Cockerel, this is an extremely complex subject and could be discussed endlessly with no confident conclusions because the data and information is simply not publically available, at least not at our level or the level of 99.9% of the people out there. As far as whether gold is pure 99.999% is a non-issue because that's a simple matter of refining, the bigger issue as you define it, is whether the gold is encumbered in some way or not as for sure it exists. But as Rickards points out quite rightly, it really doesn't matter since the US is going to confiscate it anyway along with the foreign gold holdings in storage in NY Fed to make the plan work.

BTW, very few of the derivatives that have underlying assets is likely to have negligble value but they could have dropped in half which is easily enough to wipe out equity capital of the firms who made bad choices. In fact this is one of the present problems and reason these assets are still on the books because there are buyers at .50 cents on the dollar but those selling are holding the assets at 100 cents on the dollar on their books and would immediately have to write down the asset to .50 cents on a sale which wouild have a deleterious balance sheet effect and force them to seek capital. So the buyers are there for these assets but the sellers are not selling but instead using free Fed money instead of addressing the underlying issue, of course these assets could recover over a long period of time also diminishing the problem.

Rickards suggestion makes some sense and although not perfect by a long shot it could work (there are no perfects that I have ever seen), I suggest you watch the program to get a better understanding of what he is suggesting as I suspect before all is said and done, something like it will happen.

They will attempt to inflate away the problems as has been done throughout history as they view default of the world's reserve currency as simply not a viable option. Keep in mind that many smaller nations with non-reserve currencies have defaulted successfully over the last 100 years. Of course creating some kind of new currency basket with gold as a significant element at a much higher price is just a disguised default in my view. The PTB are not going to sit back and do nothing as this will lead to anarchy.