This was not actually a terrifically good thing. It might seem like a great idea to have all the gold, but in fact that would mean that other countries couldn’t buy any more of your products because they would have no gold of their own to pay for them. In the interests of trade and a healthy global economy, gold should circulate. Instead, it was accumulating – steadily, relentlessly, in a country that was already better off than all the countries of Europe put together.
