Here’s a 08 December 2008 video of the Canadian Business News Network where at minute 12,
in reply to the question whether the USA central bank, the Fed, is not a hedge fund,

Lyle Gramley, Fed Governor from 1980 to 1985 and current senior advisor at Stanford Group,

says that the Fed balance sheet includes USA Treasury gold certificates,

that these certificates could be marked to market(-price) (MTM-d) instead of being priced as they are now at USD 42,

and that, and I paraphrase, if the Fed did that, its balance sheet would not look so leveraged.

Ivo:
The question arises to what level the price of gold would then rise.
The question presupposes that there is some gold left at Fort Knox.

Trading Day : December 8, 2008 : Special: Part One [12-08-08 2:30PM]
http://watch.bnn.ca/trading-day/december-2008/trading-day-december-8-2008/#clip119798
Making sense of the financial crisis, the possible cures, and the future of global business. Special guest host Niall Ferguson, author and professor, Harvard University, joins Marty Cej and Frances Horodelski. BNN interviews Lyle Gramley, former Fed Governor and current senior advisor, Stanford Group, and John Taylor, CEO, and founder, International Foreign Exchange Concepts Inc.

Ivo:
During my “research” for this post, I came across this;:
August 12, 1981
Policy Analysis no. 2
Monetization Practices and the Political Structure of the Federal Reserve System
by Richard H. Timberlake Jr.
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=868&full=1
SNIP
The late 1950s and early 1960s saw a resurgence of world trade, one effect of which was an outflow of gold from the United States to foreign central banks and treasuries at a rate of approximately $1 billion a year. The Fed effectively sterilized the loss of gold by matching the losses in the titles to gold (gold certificates) with acquisitions of government securities. The U.S. money stock, therefore, did not decline in the classical fashion. The gold standard was not allowed to operate.

The high profile effort to agree legislation to lend $14bn to the USA auto industry collapsed on Thursday night, leading the Bush administration to hold open the possibility that it would seek funds from its financial rescue plan instead, says the Financial Times this morning.

As a result, Asian stock markets collapsed this morning and European markets are now collapsing also.

There are now two possibilities.

Either the whole (financial) “system” will collapse.

Or our masters will print money.

Gold wins in either case.

That’s why gold is unique.

Our Detroit friends even dare to use the threat of domino-cascade collapses.
In that way, they are making sure that the prophecy of hyper-inflation will be fulfilled.

Ivo Cerckel