Side note- whether there’s gold in the Depository, I think we can all agree that Ft Knox is an actual army base, home to tank brigades.
I was never stationed there but I’ve driven past it.
A few years later they should confiscate the gold they sold to show those Bachmann-Beckist dupes that they should fear their government.
As others have noted, Fort Knox DOES have gold… just not nearly as much as commonly supposed. We haven’t been on the gold standard since the first FDR administration, and the last slim connections between gold and our currency were severed in the early Seventies.
So, the federal government doesn’t (and needn’t) keep as vast a store of gold as many people think.
Story doesn’t ring true to me.
I’ve been to the Fed’s NYC gold vault several times. According to the guys that work there, this is where all the “foreign gold” is stored, the domestic gold reserves are at Fort Knox. Even I got past the anteroom, my only credentials being “I have a friend that works at the Fed and going into the gold vault is a very cool thing to do.”
I don’t really get the reference to the 9 rooms. The vault is subdivided with “security cages” ,each with an elaborate locking system that requires more than one person to open any given cage, but you can see the contents of each cage clearly from the main floor.
I always found the shrink wrapped bundles of 100 dollar bills more enticing than the gold bars and it’s cool to see how much space a million dollars takes up.
The guard tells a cool story about a gold transfer to a South American nation…when the shipment was received it was short, despite all the precautions taken when loading. Upon investigation, they found that a gold bar had been used as a doorstop to keep a loading dock door open and it was never put back with the shipment. The gold bar was still sitting on the loading dock when they investigated so an international incident was averted.
The fact that it is posted on “nsnbc ìnternational” is a clue, I think. :dubious:
Where is this gold if it’s not stored? Are there 14+million extra gold bars laying around somewhere?
Amount of present gold holdings: 147.3 million ounces.
That’s not quite 4600 metric tons of gold.
At about 20 metric tons per tractor-trailer (@45,000 pounds), that would be 230 truck loads of gold. Not even a super-villain organization could haul all of it away. Even if it wasn’t a major Army base.
Used to work Armored. Been in several regional bank vaults and the Minneapolis Federal Reserve. Seen mountains and mountains of cash. Had $1-4 million in the back of my truck every day on the way back from the vaults for months at a time. Picked up $3.5 million or so from a casino on more than one occasion (several carts) It’s just a job, and you can’t spend too much time thinking about how much it is, but when you stop and pause… yeah, it was pretty cool. (And no, you don’t make big money doing that shit. You make jack.)
But this question reveals how silly the “gold standard” nonsense is. Suppose we had a gigantic pile of gold, and each paper dollar represented a certain weight of gold. And everyone happily exchanges the pieces of paper for goods and services.
Then one day a genie waves his magic wand and turns all the gold into cadmium (for variety), except for a tiny outer layer. To external inspection the bars look the same. And we keep on exchanging the paper money that represented the now-nonexistent gold for the same goods and services as before.
What changed? What makes the pieces of paper into bad money, when before they were good money? Especially since the government would never ever allow you to exchange your paper money for gold, even back when the gold really existed.
Back when we still pretended to be on the gold standard there was no free market for gold. Yes, it was illegal for American citizens to own gold except jewelry. That’s because, when the value of the dollar is related to the supply of gold, the government must control the gold market to control the currency. What, you think they’re going to have paper gold certificates and not control the value of gold? Of course not.
But now that we’ve given up the fiction that the price of gold and the value of the dollar have any fixed relationship, you are free to go to any coin shop, and give them your worthless federal reserve notes and walk out with gold coins jingling in your pocket. You don’t have to worry about inflation or currency manipulation or bankers, you’ve got gold coins in your possession. Yes, when it’s time to pay your taxes you’ll have to use some gold coins to buy the exact amount of dollars you need to send to Uncle Sam (check the note, whose picture is on it? Then render to George Washington that which belongs to George Washington).
The only transaction you have to use dollars for is to pay your taxes, or if someone owes you a debt you are legally obligated to accept dollars for the debt. But if you never allow anyone to go into debt to you, then you’re fine and can legally conduct all your business using gold bullion.
“Money” is a concept. An Idea. It is a medium of exchange that allows us to exchange hours of labor for widgets, wheat for oil, tomatoes for cars. If it didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent it.
So then, since you need a medium of exchange, what do you use? Over time, precious metals became the standard medium, even if other things were still used. And in time, we switched to paper to represent this ‘value’. Now as we progress, even paper is becoming obsolete and we’re just moving electrons around. Not that electrons are now currency, but we’re ‘just keeping score’ so to speak on computers. Money is just numbers kept track of to represent that you have N units available to you, or that you owe. There is no more reason that we should use or go back to using Gold than there is that we should start using strings of beads or big stone wheels. None of those things is ‘money’. They’re just a representation of money, a common illusion agreed to by the participants.
Schrodinger’s gold.
The dollar is backed by the full faith and credit of the United States, which, by it’s Constitution, may not renege on a debt. All of the assets of the US, plus its taxing ability cover the national debt many, many, many time over.
That’s the beauty of it!
You’re saying the gold is either there or it’s not, but we’ve nothing to worry about until some damn fool collapses the wave function?? :smack: 
Precisely. Once the vault is opened and it’s contents, if any, assayed, we will discover that there is no or not enough gold there and there will be loss of faith in our government. Or it will all be there and the conspiracy theorists will be driven to the point of saying that the assay was faked, photoshopped, etc. Life is Schrodinger’s Gold.
Chimera:
Really? You don’t think there are basic civilian shipping/logistics companies that have 230 tractor trailers?
Halliburton! :eek:
J. B. Hunt could do it from one dispatch location!
FWIW, I’m told that all the gold in California is in a bank in the middle of Beverly Hills in somebody else’s name.
Thanks for the earworm, punk! 
Happy to help!
All the gold was used in the fringes on Admiralty flags.