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How Much Is The Gold In Fort Knox Worth

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Does Fort Knox Still Have Gold

Fort Knox gold does not exist

When thinking of secure facilities, one name that constantly comes up in conversation is Fort Knox. And for a good reason. Fort Knox in Kentucky is where the United States government stores most of its precious metal bullion reserves.

Fort Knox now houses 147.3 million ounces of gold bullion, according to the U.S. Mint. Thats about half of the U.S. Treasurys stored gold.

Lets delve into some history and facts about the U.S. Bullion Depository at Fort Knox, a facility of endless fascination for Americans.

How Much Gold Is In Fort Knox And Who Owns It

Germany has the next highest gold reserves, with 3,364 metric tons of gold in its current holdings. At the end of July 2020, Fort Knox had 147 soldiers. There are 34 million troy ounces of gold reserves with a market value of US $290 million. There are 56 billion dollars, or $9 billion. The United States has 35% of its gold reserves in gold.

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No One Knows The Combination

Strict security measures are in place to keep Fort Knox secure. That means no one person knows the entire entry combination to access the gold vault. Instead, the information is divided up among several people. Even information about who knows a piece of the combination is classified.

Conspiracy theorists believe the Fort Knox vaults are empty. Source:

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How The Size Of A Gold Bar Affects Price

According to the United States Mint, a standard gold bar measures 7 x 3 5/8 x 1 ¾ inches. Internationally accredited standards dictate that this standard size must weigh between 350 ounces and 430 ounces. At the standard size the Mint suggests, a gold bar should weigh about 25 pounds or 400 ounces. If the gold price is currently listed at $1,570 USD, that means 400 ounces of gold, or a standard gold bar, is worth $628,000.

Thats clearly out of the price range of the average investor, so anybody daydreaming about taking home the entire wheel barrels filled with gold bars home is going to have to figure out how to become the next Jeff Bezos or Warren Buffet. Stacking standard sized gold bars isnt easy, but that doesnt mean the average investor cant get in the game for much less. It just means most will only own a fraction of a gold bar, or a much smaller non-standard size.

Historical Gold Prices: 30 Bce To Today

How Much Is The Gold At Fort Knox Worth?

Kimberly Amadeo is an expert on U.S. and world economies and investing, with over 20 years of experience in economic analysis and business strategy. She is the President of the economic website World Money Watch. As a writer for The Balance, Kimberly provides insight on the state of the present-day economy, as well as past events that have had a lasting impact.

Gold has been considered precious throughout history, but it wasnt used for money until around 550 BCE. At first, people carried around gold or silver coins. If they found gold, they could get their government to make tradable coins out of it. Because of its value and its usefulness as currency, the evolving value of gold can be traced back as far as 30 BCE.

Learn about the price of gold from 30 BCE through today.

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United States Bullion Depository

The United States Bullion Depository
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The United States Bullion Depository, often known as Fort Knox, is a fortified vault building located next to the United States Army post of Fort Knox, Kentucky. It is operated by the United States Department of the Treasury. The vault is used to store a large portion of the United States’ gold reserves as well as other precious items belonging to or in custody of the federal government. It currently holds roughly 147 million troy ounces of gold bullion, over half of the Treasury’s stored gold. The United States Mint Police protects the depository.

The Treasury built the depository in 1936 on land transferred to it from the military. Its purpose was to house gold then stored in New York City and Philadelphia, in keeping with a strategy to move gold reserves away from coastal cities to areas less vulnerable to foreign military attack. The first set of gold shipments to the depository occurred during the first half of 1937. A second set was completed in 1941. These shipments, overseen by the United States Post Office Department, totaled roughly 417 million troy ounces , almost two-thirds of the total gold reserves of the United States.

Who Holds The Most Gold

  • United States of America There is 8 tons of gold in the United States. The yellow metal represents 79% of its total foreign exchange reserves.
  • Germany Germany has 3 tons of gold equivalent to its foreign exchange reserves.
  • Italy Italy owns 2 tons of gold, which makes up the entire foreign exchange reserves.
  • France France’s gold reserves amount to 2 tons.

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Its A Currency Not A Commodity

You can look at the gold piece kind of like the American Dollar. It has whatever value people assign to it. The goal of having a currency is to give a universal portable way to conduct transactions. In the D& D universe gold is that currency. There are a few abstractions though.

Universal value For ease of use the game system assumes that every region values goods the same way, i.e. a tiny farming town values a whip as much as a merchant in Waterdeep.

There are few other currencies. Unlike the real world, most countries all settled on a single choice. There are some localized currencies described in the core books, but they are more for fluff than anything.

Its all from an adventurers perspective. When an adventurer needs a goat in a hurry to lure out the hydra, he doesnt shop around or buy in bulk. If you bought a whole herd of goats, or maybe found a farmer down on his luck, you might be able to get a goat for less than 1GP. The list price represents a cost that any merchant would gladly sell that object at.

Estimated real-world value: ~$50 This is a very tough way of looking at item costs. It would be more effective to think in terms of rarity and amount of work required. In short, there isnt a very good estimate for the previous reasons, but well try here.

Most of the answers seem to be going by the purchasing power route, but to answer it by the simple expedient of what that amount of gold is worth:

TL DR

All The Gold In Fort Knox Will Not Buy You More Than 1% Of Total Bitcoin Supply

How Much Gold Is in Fort Knox: Did You Know?

This story is about value, and the difficulty of measuring and finding true value. The total size of the US gold holdings is 261 million fine troy ounces. The size of the holdings in Fort Knox is 147.43 million troy ounces. At the current market price, this should be worth about $470 billion , the Treasury marks the gold at $11.1 billion . The statutory price for gold is set at $42.22 per fine troy ounce, the same price it was in 1971 when the dollar came off the gold standard. The real price of gold in the open market is about $1750 per troy ounce. This is about 40 times more than the marked value. The heading is based on the value of $11 billion placed on the gold holdings of the treasury, which is why it says 1% of the bitcoin supply at current bitcoin prices.

Fort Knox, Kentucky

Bettmann Archive

No nation in the world is currently tied to the gold standard. Throughout history, money has had many forms, from cowries to potsherds. Some of the more successful started with a currency fully backed by gold. First by striking the coins with gold. Over the years, many schemes and human ingenuity played roles in literally chipping away, at this standard. Bi-metallism set up in the young American republic caused so many problems, because of differences in purity of gold, because of arbitrage between silver and gold prices at various points, causing breakdowns, including the unavailability of money to conduct transactions, leading to the printing of banknotes.

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Significance Of Fort Knox

The US Department of the Treasury owns all gold from Fort Knox. The question is why this place still exists after President Richard Nixon officially abolished the gold standard in 1971. There are two probable reasons for that:

  • The stocks kept in this vault are so vast that they could destabilize the entire world economy after the sudden bullion sale
  • The simple gold politics

The problem is the gold amount the US keeps in Fort Knox. If the government ever considered selling all that gold, its value would fall instantly and cause chaos in the marketplace.

Besides, this gold is not crucial for the US monetary system but only an advantage of the Federal Reserves balance sheet. The gold in Fort Knox is among the worlds most significant bullion holdings, but it is actually only a tiny part of the US total assets.

Believe it or not, these 147.3 million troy ounces of gold are almost negligible compared to a $13.8 trillion GDP economy. In other words, these large gold reserves offer some confidence to investors, but they are not substantive but more symbolic.

What Is The Us Dollar Backed By

Currency Backed by Gold For almost 200 years following the founding of the United States, the value of the U.S. dollar was officially backed by gold. The gold standard was a system agreed upon by many countries during that period, in which a currency was determined to be worth a certain amount of gold.

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Who Owns All That Gold

So, since Fort Knox and the other depositories hold enough gold to massively influence global economics, who owns all of it? Well, the sole official owner of all 8133.5 metric tons of gold is the U.S. Department of the Treasury . The USDT is the national treasury for the federal government of the United States overseeing the agencies responsible for printing paper currency and coins, such as the U.S. Mint. The USDT is also responsible for the collection of taxes through the Internal Revenue Service among many other responsibilities.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury is essentially the executive department that deals with all things of monetary value in the United States. The other significant organization in this regard is the Federal Reserve which serves as the central bank of the United States. The head of the USDT is the Secretary of the Treasury who is a member of the presidents cabinet and is nominated by the president of the United States. As of early 2020, the incumbent Secretary of the Treasury, as appointed by President Trump, is Steven Mnuchin.

Gold is currently worth $1,570 USD per ounce. Analysts are predicting that it could be worth as much as $2,000 USD per ounce by the time Donald Trump runs for re-election later this year. That means theres a lot of upside left, but the price speculation surrounding gold begs the question, how much is a gold bar really worth?

What Do The Pcs Need Gold/money For

How Much Is The Gold At Fort Knox Worth?

Back to game play: how many cows must I offer in trade for a chain shirt that our fighter needs? The PHB GP values give you a place to begin for answers to that question. But wait, where did you get all of those cows? Is there someone looking for a party of cattle rustlers? More in-game play depth to the game economy.

How deep into trade, cost, and value are your players going to enjoy in this game? Is it more important at low levels, when gold is scarce, or at higher levels when your players may have castles, holdings, retainers, and henchmen? If you need money to raise an army to fight large hobgoblin raiding parties, economics can play a larger role.

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The Truth About The Fort Knox Gold

One of the little-known items on the Feds balance sheet is a vital asset it received from the U.S. Treasury a long time ago

During the Great Depression, in 1933, President Roosevelt issued an executive order requiring anyone with gold to surrender it to a Federal Reserve bank or any member bank of the Federal Reserve system.

The Federal Reserve banks also required the commercial banks to hand over their gold to the Fed. Now, suddenly, the gold went out of the commercial banks into the Federal Reserve Bank.

But under the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, the Fed was ordered to surrender all its gold to the Treasury Department. All the nations gold in effect came under direct government ownership.

Now, this is key: The Federal Reserve is actually a private system, while the Treasury is an arm of the U.S. government. And the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution prevents the government from taking private property without just compensation.

To get around that legality, the just compensation was a gold certificate the Treasury issued to the Fed in exchange for its physical gold.

To this day, the Fed carries that gold certificate on its balance sheet.

The Treasury officially values its gold at $42 an ounce. That was the official gold price from 1973, two years after the U.S. abandoned the Bretton Woods system. Of course, the market price of gold today is almost $1,300 an ounce.

Thats highly interesting, because thats how much gold the Treasury currently owns.

Regards,

How Much Gold Is In Fort Knox

Once the US gold reserves mounted, the government picked out Kentucky and decided to use the existing Fort Knox US Army Garrison extended over 42 acres to open the new US Bullion Depository. After opening in 1937, the first gold shipment arrived from Philadelphia by US Mail!

Nowadays, Fort Knox is the primary US treasury of gold reserves. However, some state gold is also deposited in West Point, New York, and Denver. So lets discover how much gold is in Fort Knox nowadays.

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Time For Fort Knox To Sell

The Fed wont be unloading large stashes from Fort Knox anytime soon. Doing so would flood the market and send the price of gold spiraling downward. A small, vocal group of gold bugs would be against it, says John Irons, research and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. The Fed wouldnt want to stir things up.

But Irons and some other economists would like to see the U.S.s gold reserves thinned out. The Fed could sell a lot of the gold, says Irons. Its better used in jewelry or in electronics. It can be useful to the private economy rather than buried in a vault. The sale could make a small dent in the $12.1 trillion national debt and, with the price of gold near its all-time high, this is a particularly good time to sell.

The reason Fort Knox will remain a mighty fortress, however, may come down to something Alan Greenspan once told Paul. When Paul asked the former Fed Chairman why the Fed hangs onto its hefty gold reserves, Greenspan said just in case we need it, says Paul. You hold onto it because its the ultimate in money.

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Fort Knox Gold Vault Commemorative Coin

Fort Knox: A Depository of Gold or Secrets? Learn More About Gold, Silver, Platinum and Palladium
  • Beautifully detailed engraving of the Gold Vault
  • Fort Knox: America’s Impenetrable Gold Vault
  • The legendary Fort Knox in Kentucky
  • Available

  • Collect & Save
  • Individual Item Only

Deep in the ground below a U.S. Army post in Kentucky sits the most famous gold vault in history: Fort Knox. Constructed in 1936 with walls of heavy granite and a blast-proof door weighing more than 20 tons, Fort Knox was designed to securely house America’s official gold reserves, as well as items of great importance occasionally entrusted to the U.S. government such as original copies of theDeclaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution, the Magna Carta, and European crown jewels.

All-told, the Depository is protected by its own police force plus over 30,000 soldiers with associated tanks, armored personnel carriers, attack helicopters, and artillery and no single person is entrusted with the entire combination to the vault.

Specially minted to commemorate the80th Anniversary of the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox, this AMERICAN MINT EXCLUSIVE tribute is layered in brilliant 24k gold and features a highly detailed rendition of the world’s most famous gold vault on the obverse. The year the depository was opened – 1937 – and the price of gold at the time -$35.00/oz. – is engraved along the bottom of the coin. This stunning tribute comes in its own protective capsule to preserve it for future generations.

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How Much Gold Is At Fort Knox

For nearly 80 years, a very large portion of America’s gold has been held in reserve at the U.S. Bullion Depository, known more commonly as Fort Knox. And even though we switched off the gold standard in 1971, the idea that billions of dollars worth of gold bars are just sitting in Fort Knox gathering dust, is a tantalizing fantasy for any criminal mastermind. But exactly how much gold is kept at Fort Knox? The amount of gold held at Fort Knox has fluctuated over the years. It was at its greatest amount during World War II when several European governments moved their gold reserves to Kentucky for safe keeping. At this time, the amount of gold at Fort Knox peaked at 20,205 metric tons . Also during WW2, the original copies of the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution were moved to Fort Knox as were the Hungarian Crown Jewels and a copy of the Magna Carta. Currently, the vault holds 4,578 metric tons of 368,000 standard, 400 oz. troy gold bars. That’s equal to three percent of all the gold that has ever been found and refined in human history. Fort Knox holds roughly $180 billion worth of gold.

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