Gold bugs certainly have an interest in playing Chicken Little, and Peak Oil sites draw invest-in-gold ads like bugs to honey. Catherine Austin Fitts site features gold bars and coins on her masthead, but her article on collateral fraud is provocative:

Housing Bill

After I began researching HUD fraud in the last 1990s, I would be contacted by people with experience with HUD fraud. They insisted the same home was being used to create ten or more mortgages that were placed into different pools. They alleged that Chase as the lead HUD servicer and the other big banks were implementing such systems. This was why we would see the same house default two, three or four times in a year, they claimed. You needed to churn the FHA mortgages through multiple defaults to generate the cash to keep all these fraudulent pools afloat. This, they insisted, was all going to finance various secret government operations and private agendas.

This issue of collateral fraud was repeated in other markets. As I started to learn more about precious metals and the commodities markets I would hear story after story about precious metals arrangements in which investors really had a bank credit there was no real bullion behind the arrangement.

I have come to believe that the allegations of mortgage collateral fraud are true - not just for FHA and Ginnie Mae at HUD, but across the board throughout the mortgage markets.