This is what passes for financial journalism at The Telegraph and CNBC

Appended is another example of the idiot journalism the planet is up against -- a rambling and practically unconscious discourse about the German federal auditors office's call for an inventory of the country's gold reserves, held at the Bank of England, the Bank of France, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The author, CNBC Senior Editor John Carney, asserts that it doesn't matter whether Germany's gold exists provided that everyone just pretends and acts as if it exists: "As long as the Fed says it is there, it is as good as there for all practical purposes to which it might be put. It can be sold, leased out, used as collateral, employed to extinguish liabilities, and counted as bank capital just the same whether it exists or not."
But if gold is money, the mere pretense of its existence is money creation -- potentially infinite money creation. And since, as even establishment luminaries like former Treasury Secretary and Harvard Professor and President Lawrence Summers can attest --
http://www.gata.org/files/gibson.pdf
-- gold is a powerful determinant of interest rates and the value of other currencies and government bonds, the pretense of potentially infinite gold reserves that "can be sold, leased out, used as collateral, employed to extinguish liabilities, and counted as bank capital" is actually the seizure of infinite power by government.

At least Carney acknowledges that disproving this pretense could have explosive results. "If the gold isn't there," he writes, "well, calamity could follow as trust in the central bank gold depositories evaporated instantly."
Yes indeed, Mr. Carney. So might this be why central banks won't answer certain very specific questions about their gold reserves?:
http://www.gata.org/node/11862
http://www.gata.org/node/11863
How about trying to put such questions to them yourself, Mr. Carney?
Even The Telegraph's Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who has a bit more wit and experience than Carney, failed Journalism 101 tonight with his report about the controversy over the German gold reserves:
http://www.gata.org/node/11866
Evans-Pritchard acknowledged that the withdrawal of much of the German gold from the Bank of England was a "mystery," but did he pick up the telephone and question Bank of England Governor Mervyn King or Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann about it? King and Weidmann surely could explain the "mystery," and, as he represents an influential news organization, Evans-Pritchard surely could have gotten them to come to the phone at least to be quoted with an embarrassing refusal to explain.
But no; instead Evans-Pritchard telephoned ... a gold mining company chairman, Peter Hambro, who of course could only speculate on the mystery.
Once again the original sources in government, the responsible officials, go unchallenged by supposedly expert journalists.
CNBC's Carney apparently didn't try to question any original source at all. Instead he just speculated moronically, failing to grasp the obvious and inevitable consequences of his own speculation. Representing an international television network, Carney too might have gotten King or Weidmann on the phone -- or at least a publicist for Kim Kardashian.
As long as stuff like this passes for financial journalism, the absolute power that corrupts absolutely and indeed has corrupted the West can rest easy.