the United States claims to have over 8,000 tons of gold but what if I told you no one's actually seen that gold in decades now supposedly these bars are stored in heavily guarded vaults the most famous of which is the Fort Knox bullion depository in Kentucky which alone holds about 4,580 tons almost half of the country's gold the rest is split between the US Mint and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York vault in total though the US reserves have stayed at about 8,100 tons for decades with only small changes and the value of all
this gold or something called the book value is set at a very specific price $42 and22 per ounce totaling about $ 11 billion but there's a problem that price is way below today's market value at recent market prices this gold would be worth hundreds of billions of dollars the US Gold Reserve is a hugely valuable asset even if its official accounting value hasn't been updated since the 1970s but why surely the gold reserves are reviewed every year right supposedly it should be it isn't and just recently US Banks have been flying in thousands and thousands
of gold bars from London to New York sparking a lot of theories as to what is actually happening so the question is if we looked in there today what would we find why doesn't the government just do an audit in tell us and if it's missing how would that affect Ordinary People it's one of the most interesting stories you're going to hear about and that's what I want to share with you so with that said let's get into it hi my name is Andre J hope you're doing well come for the finance and stay for
the gold now gold is part of America's mythical lore and throughout history there have been rumors that the United States doesn't actually have the gold it says it does but first I got to ask how did the US even end up with over 8,000 tons of gold in 1933 during the Great Depression President Franklin Roosevelt ended the gold standard for US citizens and ordered the confiscation of most privately held gold through executive order 6102 Americans were required to turn in all their gold coins and all their bullion to the government in exchange for paper dollars
this was super controversial at the time and it resulted in a huge inflow of gold to the US Treasury now to store it Fort Knox depository was built in 1936 and by 1937 there were trainloads of seized and stolen gold that were moved into these new vaults now as Global tensions Rose before World War II the US got even more gold from other countries to help them protect it and by 19 1941 us gold reserves peaked by the end of 1941 Fort Knox alone held over 20,000 metric tons now at that time the US controlled
about 23 of the world's official gold a concentration of wealth unlike any time in human history and all of this happened because Decades of trade surpluses and the influx of gold from Europe which it gave to the US for safekeeping during World War II and gold was seen as this huge part of the monetary system and under the 1944 Britain Woods agreement the US dollar was directly attached to gold at $35 per ounce and other countries linked their money to the dollar America's huge pile of gold gave other countries confidence in the Dollar's value then
in the 1950s to the 1960s in the post-war decades everything started to reverse the US gold reserves started to go down and America started to run what are called trade deficits and it spent a lot of money on overseas commitments the US was sending money to countries left and right and before long countries started asking for their gold back in exchange for the dollars they had held which was allowed at the time under the Breton Woods agreement and systematically gold flowed out of us vaults to pay other countries and US Holdings fell from the World
War II Peak and by 1971 us gold reserves were down to about the same level they are today so what did the US do it was kind of a rug pole president Richard Nixon closed the gold window on August 15th 1971 ending the convertibility of the dollar into gold this action broke the Breton Woods agreement and it put the world on a pure Fiat or paper currency standard at that point the United States decided to keep what was left of the gold rather than continue allowing people to redeem it so the next question is if
the US dollar is not backed by gold anymore why does the Federal Reserve supposedly have so much gold still and the truth is it doesn't in reality the Federal Reserve does not directly own any of the country's gold since 1934 because all the Federal Gold was turned over to the treasury but the FED does have a claim on it in the form of a gold certificate issued by the treasury this gold certificate is recorded on the fed's balance sheet which is sort of like its portfolio of assets which totals gold at about $1 billion that
represents the nation's entire official Gold stock so the Federal Reserve holds the certificate and the physical gold stays in the treasury's vaults now even though the US dollar is no longer backed by gold reserves there's still an important part of what gives the dollar its perceived value because ever since 1973 the gold has been fixed at this $42 per ounce rate which totals $ 11 billion on paper but in reality the Market's value is way higher however the treasury does not do what's called Mark tomarket the asset and that's why any increase in Gold's market
price today is not reflected in their official accounts so the question is why hold all of that gold and why the US has so much gold is because it's seen as a hedge against currency risk Senator Rand Paul once said gold still gives value to the dollar and that's why we don't get rid of it also it brings attention to the fact that gold still has value and implicitly not explicitly but implicitly gold still gives value to the dollar uh that's why we don't get rid of so it's a symbol of stability carried over from
the old era of monetary history but here's what's interesting if gold was marked to Market and the price was raised from the $42 ounce to the current market value in theory the treasury could issue more gold certificates to the FED in exchange for more dollars and that's why people have pointed out that we should look at revaluing the US gold reserves to market prices so we could add hundreds of billions of dollars to the treasury's assets because if the treasury has more assets it can use them to reduce the national debt and stabilize the economy
so then the question is why don't we do that and here's where we get into some really interesting theories even though the US government tells us that the gold is still there and it's still very safe A lot of people don't believe the government first of all there's a lot of secrecy around all of this you can't just visit Fort Knox and the other vaults to look at the gold and that has fueled a lot of speculation that not everything is what it seems now in the 1960s and 1970s for example several people claimed that
most of Fort knox's gold was secretly removed with rumors even suggesting that President Lyndon B Johnson shipped tons of US Gold to London during the late 1960s now according to this Theory the US Gold stash might have been used or lent out without the Public's knowledge and Fort Knox became a giant empty shell guarded for show now these claims actually captured the Public's imagination especially as the US Gold Supply was really shrinking in the 1960s now other people say that no actually the US has all the gold but the gold in Fort Knox doesn't actually
belong to the United States historically Fort Knox safeguards the gold of other countries during World War II in the Cold War gold from European countries for example was stored in the US to protect it from Nazi and Soviet threats so maybe the US does have the gold it's just not ours but according to official accounts in the government almost all foreign owned gold has long been moved out to the owning countries and Fort Knox today is supposed to be what's left of us-owned deep storage gold other people believe the US Gold has been swapped or
loaned out secretly but us officials have denied these claims saying that none of the treasury's gold is encumbered with any loans or swaps and some people believe that some of the gold bars in official reserves or maybe even counterfeit goldplated bars of tungsten or other metals tungsten almost has an identical density to Gold making it possible to create a bar that passes a weight test but isn't pure gold this Theory actually gained traction from an unverified 2009 report claiming China received a batch of gold bars that turned out to be fakes now that report was
never confirmed it sparked speculation that if counterfeit bars do exist in the market maybe even Fort Knox has them this was such a big theory that Congressman Ron Paul publicly questioned whether Fort Knox gold bars are a thing authentic or if some of them might be these goldplated tungsten bricks and during the 2008 financial crisis people believe the US might have quietly sold or leased out some of its gold to suppress prices or raise cash but okay hold on if some people believe this stuff and it's supposedly not true why doesn't the government just do
an audit and tell us what's really going on and the answer is complicated officials claim the gold is audited but there has never been a comprehensive up-to-date audit that has ever been publicly released but here's what we do know when President Dwight Eisenhower took office in 1953 rumors were circulating that some Fort Knox gold has been used to pay wartime bills and in response a group of Auditors conducted a limited inspection of the gold and this is cited as the last full audit of the US Gold which happened over 70 years ago although it ALS
wasn't super detailed by modern standards either Reports say that it was essentially a spot check of about 5 to 7% of the gold bars and the Auditors didn't actually count or test every bar but they sampled enough to say that at that time the gold appeared to be in order people in the 1950s were like okay cool then in the 1970s the US economy started to struggle High inflation the oil shock and the country had come off the gold standard so the question about gold started to to be asked again where is the gold in
1974 a Washington attorney published a book claiming 20 billion dollar worth of gold was missing from Fort Knox and that story became really popular so to silence the doubters the treasury decided to put on a show to prove everybody wrong on September 23rd 1974 the Fort Knox Vault was opened to 100 congressmen and news media it was the first look inside for Outsiders in a long long time now the visitors were shown stacks of gold bars and they were even allowed to hold some of these bars for photos one radio reporter said all I can
say is that I saw gold in there now this event is sometimes mistakenly referred to as an audit but in reality no thorough audit was done during that visit because the tour lasted only a couple of hours only one Vault room was open for viewing no bars were tested or weighed and serial numbers were not checked against the records it was basically a PR move by the government then in 1974 the US Treasury and the general Accounting Office made a more systematic audit program and from 1975 to 1981 there was a series of yearly audits
on portions of the gold with oversight by the general accounting office and the US Mint now those audits involved opening the Vault counting bars and testing random samples for purity by 1981 they reported that there were no discrepancies that were found between the recorded and the actual numbers of gold in storage but this too was not a 100% audit the last report noted that about 22.7 million troy ounces had been verified which represents roughly 80% of the total us owned gold and in terms of gold bars they had checked only 21% of the Gold Bars
by serial number after 1981 though the audit stopped and since the 1980s according to the US Mint and US Treasury the gold is inventoried and audited regularly on the basis of trust me bro now the details of those audits of course are not told to the public that is until 2017 that's when treasury secretary Steven minian made a publicized trip to Fort Knox along with Senator Mitch McConnell and a few other officials and this was the first time that a sitting treasury had visited Fort Knox since 1948 after the visit minian said glad the gold
is there unfortunately one visit by government insiders is still not an actual audit and that brings us to today one of the biggest reasons why people are talking about gold again is because of the trade war and reports that banks are flying over 8,000 gold bars about 2% of the total out of London L and into the US and some people think that this absolutely confirms that the US is out of gold but the real reason is actually something else it's a banking strategy called Arbitrage and here is how it works right now JP Morgan
and HSBC are literally flying gold bars across the ocean from London to New York and they're doing that because they're trying to fix their short positions and make some extra cash while they're doing it that's because right now gold is more expensive in New York than it is in London by about $20 per ounce I know that doesn't sound like a lot but when you're dealing with billions of dollars of gold it adds up really fast JP Morgan and HSBC are what's called gold market makers meaning they help move gold around the world and they
provide liquidity to buyers and sellers and part of their business plan is gold leasing where they lend out physical gold to other Banks investors and institutions in return they earn an interest on these loans but here's the catch when they lease the gold out they hedge their Risk by selling gold Futures in New York in simple terms they're betting on the gold price to stay stable so they don't take on unnecessary risk but something went wrong there was geopolitical tension and uncertainty especially around Trump's new tariffs so gold price in New York went up more
than they did in London that means the bank's short positions or their gold Futures bets are now losing money so to stop bleeding cash they're physically moving gold from London to New York so they can settle their Futures contracts and close their short positions without taking on huge losses this is called Arbitrage by shipping physical gold to New York they can sell it at a higher price then they can use that money to cover their short positions and maybe pocket some of the difference JP Morgan alone is reportedly moving over $4 billion worth of gold
across the Atlantic this month that's what they're really doing it's not necessarily some giant coverup for Fort Knox but even that explanation by itself is just not good enough even Elon thinks we should audit Ford Knox he's openly suggested live streaming the vaults because let's be honest who wouldn't want to see what's inside of there so why won't the government just do it is it really about security or are they trying to hide something what's most interesting to me is that there's always been this duality of what we're told economists like Barry ien green and
Central Bankers say that the fed and treasury have no incentive to lie to us about the gold doing so would be a huge scandal with very little benefit personally I kind of disagree with that I think there's a lot of incentive to not be truthful on one hand you have officials telling us that everything is going well the audits have checked out and on the other hand you have Elon tweeting and it's gone so people don't really know what to believe so it makes sense why so many people are skeptical we're supposed to believe that
some huge amount of treasure that is never seen never audited in full public view is not somehow tampered with and is still there the funny thing is the government could answer 99% of these suspicions by conducting a public Barby bar audit with independent observers so far it's chosen not to do that and instead it's chosen to invite government insiders to verify their claims and maybe they feel that it's due to cost or security or they feel it's un necessary whatever the reason is the truth is we don't actually know if the gold is still there
or not the fact that we don't know is a problem in itself if it turned out the US Gold was missing it could trigger a huge Global Panic the Dollar's credibility would collapse inflation could spiral and countries might start demanding gold-backed currencies again it could be one of the biggest Financial crises in history which is why I think we should demand an answer the gold is either there or it isn't and it's time we find out for now there's no concrete evidence that any US Gold is missing all signs point to it still being there
safe and sound and maybe Elon Musk will someday live stream and show us all of that but would we really know what we're looking at if he did I know I wouldn't and now we're back to the beginning it's not a full audit right I didn't get to lick the gold bars myself but you know what actually fixes this so I guess we'll see what happens as always I'd love to hear your theories on what you think is going on I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day smash the like button subscribe if
you haven't already I'd love to see you back here next week I'll see you soon bye-bye
