It is audited every year, mainly by checking that the seals on containers/pallets/vault rooms show no tampering.
They do not unstack the gold bars, check the serial number on each one, and count them – that would take more than a year to complete. (There are somewhere between 30,000 - 40,000 gold bars in the inventory.)
They do actually do that for a few selected containers each year. I think it would take about 15 years for all of them to be done.
The checking is done by a separate group – Congress’s General Accounting Office.
A full audit is done only occasionally (it’s quite expensive). I think recent ones were in 1953, 1974, and 1986.
Recently, some people have been raising a fuss because the detail record of some of these audits can no longer be found. But that seems silly to me – can you show all your financial records from 1953? And the people raising these ‘concerns’ seem to be right-wingers who are in the business of selling gold. Not at all disinterested parties!
Goldfinger’s gold holdings have value even if we deem him guilty. If he holds (say) 10% of the world’s gold and he wipes out another 10% then his gold is more valuable. Period. Full stop. The question is can the US throw him in jail so he cannot profit from it? I’m assuming he has that covered.
The Hunt brothers almost cornered the silver market. Which was illegal. But they tried. I have never heard an explanation of how they meant to get away with that. Which, in the context of Goldfinger…why can’t he get away with it?
Auric Goldfinger would have been known to have participated in detonating a nuclear weapon on US soil. Aside from the loss of his domestic assets, he would have no quarter in any country in the Western Hemisphere; even Switzerland wouldn’t harbor him under those circumstances, and it is doubtful that the Soviet Union would give him refuge. Either he ends up living in Communist China circa 1965, or trying to conceal himself somewhere in South America with all of the other Nazi expatriates. Good luck with that.
What Nelson, Lamar, and William Herbert did on ‘Silver Tuesday’ wasn’t illegal at the time, just very risky as they were leveraged to the hilt and should have ended them in the poorhouse if that they weren’t bailed out to save their brokerage firm. They made a technical violation in terms of not disclosing their stake in that firm but that was just a regulatory issue, not a crime they could have been convicted of in court.
It’s where everybody knows your name and they’re always glad you came.
I’ve always wondered if this plan made inherently more sense during Bretton Woods and pre Nixon Shock. As someone who has only known a world of pure fiat currency, I have never really understood how destroying something that was artificially pegged to a value would really do anything.
I can also imagine him not knowing how much solid gold actually weighs. One of those bars is probably too heavy for an octogenarian in poor shape to lift one-handed.
Cast gold bars weight ~30 lbm; heavier than you’d want to carry in a pocket but easy enough for most people, especially one still mobile enough to play a decent game of golf (even if he does have to cheat). Gert Fröbe, the actor who played Auric Goldfinger, was actually 50-51 during filming.
With better writing you could make the plan smarter, by having Goldfinger create more deniability. It’s a clever idea if you write it correctly, but most Bond movies are very clumsily written.
The genius of it is your gold holdings wouldn’t just go up in value proportional to the loss of gold there; they would go up much further during a brief initial panic period. THEN you sell.
Most of them are, certainly, and they basically recycle the same plots every four or five movies. Every once in a while you get something exceptional but it’s basically once per actor. For every Casino Royale and From Russia With Love, you get stinkers like SPECTRE and Diamonds Are Forever.
Except Goldfinger doesn’t want to part with any of his inventory:
This is gold, Mr Bond. All my life, I have been in love with its color, its brilliance, its divine heaviness. I welcome any enterprise that will increase my stock- which is considerable.
Yes, that’s the biggest flaw in the plan, really. An individual being known for being responsible for nuking the US is going to be hunted down and killed no matter how long it takes or where he runs. No amount of money or legal shenanigans would be a defense, at that point the government wouldn’t care. And seeking sanctuary in another nation is actually a worse option than in real life, in a setting with, well, Bond style super spies/agents/assassins. To be fair, I’ve seen so many examples of rich people thinking they are utterly above the law that it’s not actually a plot hole, since I can certainly see one convincing themselves that they could do something like that and the government would refuse to touch them for it. They’d be wrong, but being arrogant & foolish isn’t a plot hole.
Now, if he could lay all the blame on somebody else then the plan should actually increase the value of his gold and he’d have a reasonable chance of actually being alive to enjoy it. I suspect he’d actually come out behind in purely financial terms with all the expenses involved (even ignoring the collateral damage mentioned upthread), but a gold-obsessed nut like him might well not care.
No, Auric Goldfinger would definitely know how much gold weighs – he was involved in smuggling gold, after all, by casting it into boy parts for his car. He would’ve had to have handled it and considered its weight when making sure his car could clear customs (Goldfinger did something similar in the novel, only I think there it was being used for passenger airplane parts). As i noted in my earlier post, he would’ve been well aware of how tough it would be to heft a heavy ingot, but I still can’t believe that he wouldn’t try to take at least one, if only to brag that he had the only surviving un-irradiated gold bar from Fort Knox.
I quite liked “Diamonds are Forever” but doing cursory research it was released before I was born. I think I watched it at around age eight, mid 80s, so not the thorough cynical critic I am today.
