Going a little bit off on a tangent here but this article reminded me of how the gold price against the dollar has historically been set:
>Every morning at nine o'clock, [acting treasury secretary] Morgenthau; Jesse Jones, the head of the RFC; and George Warren would meet with the president over his breakfast of soft-boiled eggs, to determine the price of gold for that day. They began at $31.36 an ounce. The next morning this increased to $31.54, then $31.76 and $31.82. No one had a clue how they went about setting the price, although everyone presumed that some subtle analyses of the world bullion and foreign exchange markets went into the calculations. In fact, the choice of price was completely random. All they were trying to do was to push the price a little higher than the day before. The exercise brought out the juvenile in Roosevelt. One day he picked an increase of 21 cents, and when asked why, replied that it was a lucky number, three times seven.
The point of setting magic numbers in that manner is the continuous employment of people tasked with explaining how discovering that this was how it worked all along was "unexpected" and "surprising".
>Every morning at nine o'clock, [acting treasury secretary] Morgenthau; Jesse Jones, the head of the RFC; and George Warren would meet with the president over his breakfast of soft-boiled eggs, to determine the price of gold for that day. They began at $31.36 an ounce. The next morning this increased to $31.54, then $31.76 and $31.82. No one had a clue how they went about setting the price, although everyone presumed that some subtle analyses of the world bullion and foreign exchange markets went into the calculations. In fact, the choice of price was completely random. All they were trying to do was to push the price a little higher than the day before. The exercise brought out the juvenile in Roosevelt. One day he picked an increase of 21 cents, and when asked why, replied that it was a lucky number, three times seven.
Source: "Lords of Finance"