If Vietnam’s gold market policy resembles bathwater that needs changing, which water should be discarded without throwing out the baby in the tub? Throughout the endless debates of human intellectual history, philosophers have made it their responsibility to discard the bathwater—the outdated ideas they considered no longer valid. Yet, they also acknowledged and respected their predecessors, recognizing that within each discarded bathwater remains a child worth preserving. The task of later generations is to pour away the water while ensuring that the baby survives. To better understand the origins and rationale behind Decree 24/2012/ND-CP, dated April 3, 2012, concerning the management of gold trading, readers may refer to my earlier article published in The Saigon Times in April 2013. In that piece, I explained the fundamental objective of Vietnam’s gold policy, which was implemented for the first time: to remove gold from circulation. In other words, it aimed to separate gold from the credit system and eliminate its role in the financial system as a means of monetary exchange, restoring its status purely as an asset. This is the “baby” of the gold policy. At that time, the power of the gold market was so strong that the monetary regulator […]