Jim Rickards of Omnis has an interesting anecdote about global gold mania.

He tells King World News of a client of a major Swiss bank who was refused access to his one ton of physical gold ($40M) and was forced to make threats to convince the bank otherwise:

“Correct, and through all of that eventually the individual did get his gold...it took lawyers, it took threats of publicity, it took a lot of pressure to do that, which my inference is that that gold was not there.  The bank had to scramble, go out and find it somewhere before they could make good delivery.”