Bonnewagon, don't be so sure about that gold. The US went off the gold standard shortly after WWII. Basically, as it stands now, the US dollar is valued in terms of how it trades or exchanges with a "basket" of other currencies. The whole business was actually a chapter in a College Economics course that I took.
As for guarding Fort Knox, it wouldn't be the first time that the military got tasked with creating an illusion that something valuable or important existed at a given location where the opposite was true. Gotta keep up appearances to fool the enemy and keep the population complacent.
As for those reserves, unlike Canada, where a fixed percentage of all deposits have to remain on deposit or in immediate on site reserve to cover unforeseen withdrawals, American banks can lend out all their assets. A few years back there was one of those urban mystery tales shows ,the plot for which hypothesized that two major New York banks located across from each other on the same street actually had a tunnel drilled between their basements for the express purpose of moving gold from the vault of one to the vault of the other in case an federal audit of assets was called and it was discovered that they had insufficient hard specie reserves on the premises to cover their outstanding debts or loans. Of course the narrator could not get into either of those basements to verify the theory and a lot of the "suits" out on the streets were supposed to be security from one alphabet agency or another. (Hey, it beat watching some mook all dressed up in a squirrel suit try to sing opera, or whatever....)
The other interesting thing is that if you watch one or more of those goldmining shows where multiple crews come close to killing themselves to scratch a living out of the gold fields, the turn in value of what they excavate and sluice is outrageous. 1000 grams = 11kilogram= 2.2 lbs. A standard pound is 16 oz,, gold is weighed on the troy ounce standard; 12 oz/lb. I think that at one point an ounce of gold was valued well north of a grand. Anyway, for the one mining crew the final gross pay day was over a million dollars before expenses, crew, equipment, loans and interest on loans.
Big Question here is, What happens to that gold once it is bought by the gold buyer? Where does it go? Gold is not supposed to be owned by private citizens, again, part of that business of decommissioning dependence on the gold standard. The pipeline for where the gold goes and how it is subsequently processed and stored is never explained. And yes, I know, that private possession law is broken probably as much as it is obeyed, the theory being that come the fall of humanity, gold will still be acceptable for trade and barter and purchases where paper cash will be worthless. Right now there is probably more gold being held in private hands than the banks can lay claim to. For all anyone knows, the entire gold reserve of the US isn't even domestically stored locally anymore but got sent to Switzerland to be banked, (Yeah, right,) there
Nick
As for guarding Fort Knox, it wouldn't be the first time that the military got tasked with creating an illusion that something valuable or important existed at a given location where the opposite was true. Gotta keep up appearances to fool the enemy and keep the population complacent.
As for those reserves, unlike Canada, where a fixed percentage of all deposits have to remain on deposit or in immediate on site reserve to cover unforeseen withdrawals, American banks can lend out all their assets. A few years back there was one of those urban mystery tales shows ,the plot for which hypothesized that two major New York banks located across from each other on the same street actually had a tunnel drilled between their basements for the express purpose of moving gold from the vault of one to the vault of the other in case an federal audit of assets was called and it was discovered that they had insufficient hard specie reserves on the premises to cover their outstanding debts or loans. Of course the narrator could not get into either of those basements to verify the theory and a lot of the "suits" out on the streets were supposed to be security from one alphabet agency or another. (Hey, it beat watching some mook all dressed up in a squirrel suit try to sing opera, or whatever....)
The other interesting thing is that if you watch one or more of those goldmining shows where multiple crews come close to killing themselves to scratch a living out of the gold fields, the turn in value of what they excavate and sluice is outrageous. 1000 grams = 11kilogram= 2.2 lbs. A standard pound is 16 oz,, gold is weighed on the troy ounce standard; 12 oz/lb. I think that at one point an ounce of gold was valued well north of a grand. Anyway, for the one mining crew the final gross pay day was over a million dollars before expenses, crew, equipment, loans and interest on loans.
Big Question here is, What happens to that gold once it is bought by the gold buyer? Where does it go? Gold is not supposed to be owned by private citizens, again, part of that business of decommissioning dependence on the gold standard. The pipeline for where the gold goes and how it is subsequently processed and stored is never explained. And yes, I know, that private possession law is broken probably as much as it is obeyed, the theory being that come the fall of humanity, gold will still be acceptable for trade and barter and purchases where paper cash will be worthless. Right now there is probably more gold being held in private hands than the banks can lay claim to. For all anyone knows, the entire gold reserve of the US isn't even domestically stored locally anymore but got sent to Switzerland to be banked, (Yeah, right,) there
Nick
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