Dismiss gold if you will as an irrelevant artifact of a much simpler time, but do so at your own peril. Paper money and "innovative" financial products in the West are looking more shaky every day and the phrase "like a run on the bank" is being heard with alarming regularity. Even the word "freeze" has crept back into the financial vocabulary in ways very different, but even more alarming, than it did in the 1970s.