’s currency was determined by the precise amount of actual gold it claimed to represent, so that balance of payments surplusses and deficits were settled by transfers of gold from one central bank to another. There was a dirty little secret there, however: it was rare that the gold was actually physically transferred when settling such national accounts. It’s heavy stuff, after all, and thus costly to ship, especially when you factor in the extra need for security. Plus, you could never rule out the trade winds reversing next year – so to speak – so that deficit country became surplus country and the gold would then have to be shipped back the other way.

No, it was much easier just to slap a new ownership-label on a certain section of a pile of gold sitting safely and cozily in some certifiably safe place – the vaults of the New York Federal Reserve, say, or a similar place in London, which has long been the center of the world’s gold market anyway and the source of the daily gold fixing that sets its price.

However, that may not be good enough anymore:

This brief piece from Germany’s Huffington Post reports how the Bundesbank’s official in charge of transatlantic relations, Philipp Mißfelder, has demanded that all of his institution’s gold be shipped back to German physical control by the year 2020. Apparently, that has already occurred with the German gold that used to be held in Paris – note how we’re only allowed to find out about this after it already happened – and now Mißfelder is demanding a repatriation of the 674 tons of Germany’s gold in New York and London.

One has to wonder: Why this? Why now? Granted, it’s always a better feeling to have a valuable asset like that – even if less important than it was before – under your own lock-and-key, unseizable by others barring invasion, yet, again, the trouble and costs involved in that physical transportation are such that things were run up to this point in such a way as to avoid them entirely. It’s true that Germany itself is a bit safer of a place, now that it is not divided in two anymore with Warsaw Pact armies massed just on the other side of the inter-German border, but then that has been the case for over twenty years.

What it comes down to is Trust, right? And what sort of recent cellphone-listening, snooping-on-citizens* developments have we seen lately to throw Trust into question?

* Recall that this has involved both the US and the UK, the former operating from the privileged position of its embassy, allotted by the Berlin authorities upon reunification a high-status location right beside the Reichstag.