People still occasionally wander into the reception area of New Zealand’s Reserve Bank – a14-storey steel, glass and concrete building at the bottom of The Terrace in Wellington – and ask them how much gold they have in the vaults. There is a secure vault somewhere beneath the city’s parliamentary precinct but it contains only a few hundred million in cash. Our dollar came off the gold standard at the outbreak of World War I and since then it’s been a fiat currency – it has no inherent value. The money is created by the Reserve Bank (RBNZ): there’s currently about $8.3 billion in paper and coins circulating and another $400 billion in electronic form. The currency has value because the
