http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071005061907AA5tiqU
[snip] At this time, no country is fixed to a gold standard. The gold standard effectively came to an end in 1933 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt outlawed private gold ownership (except for the purposes of jewelry). The Bretton Woods System, enacted in 1946 created a system of fixed exchange rates that allowed governments to sell their gold to the United States treasury at the price of $35/ounce. The Bretton Woods system ended on August 15, 1971, when President Richard Nixon ended trading of gold at the fixed price of $35/ounce. At that point for the first time in history, formal links between the major world currencies and real commodities were severed. The gold standard has not been used in any major economy since that time. [/snip]
The reason for his action was that the total government debt had exceeded the value of the government’s pile of gold. The reason that happened was decades of federal overspending due to Congressional pork barreling (Demwits have controlled both houses of congress for most of the past 78 years) and lack of Presidential line-item veto.
http://www.galmarley.com/framesets/fs_commodity_essentials_faqs.htm
[snip] How much gold is there? In the world there are currently somewhere between 120,000 and 140,000 tonnes of gold ‘above ground’. To visualise this imagine a single solid gold cube with edges of about 19 metres (about three metres short of the length of a tennis court). That’s all that has ever been produced.
Divided amongst the population of the world there are about 23 grams per person, about 1.2 cubic centimetres each. This equates to about $250 - $350 worth per person on Earth, depending on the current price. [/snip]
This seems to coincide with the seemingly far fetched European claims that the French head of the IMF was set up and arrested for raping a maid because he leaked the fact that there was NO gold remaining in Fort Knox.
With the deficit out of control, it would not be that far fetched for Obama, Geithner et al to have transfered our gold reserves to China or elsewhere as collateral.