At the height of the European sovereign debt crisis, the European Central Bank decided to purchase distressed European government bonds. Even worse, and more importantly, the ECB is providing direct support of several hundred billions of euros to troubled banks via its normal monetary policy...

Collateral plays a central role in monetary policy. In recent years, its importance has increased as uncollateralised inter-bank borrowing has gradually been replaced by collateralised central bank lending. This has in turn affected collateral availability and the need for high-quality assets....

Given the shortcomings of the current responses to the sovereign debt crisis in the eurozone, the author proposes utilising national gold reserves as collateral for government debt. Gold backing would be quite attractive to bond investors and would significantly ease the burden of high sovereign...