Which are the top five countries that possess gold bullion that is owned by their governments, and how much does each of them have? If the United States were to sell all its bullion at present rates, how far would it go toward paying off the national debt, and who makes the decision to sell U.S. gold?
The United States gold reserve is approximately 8,133,500,000 grams. The price of a gram of gold is around sixty American dollars.
So figure if you were somehow able to dump all that gold on the market without depressing the price, you’d get around 488 billion dollars.
The national debt is currently around 14,644 billion dollars. So the effect would be pretty small.
I wouldn’t know which are the top five gold owners, but during the last 15 years or so, many countries got rid of large parts of their gold reserves (obviously, they would have been better off waiting a bit). I’m not sure why exactly.
The Wiki page shows that combined “Eurozone” government gold holdings surpass those(*) of the U.S. today, and that total gold reserves are dwarfed by jewelry, privately-held bullion, etc. … but this wasn’t always so.
(I think much of Europe’s reserves are stored in Manhattan vaults, so we’ll have the option of confiscating it as payment for D-Day when the lunatics are in full control.)
Sixty-odd years ago, about half of all the gold ever mined in human history (up until then) was sitting in Fort Knox, but even at today’s prices that Fort Knox gold would be worth only $1.2 trillion. (If that seems low, it’s because more gold has been mined since WWII than all the gold mined before WWII.)
I was surprised to read that a main reason that the U.S. acquired so much gold during the Roosevelt-Truman era was simply its offer to buy unlimited quantities for $35/oz. This offer was eagerly snapped up across the world.