Gold is being hit as I type this but have to wonder how much gold will have to be sold to spring the IMF director....can't be that much unless we find out it was more than one maid he accosted!

"WASHINGTON -- After an emergency meeting of its Board of Governors on Sunday afternoon, the International Monetary Fund announced that it would sell gold to raise bail for its managing director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, charged Saturday with raping a hotel chambermaid in New York.

The IMF's first deputy managing director, John Lipsky, taking over while Strauss-Kahn was held in a lockup in Harlem pending a court appearance, defended his boss. "The maid was Argentinian," Lipsky said, "and you know how those people are with their international loans. Dominique probably couldn't help it. Force of habit, you know."

Lipsky would not quantify the IMF's new gold sale but he said it would be enough both to obtain the release of Strauss-Kahn and "to ensure orderly transactions in gold, the dollar, the euro, the pound, the yuan, the Swedish krona, the Brazilian real, the South African rand, the Mexican and Argentine pesos, the Mongolian tugrik, and any other currencies in which a market might threaten to break out."

Gold in Asia fell more than $5 to $1,489.20."