What exactly is the gold in Fort Knox waiting around for? I once heard it was to backup US currency, but why should that matter? Fort Knox could be empty for all I know and I’d still spend money with the same blind trust I always have. Does anyone have any ideas?
It’s all been gone for the last 36 years.
Goldfinger and Pussy Galore got it.
The only reason that gold is still in Fort Knox is because if the Government sold it (or even, just planned on selling it)it wouldn’t be worth anything. The price of gold (a commodity with very little practical value) is a reflection of it’s rarity. If people and governments stopped hoarding it, it wouldn’t be worth much more than a lot of other stuff that you can’t eat, operate, or live in.
Several national banks around the world are finally realizing that gold has no real worth and are now selling off their reserves. If you have any Kugarands stashed somewhere, now is the time to unload them.
That whole “backing up the dollar” malarky hasn’t been true for decades.
Actually, in the rare director’s cuts of those movies, the villians later apologized and gave the money back. James Bond was rejected by a fantastically beautiful woman, and the world vanished in a puff of entropy.
If there are any electrical engineers in the house, please correct me, but I thought that gold was one of the best conductors of energy there is? If this is true, shouldn’t it be valuable just for its commercial applications and not its rarity? Maybe the government should just sell the gold, double the guards, and fill the warehouses with Beanie Babies.
True. That would but the actual worth of gold just above that of copper.
Many governments like to keep a few million dollars of gold around, to buy up some of their currency when its value sags, for example. The U.S. keeps its own gold at Ft. Knox, and if I recall, also keeps gold for foreign governments there, as well.
Ukulele Ike, Breckinshire, I think that we’ll have to schedule you for a little “memory” session with Odd Job. Goldfinger did not plan on stealing the gold, he actually was going to leave it where it is, but turn it radioactive and therefore inaccessible.
(Sigh!)
Open up the computer you’re posting from. Take a look inside. Does that look like copper to you?
John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams
Nope. Looks more like silicon.
FYI, the world’s largest depository of gold is not Fort Knox but the New York Branch of the Federal Reserve Bank. Just a few blocks from where I’m sitting is about $86 billion in gold bars (1997 prices), and that doesn’t count the gold and other precious metals stored in the Chase Manhattan Bank vaults across the street from the Fed.
The Fed has a brochure online about their vault, the use of gold in current and historic monetary policy, and and the security system that protects the gold (oh well) at http://www.ny.frb.org/pihome/addpub/goldvaul.pdf (pdf format). It has some nifty pictures of walls full of stacked gold bars.
And as a consequence there’s a freaking traffic jam of armored vehicles on Maiden Lane and on Liberty Street every morning at 7:10. So if you’re taking a cab to Wall St. in the morning, be sure to tell the guy to go down Anne St. to Gold to Fulton. He’s gonna want to go to Exchange Place down to William, but don’t let him. He’ll never make the left.
There’s your “how to get around our fair city” tip for the day.
Oh yea. And be sure to watch out for the Euro-trash guy with the bad German accent being chased by the bald guy who used to work for Cybil Shephard.
Change Your Password, Please and don’t use HTML, as it has been disabled
Among normal materials (no superconductors, please!), silver is the best electrical conductor, closely followed by copper, then gold, then aluminum. If you call copper 1.00, then silver is 0.96, gold is 1.23, and aluminum is 1.58.
Gold is used to plate electrical connectors because it doesn’t oxidize or corrode- making the connection more reliable. It’s used inside of integrated circuits to connect the tiny silicon chip to the big pins on the outside because it can be easily molded into tiny wires.
Arjuna34
You could use it to replace all that nasty depleted uranium in tank shells…
True, in the movie. In the Ian Fleming novel, our boy Auric was gonna steal the gold. Forgive me my literary peccadilloes.
Actually, rendering the gold radioactive was a much cleverer plot…one of the few times in Hollywood history where the screenwriter was smarter than the novelist.
Uke
Matt, gold would be too soft to replace DU in shells. They have similar densities, but gold would splatter against armor plate, rather than penetrating.
Every US dollar is backed by gold. So, might be nice to have some around, eh?
This is exactly what I was referring to. How often does one consider whether or not there is anything to backup our cash? At least in a financial crisis coins could be melted down for scrap metal. Dollars are useless, except maybe as memo pads. 
A computer without a Microsoft operating system is like a dog without bricks tied to its head.
Not really. Gold has very little to do with the value of the dollar anymore.
http://www.frbchi.org/pubs-speech/publications/BOOKLETS/money_matters/money_matters.html
Now I’m embarassed! That’s one of the novels I haven’t read. My apologies to Ukulele Ike and Breckinshire.