Got gold? If not, the IDF knows where you can find some: There’s tens — and maybe even hundreds — of millions worth hidden under the Al-Sahel General hospital in Beirut.

Getting in there — to Dahiya, the suburb where Hassan Nasrallah buried his pirate treasure — won’t be easy, and getting out’s likely to be even harder. You’ll surely end up in a gun fight with Hezbollah, who won’t be keen to let you escape with their slain boss’s stash. If you somehow survive that, you’ll have to dodge 2,000-pound bombs dropped from IDF warplanes, evade missiles fired from Israeli drones, then probably outrun a giant boulder and swim out to Jock’s plane while the natives blow poison darts at you.

Or you could just buy GLD. Paper gold. Or, as the lunatics describe it, claims on gold that surely isn’t there, and that anyway won’t do you any good in a “pinch” because it won’t be any more accessible to you than Nasrallah’s buried treasure. If you ask a physical gold hoarder to define “a pinch” — i.e., to explain the use case for gold in a real apocalypse scenario — they’ll come up empty, and also aggressive. The same’s generally true of Bitcoin fanatics. In a doomsday scenario, you need water, food, fuel and guns. And not necessarily in that order. Gold will be irrelevant and Bitcoin even more so.

Anyway, gold’s obviously set a series of records recently. I was feeling remiss about not mentioning it, but I needed a good hook. Israel’s declassified intelligence on Nasrallah’s gold vault was as good as hooks get. Spot traded around $2,750 or so on Tuesday. Suffice to say it’s been a very good run. And it’s (still) at odds with real yields. As the chart below shows, the decoupling of gold and US real rates remains a sight to behold.

Gold’s famously an inverse real yields play, but bullion scaled new peaks even with 10-year reals as high as 2.50% over the past 12 months.

Note that since the Fed cut rates last month, 10-year reals are more than 30bps higher, a function of the rethink underway across the US rates complex, where traders are reassessing the Fed trajectory in light of still-strong US economic data. And yet, gold’s up 7% over the same stretch, a microcosm of a decoupling which began a year ago.

In the October installment of BofA’s monthly fund manager poll, gold was number two on the “most crowded trades” list (figure on the left, below).

The figure on the right shows the share of panelists in the same poll who said gold’s overvalued. That share was the highest in more than four years.

Certainly gold’s “rich” to its real yields relationship. Indeed, it’s so rich on that score as to call into question the viability of using real rates as a lens through which to analyze and assess gold prices. I’m not sure what other lens there is, though: The only way to value hunks of inert metal is by reference to the opportunity cost of not earning the inflation-adjusted risk-free rate.

Some of the bid for bullion in recent weeks is probably a haven play given the rising odds of an all-out war in the Mideast. And everyone knows the central bank-buying story by now — that’s a mainstay of the bullion bull narrative. But I’d be derelict not to at least suggest that some of the gains reflect structural concerns about America’s fiscal position ahead of the election.

Regular readers know how I feel about deficit doomsaying in the US context. It’s nonsense. But so’s religion and people die every day for that. The gold rally appears to be in part a function of dollar debasement concerns and generalized jitters about what — exactly and if anything — will ever be done to address what the vast majority of humanity believes is a serious problem. Namely, America’s “debt” burden and “unsustainable” fiscal trajectory.

In a Tuesday interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin, Paul Tudor Jones piled on with a belabored lament for debt and deficits. He described next month’s election as a potentially pivotal moment beyond which some investors may start to seriously question the investment case for US bonds. He’s short the long-end across fixed income. He’s also long gold, long commodities (which he described as “ridiculously under-owned”) and long Bitcoin because, as he put it, “All roads lead to inflation.”

Sounds terrible, right? Fortunately — and this brings us full circle — I know where there’s some free gold. Now who’s coming with me to Beirut?

What is Sankara?

Fortune and glory, kid. Fortune and glory.