Cockerel, I came to believe exactly the same thing about a year ago when someone emailed me copies of the original blueprints for the New York Federal Reserve building in New York. The design parameters required 90 feet of bed rock out on all 5 sides of the basement vault. It is 13 stories deep I believe. 90% of the Federal Reserve Stock (it is a "C" corp I believe, that pays dividends to it's member banks, and paid 53 billion last year if memory serves me right.) is owned by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which in turn is owned by the Lineage of the big "5";

J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citicorp, and Wells Fargo(Wachovia), I believe.

I'm a "Dot Connector", and I could never figure How with 600+Trillions of Notationally worthless Derivatives on the above "5"'s balance sheets, how their respective stock prices have never cratered to zero, or at the very least, to single digits. But, if in fact the gold has been trucked to the New York Fed Vault over the last 20+ years for collateral against gold swaps, etc.(which I believe it has, ergo the Tungsten bars clandestinely talking their place at Fort Knox) then this would, to me, be the only explanation for why their stocks have never gone down. Also since most of the worthless paper which the Federal Reserve has bought and taken as collateral since Lehman crashed, and put on the Fed's balance sheet, is not the property of and or on the balance sheet of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, which is a separate entity, and "owns" controls, and, I believe, has possession of the 8000+ tones of gold.