An incident this morning reveals how jittery the world is, in the midst of escalating geopolitical tensions surrounding Syria.

Apparently it was a joint-U.S. Israel test of an "anchor" missile.

Around 5 AM, headlines emanating out of Russia said that Russian defense officials had identified the launch of two "objects" fired toward the Easter Mediterranean. However, skepticism that some kind of attack was underway quickly grew, as Israel said its intelligence was aware of no launch, and there were no explosions in Damascus. Eventually more headlines came out of Russia saying that whatever they detected had fallen into the sea. Meanwhile, U.S. officials deny any kind of launch of anything.

Here's how things went down...

This was an early headline from Reuters...

These additional headlines came out of Russian news agency Interfax.

After these headlines hit, markets in Europe tumbled, and gold spiked.

Here for example is how Italy went. (Italy has now climbed back into the green).

This is what gold initially did.

Since then, gold as well has given up some of its pop.