Seismographs and satellite cameras may have registered the force of Sunday’s nuclear explosion in North Korea, but it barely caused a ripple on the world’s stock exchanges.  U.S. shares were narrowly mixed, while Asian stocks barely budged. South Korea’s Kospi index suffered the biggest loss of all, but it was only 2.4%.  Perhaps the further a bourse from Seoul’s ground zero, the less affected it was by the news? Meanwhile, gold, once considered a sensitive indicator of global jitters, was down a little more than $2 on the day. Does that mean it no longer works as a barometer of geopolitical tensions? Not necessarily. My guess is that it gold is as sensitive as ever; it is the geopolitical nervous system that has grown numb, almost to the point of deadness, over the years.

There was a time when precious-metal traders could make a good living staying on top of the news, especially bulletins that crossed the tape in the middle of  Wall Street’s night. If you were up at 3 a.m. when, say, Soviet tanks rolled into some Eastern bloc country, you could have made a pile of dough betting that the price of gold would shoot up momentarily, then keep on rising for the rest of the day. These days, even a nuclear explosion can no longer be relied on to push precious-metals quotes higher. Would it perhaps have to occur above an urban center to rattle investors? On the evidence, they seem to have become inured to anything less, like third-generation New Yorkers who have had the startle reaction bred out of them.  

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