Former Fed Gov: gold revaluation

Interviewed Monday this week on the "Trading Day" program of Business News Network in Canada, former Federal Reserve Governor Lyle Gramley hinted that a big upward revaluation of gold may figure heavily in the Fed's attempt to rescue the U.S. economy.

The program's guest host, Niall Ferguson, an author and history professor at Harvard, asked Gramley, now senior adviser at Stanford Group in Houston, about the seemingly grotesque expansion of the Fed's balance sheet in recent months.

Ferguson asked: "I've heard it said that the Fed has turned into a government-owned hedge fund, leveraged at 50 to 1. Do you feel nervous about what this might actually do to the Fed's reputation?"

Gramley replied: "I think you have to reckon with the fact that one of the Fed's assets is gold certificates, which are priced, as I remember, at $42 an ounce, and if we were to price them at market prices, the Fed's leverage would look a lot less than it is now."

While valuing the U.S. government's claimed gold reserves at today's Comex closing price of around $822 per ounce instead of the government antique bookkeeping entry of $42.22 per ounce would indeed vastly expand the government's monetary assets, it might not be enough to offset the liabilities and guarantees the government lately has taken on. But the job might be done by revaluing the gold to $5,000 or $10,000 per ounce, as the British economist Peter Millar speculated two years ago might be necessary to prevent debt deflation: