Is gold the dog that refuses to bark in the current bout of inflation? The news on the cost of living continues to worsen but the precious metal is not, so far at least, becoming more precious still: its price is no higher than it was 18 months ago, when coronavirus was our only concern and no one was thinking about inflation.

And worsen the news has. This week the official rate of inflation in America reached 7pc and an analyst at Goldman Sachs, the bank, predicted that it would come within a whisker of that level here in Britain.

Prof Peter Morici of the University of Maryland told the BBC that America’s current rise in the cost of living was the second worst inflationary bout there since the Second World War and rejected the argument that it was transitory, saying the pandemic had disrupted patterns of consumption and it would take time for the economy to adapt.

If he is right it hardly seems likely that Britain won’t be caught up in the same process and find its own bout of inflation similarly prolonged. The World Bank has warned that Britain is among the economies most at risk of inflation expectations running out of control.

All the more reason to expect the price of gold, the world’s oldest inflation hedge, to take off. But it hasn’t.

We were fortunate in the timing of our purchase of gold for the Wealth Preserver portfolio; the price was $1,764 an ounce in April last year and it has since risen modestly to $1,827. But it breached $1,800 in July 2020 and has, broadly speaking, oscillated around that level since. The interesting thing is that, over the two years before our purchase, the price had risen by 50pc, from $1,200.

Adrian Ash of BullionVault, which stores gold for private savers, is a seasoned watcher of the metal. He acknowledges that the recent rise in inflation seems not to have attracted new buyers so far but says those who bought during the pandemic in search of “portfolio insurance” – other assets were of course all over the place when the virus struck – are sitting tight.

“2020 was a hard act to follow for gold, because of that year’s record inflows, and it’s a fact that the precious metal has struggled despite the rise in inflation,” he says. “Private investors and money managers bought unprecedented quantities of bullion and gold-backed ETF funds as the Covid crisis began but, while new inflows in 2021 lagged that surge, the vast bulk of 2020’s new allocations remain in place, showing confidence in gold’s role as long-term portfolio insurance.”