Why the US would need to seize gold is beyond me – is there some settlement in gold done in international back rooms of which we should aware? Is the implication we are going back on a full/partial gold standard?

Prior to FDR seizing gold, there was a fair amount of speculation he would do so – he actually had to deny it (with Clinton-like linguistics – that’s a backhanded compliment). Keynes has some great comments about the US administration’s handling of gold pricing after seizure (from Hoover’s memoirs):

J. Maynard Keynes, who had earlier pronounced Roosevelt “magnificently right,” came out with a stinging criticism.
Keynes, upon whom Fisher and Warren leaned heavily for support, described the “gyrations of the dollar” under the Government’s manipulation as “more like a gold standard on the booze” than an ideally managed currency.

And, horror of horrors for Warren, he characterized as “foolish” the idea “that there is a mathematical relation between the price of gold and the price of other things.”

fictional value under the control of the federal reserve means that a select group of powerful people can arbitrarily modify the market

it’s easy to buy low and sell high when you decide when it will be low and when it will be high

it’s a system of organized robbery where the rest of us randomly lose money when the market is artificially devalued, and then the robbers invest, restore value, sell, and have taken personal spending power that can be used to seize our assets

the pretense that they’re stabilizing the economy by setting it up for random, artificial changes is laughable

nothing was more stable than value based on gold, that was the problem

However, so far, the deflation scenario is the one that seems to be taking hold – lower commodity prices, lower asset prices, and eventually lower consumer prices. As debt levels are high, this is the scenario to fear.