I found the following quote (italicized) from this article to be strange and I'm not sure in my paranoia that I am thinking straight on this.

I would think of gold as being on the asset side of a balance sheet. Hence the sale of gold would result in a debit to cash, credit to sales, for an equivalent amount and a credit to gold and debit to cost of sales for an equivalent amount.

For a liability to exist as an unrealized capital gain, there must have been some sort of unrealized sale that also occured ... for the unrealized cg to be a credit, they would have had to have had a corresponding debit ... what would that have been? ... if it was unrealized there was no cash, it could have gone into cost of sales thus diminishing a previous years profitability ... pretty fraudulent if you ask me since it understated profit or overstated a loss in a previous year.

The opposite of the understated profit/ overstate loss is also true if there was a sale recognized in a prior year and the liability is really a contra liability.

can anyone else suggest how this could be done ??? I am lost as to what is really going on ... any other professional accountants equally perplexed by this ...

should i be made to give back my designation by a massive brain cramp ... please let me know!!

Barclays Capital analyst Thorsten Polleit told AFP that profits on the book value of gold holdings are recorded as a liability as unrealised capital gains on the ECB's balance sheet.