Running into year-end 2008 with a hatful of fears, losses, hope and questions?

Here's another puzzler to ponder as the $3 trillion of tax-funded bailouts now promised worldwide slowly roasts every bond holder's goose over Christmas ...

As a proportion of global investable assets, gold hasn't been this strongly weighted for the last 15 years.

But seeing how this financial crisis is the ugliest since the Great Depression, World War I or perhaps even earlier (depending on which political hack, wonk or meddler you speak to), it could double yet again - if not rise more than tenfold.

Either that, or the value of paper assets - meaning stocks and bonds - could tumble in half. If not sink by more than nine-tenths.

Am I kidding? No more than anyone else.

Tessa Jowell, a UK minister, reckons this downturn is "deeper than any we have known." Mervyn King, head of the Bank of England, says it's the worst financial crisis since before the Great War.

And given that "when investor stress reaches extreme readings" people buy gold - as John Hathaway at Tocqueville Asset Management put it in a 2006 paper - then we should expect the valuation of all the gold in the world to rise accordingly.

People turn to this rock, after all, when paper's too scary to own. Have we reached an "extreme" amid this financial end of days ...?

First, let s try (if we can) to ignore the $596 trillion worth of "notional" value outstanding in credit, currency, stock-market and collateralized derivatives.

Let's also put the Western world's real estate markets to one side, as well. The idea that housing is a tradable asset only shows up every generation or so. In between, the slumps and dips just make bricks and mortar somewhere to live in - not retire on.

That leaves us, pretty much, with stocks and bonds. And as the good folk of World Financial Exchanges will show in their data just as soon as 2008 croaks out, last year's peak of $90 trillion is set to take a knock. By our reckoning here at BullionVault, in fact (and with thanks to the Bank for International Settlements' latest figures), that gross market capitalization will show a fall of one-quarter and more in global equities and tradable debt.

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