Fort Knox gold an US government

R1D2

R1D2

many leagues under the sea.
Valued Senior Member
I got to watching a show called Brad Meltzer's Decoded...
An I got a little intrigued.
The government could lie about the gold it has to keep the fears down an to make others think our dollars worth more even though our dollar is not backed by gold. We need gold to make the dollar worth something.
Could fort knox's gold be gone. Could it really be emptied. What could you come up with on why the US Government would lie about US kept gold. I think its emptied. Because its been depleted, an moved.
If Knox was believed to be the gold source of the US. Then that's where the bad guys will attack. So they have to let all of us believe its full. There may not be much gold stored by the US. An strongly I feel it could be stored in a few places. One place you may argue is not real is a place I heard about a long time ago. A secret "vault" under mount Rushmore. An a quick thought why does the president have to place a request to get in Knox? He can be denied. An no president in at least the last 10 years has placed a request to see the gold at Knox.
 
I have news for you, gold isn't any more real as money than cash. We absolutely don't have enough gold to back our money, and it hasn't been that way for a long time. Nor does it matter.
 
In his excellent investing primer in Fortune (an excerpt of his forthcoming Annual Letter), Warren Buffett devotes a few paragraphs to gold and the fools who worship it.

He also explains why gold is generally a crappy investment, even if its price in dollars goes up from time to time (as it has over the past decade).

If you molded all the gold in the world into a cube, Buffett says, it would be about 68-feet per side. This is four feet shorter (and considerably wider) than a tennis court. As Buffett observes, it would fit comfortably in the middle of a baseball infield.
 
Buddha12 said:
The size of a tennis court is large to you? Doesn't take much to amaze you it would seem. To me that's a very small cube from all of the Earth that has been mined to get it out.
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Yeah, but that's solid. You could make a pile a treasure from that gold that would cover many football fields.
 
go
R1D2 said:
An a quick thought why does the president have to place a request to get in Knox? He can be denied. An no president in at least the last 10 years has placed a request to see the gold at Knox.
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Why would a president want to go to Fort Knox and inspect the gold there? Gold is not relevant to the US or international monetary policy. Major currencies are no longer backed by commodities. Additionally, the New York Federal Reserve holds more gold than Fort Knox.

http://news.cnet.com/2300-11386_3-10004180.html
 
Joe you said "New York Federal Reserve holds more gold than Fort Knox."
I say that's correct as well... I am saying the emblem above the door to the entrance is the only gold at fort knox. There is none stored there.
As for what does gold mean to a country... Um let's see no country can survive with out it or start with out it. An if a country needs to pay a loan from another country do you think they want "currency" that ain't worth what they used to print it on. I don't think so they want trade of gold or diamonds, silver maybe other jewels. They don't want something worthless. An I am sure other country's don't want a cargo freighter full of dollar bills. So gold is important. An that gold has a value. Other country would think less of the USA if we had gold an wrote audits, an other proof we had said amount of gold an lied about our amount. Or where its at we can't say 100 pounds of gold is at fort knox an it not be there. Its deceptive an wrong. Of course you can't expect our government to tell the whole truth. But on this matter they should be truthful. An I doubt the amount you mention Buddha12 in the whole world. It has not all been measured an accounted for. Just what is claimed. An think of what would happen if what is said to be claimed is not fully accounted for? An a president should see the gold at all reserves. He is ultimately in charge of it. Its like owning a safe an you don't know what's all in it. You can't operate with what you don't know. That's almost like a carpenter that don't know welding. An he is trying welding with out instructions, an not knowing what he's doing.
 
spidergoat said:
Gold has a limited value as an industrial metal, other than that it has no inherent value other that what people arbitrarily give it. Our oil reserves are far more important.
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I disagree. The thickness of gold (on the connectors of circuit boards) had to be reduced from 6microns to 4 microns (approx) because of the cost of gold. That means I can plug a circuit board into a mother board and get errors even when both boards are working properly.

I would agree, however, that oil is more important than gold.
 
Mazulu said:
I disagree. The thickness of gold (on the connectors of circuit boards) had to be reduced from 6microns to 4 microns (approx) because of the cost of gold. That means I can plug a circuit board into a mother board and get errors even when both boards are working properly.
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Not because of the use of gold in industry. It's price has little to do with that and more to do with the arbitrary value we give it because it's pretty.
 
spidergoat said:
Not because of the use of gold in industry. It's price has little to do with that and more to do with the arbitrary value we give it because it's pretty.
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It's not as arbitrary as you might think. If you look at every element on the periodic table, gold is one of the few elements that's non-reactive, not a gas, and not radioactive or toxic. Among those that fit the bill (the precious metals) only gold or silver were available in sufficient quantities in ancient times to be used as a currency. And silver is probably too plentiful. When you come down to it, it was almost inevitable that gold would be used as currency or to back currency.

[video=youtube;FqrT6Ogbazw]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqrT6Ogbazw[/video]
 
OK, but you are just talking about coinage that will wear well. It's still largely symbolic. The proof is that paper works too.
 
Actually dollars an what not USA currency is printed on a complex linen like material. Not paper, now some foreign money may be. An I believe even some of them have included a plastic like material in them to make them harder to counterfeit..
 
R1D2 said:
We need gold to make the dollar worth something.
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This is a theory that collapsed about 75 years ago. The Wizard of Oz was originally a parody about leaving the "gold brick road" for the absurdity of the Emerald City--greenbacks.

Money doesn't have value simply because gold is behind it. It has value because everyone everywhere accepts it in trade for items of equal value.

The value of money is often considered in the exact reverse. It's not just the dollar that represents value, but each dollar in the money supply represents the government's estimate of how many sales are in progress on any given day. "Printing money" as the Right likes to characterize it, is not as simple as artificially propping up the economy. It's the other way around. When the government is printing a lot of currency, it means a lot of currency is circulating. The economy is booming and the mint has to keep up with demand. It's generally a sign of health, not of disaster.

One of the hard things about talking about economics is that the Right has jacketed the talking points with all kinds of inflammatory rhetoric and tangled it up in worry-beads. It's hard to strip that away and try to understand any of this since most of us are essentially outsiders to this specialized field of study. I like to think of it as any other science, one that is rooted in academia and supported with studies, models and simulations. I doubt that any of the experts carry forward many of the Right's slanted perspective about what makes the economy tick.
 
Putting politics an the meaning of gold, an the backing of the dollar aside. Do YOU believe that Fort Knox don't have gold? Where do you believe the government put it? Where might have all the gold in Knox GO?!? What could this mean to our standing in the world?
 
Aqueous Id said:
When the government is printing a lot of currency, it means a lot of currency is circulating. The economy is booming and the mint has to keep up with demand. It's generally a sign of health, not of disaster..
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Not necessarily:

Zimbabwe_$100_trillion_2009_Obverse.jpg
 
madanthonywayne said:
Not necessarily
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You cannot make a valid comparison between The United States and Zimbabwe. Additionally, there is no valid reason to expect runaway inflation in The United States in the foreseeable future – assuming Republicans/Tea Partiers don’t cause an intentional default as they almost did last year with the debt ceiling issue.

The Federal Reserve has the power to increase the money supply as most people know. But here is what most people don’t know, the Federal Reserve also has the power to reduce the money supply. The simple minded and the uninformed, think that the Federal Reserve can only print more money, and that is simply fiction.
 
R1D2 said:
Putting politics an the meaning of gold, an the backing of the dollar aside. Do YOU believe that Fort Knox don't have gold? Where do you believe the government put it? Where might have all the gold in Knox GO?!? What could this mean to our standing in the world?
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I believe there is gold in Fort Knox, it is audited. And I have no reason to believe it is not there. But ultimately it doesn’t matter. There is only about 230 billion dollars in gold at current prices sitting in Fort Knox. At a time when our economy is in excess of 15 trillion dollars annually, that is a pittance.

If the gold were not there where is it? If were sold on the open market, someone, actually a lot of someones would have noticed. You cannot move that much gold and sell it without a lot of people knowing.
 
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