Is There Gold at Fort Knox?
The famed Fort Knox is a facility managed by the U.S. Mint. Curiously, however, in a recent exchange of e-mails with a gold investment blog, the former director of that agency demonstrates a disturbing lack of knowledge about the precious metal supposedly stored there. And the Federal Reserve may be hiding the location and value of the allegedly missing bullion.
On July 1, Koos Jansen of goldseek.com published another in a series of posts exploring the fate of the gold allegedly kept in vaults at Fort Knox, Kentucky. In his latest article, Jansen makes some startling claims that if proven true, should instantly constrain Congress to investigate the situation with the gold inventory.
Jansen questions the accuracy and reliability of the recent audit of the reserves. In his own words, he is investigating “the audits performed on 95 % of US official gold reserves — the 7,628 tonnes stored by the US Mint — this is referred to as Deep Storage gold, 4,583 tonnes is at Fort Knox, 1,364 tonnes in Denver, 1,682 tonnes at West Point. In total US official gold reserves account for the 8,134 tonnes, owned by the US Treasury.”
Specifically, he is concerned with the biggest cache of bullion — that supposedly being held at Fort Knox.
Goldseek isn’t the first to question the federal government’s official position regarding the amount of gold held in reserve by the United Stores or the location of those bars. A quick Google search reveals that for at least the last five years, several mainstream news organizations have asked questions similar to those posed by Jansen.
For example, in 2010, CBS News published a story about the gold, questioning the veracity of the government’s claims:
Protected by a 109,000-acre U.S. Army post in Kentucky sits one of the Federal Reserve’s most secure assets and its only gold depository: the 73-year-old Fort Knox vault. Its glittering gold bricks, totaling 147.3 million ounces (that’s about $168 billion at current prices), are stacked inside massive granite walls topped with a bombproof roof. Or are they?
It’s hard to know for sure.
In 2011, CNN reported that Ron Paul (then serving as a congressman from Texas) wanted all the gold audited — the entire inventory.
“Treasury officials insist that the gold is audited annually and is all there,” the news channel reported. Paul was not willing to take the federal government at its word, however. CNN added:
During the hearing, Paul suggested that the Federal Reserve of New York, which has 5% of the U.S. gold reserves, has the ability to secretly sell or swap gold with other countries without anyone knowing.
“The Fed is pretty secret, you know,” said Paul, who leans Libertarian. “Congress doesn’t have much say on what’s going on over there. They do a lot of hiding.”
That’s right: The Federal Reserve — the ultra-secretive central bank that controls the flow of money in the United States — apparently has monopoly control over the gold, too.
Then there is this point made by U.S. News:
A proper audit would verify both the quantity and purity of the U.S. gold hoard. Ideally, each gold ingot would be individually numbered and tested and at the end a reputable nongovernment auditor such as a major accounting firm would attest a complete inventory of separately numbered ingots. This should be a fairly straightforward task. The failure to conduct the audit is perennially advanced as evidence that the gold does not exist.
Knowing what should be done only leads to the question of what is done. That is to say, just how is the gold audited and who does the counting?
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