How Much Gold Does The Us Have

Thousands Of Gold Coins Being Sold Figures Show

Canada is selling off most of its remaining gold reserves, mainly by selling gold coins, figures from the Bank of Canada and Finance Department show.

The country held just $19 million US worth of gold as of last Monday. Through most of 2015, the country’s gold reserves stood at more than $100 million US.

Finance Department figures show that Canada sold 41,106 ounces of gold coins in December and another 32,860 ounces of gold coins in January.

That left Canada holding 21,929 ounces of gold in its reserves as of the end of January a “negligible” amount, the Bank of Canada acknowledges worth $24 million US.

“The decision to sell the gold was not tied to a specific gold price, and sales are being conducted over a long period and in a controlled manner,” Finance Department spokesman David Barnabe wrote in an email to CBC News.

“The government has a long-standing policy of diversifying its portfolio by selling physical commodities and instead investing in financial assets that are easily tradable and that have deep markets of buyers and sellers,” he said.

• DOC ZONE: A look at Canada’s diminished gold reserves

With our gold holdings worth $19 million US as of three days ago, that suggests further sales this month, as the price of gold has been rising up to $1,245 US per ounce today.

The History Of Fort Knox

Plans for the construction of the U.S. Bullion Depository began in 1935 when the U.S. Treasury announced their desire to build a gold depository on the grounds of Fort Knox, Kentucky. The idea behind this plan was to move gold from more vulnerable coastal locations like New York and Philadelphia and place it in locations better insulated against military invasion. This exact thinking is what had already led the Treasury to have over 2,600 metric tons of gold moved from San Francisco to Denver where it now resides.

From the initial announcement in 1935, it only took builders about a year and a half to complete the construction of the gold vault. By the end of 1936, the United States Bullion Depository was mostly completed and only slightly over budget. The Treasury Department wasted no time moving gold to their new depository and the United States Post Office began to make semi-weekly shipments starting January 11, 1937. The entire act of moving the gold was a massive militarized operation.

Oddly enough, less than a decade earlier when construction began, the U.S. gold reserves sat around 194 million troy ounces in total. By 1939 that had jumped to 503 million troy ounces and continued from there. Much of this came in from gold imports from abroad as the U.S. earned a greater and greater perception as a safe haven for capital. Moving into the 1940s the United States held an impressive 628.4 million troy ounces of gold accounting for almost 80% of the worlds gold reserves.

Countries With The Largest Gold Reserves In The World

As of June 2021, these are the five countries with the largest gold reserves:

1. United States: 8,133.5 tons. During the height of the Bretton Woods system of international exchange, when the U.S. offered to house other countries’ gold in exchange for dollars, it was reported that between 90% and 95% of the entire world’s gold reserves lay in American vaults. Decades later, the U.S. still holds the most gold makes up over 75% of its foreign reserves.

2. Germany: 3,362.4 tons. Germany keeps its gold reserves in the Deutsche Bundesbank in Frankfurt am Main, the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank branch in New York, and the Bank of England in London.

3. Italy: 2,451.8 tons. The eurozone crisis led some to call for Italy’s government to sell some of its gold reserves to raise funds, but no such plans ever materialized.

4. France: 2,436.2 tons. Former President of France Charles de Gaulle was partially responsible for the collapse of the Bretton Woods system when he called the U.S. bluff and began actually trading dollars in for gold from the Fort Knox reserves. Then-president Richard Nixon, who knew that the fixed rate of $35 per gold ounce was too low, eventually was forced to eventually take the U.S. off the gold standard, ending the dollar’s automatic convertibility into gold.

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A Bit Of Gold History

When Spanish explorers first arrived in the “New World” they met the native people of South America. These two cultures had been separated by a vast ocean, they had never touched one another, they spoke different languages and lived entirely different lives. Yet they had one thing in common – they both held gold in highest esteem and used it to make some of their most important objects.

Throughout the history of our planet, almost every established culture has used gold to symbolize power, beauty, purity, and accomplishment. Today we continue to use gold for our most significant objects: wedding rings, Olympic medals, Oscars, Grammys, money, crucifixes and ecclesiastical art. No other substance of the same rarity holds a more visible and prominent place in our society.

Gold ring: Gold ring with colored stone. Image copyright iStockphoto.com / Krzysztof Gorski.

Gold rings: Gold rings of different color. Image copyright iStockphoto.com / Martin McCarthy.

Colors of gold-silver-copper alloys: Different metal colors that can be produced by alloying different amounts of gold, silver, and copper. Image by Metallos, used here under a GNU Free Documentation License.

We Have A Problem: Biofuel Mandates Are Too Big

The 10% limit is an issue most didnt anticipate at the time the RFS came to be, and heres why things are going awry.

RFS mandates are out of touch with supply and demand dynamics. Biofuel and ethanol consumption in America is near all-time-highs with some 12 billion gallons consumed in 2020. At the same time, gasoline demand is some 30 billion gallons below the forecasts when the RFS passed.

Whats more, this is leading to unintended consequences and ineffective business practices:

• First, a surge in advanced biofuel imports is occurring. Given the RFS mandate requires more ethanol than the U.S. gas supply can absorb, refiners are forced to pay hefty fees for advanced biofuels from foreign markets. In 2020, the cumulative cost stood at a staggering $5.3 billion, nearly 15x the amounts imported in 2011.
• Second, these exorbitant import costs are being passed on to consumers in the form of higher fuel costs. For example, the RFS obligations have led to an average 20 cent per gallon increase in 2021.
• Third, fuel manufacturers are paying billions of dollars in compliance credits to satisfy the RFS obligations. In many cases, this expense is greater than total labor and wages expenses and threatens to make businesses in this space anti-competitive.

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Report As Of: February 28 2021

This data is moving to FiscalData.Treasury.gov where it is available for download in multiple machine-readable formats with complete metadata!

Table may scroll on smaller screens

Book Value: The Department of the Treasury records U.S. Government owned gold reserve at the values stated in 31 USC § 5116-5117 which is $42.2222 per Fine Troy Ounce of gold. The market value of the gold reserves based on the London Gold Fixing as of September 30, 2020 was $493.4 billion.

Deep Storage: That portion of the U.S.Government-owned gold bullion reserve which the Mint secures in sealed vaults that are examined annually by the Treasury Department’s Office of the Inspector General and consists primarily of gold bars.

Working Stock: That portion of the U.S. Government gold reserve which the Mint uses as the raw material for minting congressionally authorized coins and consists of bars, blanks, unsold coins and condemned coins.

Status Report of U.S. Government Gold Reserve

A program of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service

Uses Of Gold In Glassmaking

Gold has many uses in the production of glass. The most basic use in glassmaking is that of a pigment. A small amount of gold, if suspended in the glass when it is annealed, will produce a rich ruby color.

Gold is also used when making specialty glass for climate-controlled buildings and cases. A small amount of gold dispersed within the glass or coated onto the glass surface will reflect solar radiation outward, helping the buildings stay cool in the summer, and reflect internal heat inward, helping them stay warm in winter.

The visor on the helmet of an astronaut’s space suit is coated with a very thin film of gold. This thin film reflects much of the very intense solar radiation of space, protecting the astronaut’s eyes and skin.

Gold church dome: Gold dome of a church. Image copyright iStockphoto / Constantine Vishnevsky.

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Gold Gilding And Gold Leaf

Gold has the highest malleability of any metal. This enables gold to be beaten into sheets that are only a few millionths of an inch thick. These thin sheets, known as “gold leaf” can be applied over the irregular surfaces of picture frames, molding, or furniture.

Gold leaf is also used on the external and internal surfaces of buildings. This provides a durable and corrosion-resistant covering. One of the most eye-catching uses of gold leaf is on the domes of religious buildings and other important structures. The cost of this “roofing material” is very high per square foot however, the cost of the gold is only a few percent of the total project cost. Most of the cost goes to the labor of highly skilled artisans who apply the gold leaf.

Prague orloj: Prague Astronomical Clock in the Czech Republic. Image copyright iStockphoto / Kelly Borsheim.

When Might We Run Out Of Gold

In the U.S. and throughout the world, theres still gold in them thar hills, to borrow an expression associated with the U.S. Gold Rush of the mid-1800s. But theres really only a precious amount of the precious metal.

In 2015, investment bankers at Goldman Sachs speculated that the worlds mineable reserves of gold would run out by 2035. In fact, some experts believe the global supply of mineable gold will hit its peak in 2019 and trail off after that. Over the past three decades, the rate of gold mine discoveries around the world has tapered off.

Looking at the fourth quarter of 2018 alone, most gold miners reported declining production. The World Gold Council confirmed this fourth-quarter decline in their report Gold Demand Trends Full year and Q4 2018, noting that the final quarter of 2018 saw gold mine production fall back from the record quarterly total achieved in Q3.

Prominent mines that experienced a decline include Newmont Goldcorp, Barrick Gold Corporation, and Kinross Gold Corporation.

• Goldcorp, the worlds largest gold mining company by market cap, reported a YoY decline of 2.5 percent.
• Barrick Gold, arguably the second largest gold mining company in the world, reported a ~6 percent YoY decrease.
• Kinross Gold, which claims to be a senior gold mining company, reported a decline of 6.5 percent YoY.

Australia, Canada, and the U.S. account for about 40 percent of worldwide spending on gold mine exploration.

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Support For The World Economy

First, any sign the U.S. was considering selling its gold would wreak havoc in the marketplace. Prices would collapse and gold investors and speculators would be devastated. The reserves of central banks around the globe would decline sharply and the solvency of so-called bullion banks would be threatened. These banks are the same too-big-to-fail banks we bailed out during the 2008-2009 financial crisis and wed face the prospect of letting them fail or bailing them out again.

2013 World Gold Reserves. Courtesy MoneyWeek.

Since the U.S. holds only 2.5% of the worlds gold, you might think this assessment is hyperbolic. Not so. A year ago, when reports swept the market that Cyprus might be forced to sell its gold reserves to deal with its debt crisis, world gold prices plummeted. U.S. gold reserves are 330 times larger than Cyprus reserves.

How Much Gold Is There Can We Add It Up

Well, maybe not.

Turns out, estimates of the amount of gold sitting on the surface of the planet vary widely. Warren Buffett says that if melted down it would all fit into a cube 20 meters on a side. That jibes with estimatessuch as that from precious metals consultancy ThomsenReuters GFMSwhich come in at somewhere around 165-170,000 tonnes.

For convenience sake, we’ll use the metric measurements that are standard to the industry. Smaller quantities of gold are generally expressed in troy ounces, each of which is about 1.1 times the weight of our avoirdupois ounce. Large quantities are expressed in tonnes, which are 10% larger than our ton, at just over 2200. And one tonne = 32,150 troy ounces.

Buffet’s cube would look something like this:

Image courtesy of Demonacracy.info

That tonnage is probably a little low since the estimate is a couple of years old and weve been adding to the world stockpile at a rate of a little over 3,000 tonnes/year since 2015. So perhaps were up to 175,000 tonnes or more.

Or is that figure too low, maybe way too low?

This is the contention of the folks over at the Gold Standard Institute, who have run their own numbers and come up with a wildly different estimate, 2.5 million tonnesthough they do admit that the evidence is sparse and the figure is rather speculative, and few agree with them.

And there are two further complicating matters.

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Gold As An Investment

Gold is available for investment in the form of bullion and paper certificates. Physical gold bullion is produced by many private and government mints both in the USA and worldwide. This option is most commonly found in bar, coin, and round form, with a vast amount of sizes available for each.

Gold bars can range anywhere in size from one gram up to 400 ounces, while most coins are found in one ounce and fractional sizes. Like other precious metals, physical gold is regarded by some as a good way to protect themselves against the ongoing devaluation of fiat currencies and from volatile stock markets.

Buying gold certificates is another way to invest in the metal. A gold certificate is basically a piece of paper stating that you own a specified amount of gold stored at an off-site location. This is different from owning bullion unencumbered and outright because you are never actually taking physical ownership of the gold. While some investors enjoy the ease of buying paper gold, some prefer to see and hold their precious metals first-hand.

How Much Gold Does China Really Have

Its amazing that no one is talking about this.

Chinas demand is robust theyll say. China may overtake India as the top gold consumer theyll add. Exports rise year over year the chatter continues.

But no one, and I mean no one, in the mainstream is calling a spade a spade. China is hoarding gold at a rate never seen before like modern day conquistadors. Only today, unlike in the time of the conquistadors, the blood trail is tough to follow, as are the shipfuls of gold.

Its an egregious rake, though. And while the mainstream media fails to cover this huge story, well do our best to figure out just how much gold China is holding

It all comes down to a little Chinese math.

Remember, the last official announcement detailing Chinas gold holdings was in 2009 ringing in a total of 1,054 tonnes. Compared to their previous official holding, announced six years prior, the new total represented a dramatic 75% increase in Chinese gold holdings.

Much time has passed since the latest official announcement and Chinas gold holdings have surely risen higher. Indeed, a year ago, when we touched base on this topic, we ascertained that China was likely holding 3,300 tonnes of gold thats about three times the current official holdings.

Flash forward to today and the strategic Middle Kingdom is surely holding even more gold. Just take a look at their import patterns over the last 12 months

But heres the kicker.

Take a look:

Keep your boots muddy,

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How Much Gold Does The Us Have

As of November 30, 2018, the US Treasury claims that there is 261,498,926 oz of gold bullion in official US Gold reserves.

Among all nations in the world, the official US Gold Reserves are the most significant amount of official gold claimed by one country by far .

The Department of the US Treasury records official US gold reserve at the values stated in 31 USC § 5116-5117 which gets held to this day at $42.2222 USD per Fine Troy Ounce of gold.

The ongoing market value of the physical gold reserves held based on the fluctuating gold spot price as of February 13, 2019, was $344.4 billion USD.

Below we will break down where in the United States this gold is supposedly stored and in what quantities.

As well, we will show you a bit of shade on the supposed Fort Knox gold holdings, as its historical audit trail since the 1933 gold confiscation is dubious at best.

Why Should You Consider Investing In Gold Bars

Why not? Gold has stood the test of time as a stable form of investment. It has enabled investors to safeguard their wealth for centuries and therefore investing in gold is indeed a wise decision.

Perhaps the most satisfying benefit of holding physical gold is that you get the chance to have total control over your wealth, unlike having your investments in a banks savings account.

As you might know, the future of the dollar is uncertain and therefore converting a portion of your wealth to gold will certainly protect you against future risks.

Gold will therefore enable you to crash-proof your retirement and give you some sense of security.

If you considering rolling over your IRA or 401k to gold or silver, you can check out our top-rated Gold IRA Company Here> > .

Now, lets dive in and explore the common factors that affect the price of a gold bar.

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