Has
the Federal Reserve Sold the Gold at Fort Knox? by Joe Wolverton,
II, J.D. | Wednesday, 08 July 2015
The famed Fort Knox is a
facility managed by the U.S. Mint. Curiously, however, in
a recent exchange of e-mails with a gold investment blog,
the former director of that agency demonstrates a disturbing
lack of knowledge about the precious metal supposedly stored
there. And the Federal Reserve may be hiding the location
and value of the allegedly missing bullion.
On July 1, Koos Jansen of goldseek.com published
another in a series of posts exploring the fate of the gold
allegedly kept in vaults at Fort Knox, Kentucky. In his
latest article, Jansen makes some startling claims that
if proven true, should instantly constrain Congress to investigate
the situation with the gold inventory.
Jansen questions the accuracy and reliability
of the recent audit of the reserves. In his own words, he
is investigating “the audits performed on 95 % of US official
gold reserves — the 7,628 tonnes stored by the US Mint —
this is referred to as Deep Storage gold, 4,583 tonnes is
at Fort Knox, 1,364 tonnes in Denver, 1,682 tonnes at West
Point. In total US official gold reserves account for the
8,134 tonnes, owned by the US Treasury.”
Specifically, he is concerned with the biggest
cache of bullion — that supposedly being held at Fort Knox.
Goldseek isn’t the first to question the
federal government’s official position regarding the amount
of gold held in reserve by the United Stores or the location
of those bars. A quick Google search reveals that for at
least the last five years, several mainstream news organizations
have asked questions similar to those posed by Jansen.
For example, in 2010, CBS News published
a story about the gold, questioning the veracity of the
government’s claims:
Protected by a 109,000-acre
U.S. Army post in Kentucky sits one of the Federal Reserve's
most secure assets and its only gold depository: the 73-year-old
Fort Knox vault. Its glittering gold bricks, totaling 147.3
million ounces (that's about $168 billion at current prices),
are stacked inside massive granite walls topped with a bombproof
roof. Or are they?
It’s hard to know for sure.
In 2011, CNN reported that
Ron Paul (then serving as a congressman from Texas) wanted
all the gold audited — the entire inventory.
“Treasury officials insist that the gold is audited annually
and is all there,” the news channel reported. Paul was not
willing to take the federal government at its word, however.
CNN added:
During the hearing, Paul
suggested that the Federal Reserve of New York, which has
5% of the U.S. gold reserves, has the ability to secretly
sell or swap gold with other countries without anyone knowing.
"The Fed is pretty secret, you know," said
Paul, who leans Libertarian. "Congress doesn't have
much say on what's going on over there. They do a lot
of hiding.”
That’s right: The Federal
Reserve — the ultra-secretive central bank that controls the
flow of money in the United States — apparently has monopoly
control over the gold, too.
Then there is this point made by U.S. News:
A proper audit would verify both the quantity
and purity of the U.S. gold hoard. Ideally, each gold
ingot would be individually numbered and tested and at
the end a reputable nongovernment auditor such as a major
accounting firm would attest a complete inventory of separately
numbered ingots. This should be a fairly straightforward
task. The failure to conduct the audit is perennially
advanced as evidence that the gold does not exist.
Knowing what should be done
only leads to the question of what is done. That is to say,
just how is the gold audited and who does the counting?
Although the vaults are under the management of the U.S.
Mint, it is the Treasury Department and the Government Accounting
Office that do the counting.
Well, some of it. You see, the gold at Fort Knox is not
counted and hasn’t been since 1986, if it even was then.
But, the feds don’t admit that openly.
"We know where it is. We know how much there is. We
know it's there. None of it has been removed," insists
Treasury Inspector General Eric Thorson, as quoted by CNN.
That’s the part where Jansen — and Ron Paul — think the
story falls apart. Here’s why.
First, Jansen points out that since 1986, the vaults have
literally been sealed shut. The seals were wax with a ribbon
running through them connected to a document declaring the
vaults sealed.
“The Treasury Office Inspector General (OIG), which is
currently responsible for the Deep Storage gold audits,
has told me it is absolutely not routine to break the seals.
Neither for inspection by a US Mint Director nor for the
President of the United States will the seals be broken,”
Jansen writes.
In 2010, however, the seals were broken and new, more durable
plastic seals replaced the old wax ones. Here’s the story
from Jansen:
At the Gold Transparency Act in 2011 the OIG stated:
More recently the Mint
decided to replace all of the previously placed Official
Joint Seals with new seals. The new seals are more durable,
having a double security barrier seal that can only be removed
by two cuts with a strong cable cutter.
The Mint replaced all of the previously placed Official
Joint Seals with new ones during fiscal year 2010. The
seal replacement process consisted of two steps: (1) inspection
of all previously placed Official Joint Seals on all the
compartments containing deep storage gold to determine
whether they had been altered or compromised in any way,
and (2) placement of a new Official Joint Seal. The seal
inspection and replacement process was carried out for
all 42 deep storage gold compartments, in the presence
of a Treasury OIG auditor, by a Mint headquarter staff
person, representing the Mint Director, and a Mint storage
facility staff person, representing the facility’s Plant
Manager. For each Official Joint Seal removed, the Mint
headquarters representative, the Mint storage facility
representative, and the observing Treasury OIG auditor
signed an inspection report; the same parties also signed
the new Official Joint Seal that replaced the one removed.
So, it’s not likely that
the former director of the U.S. Mint, Edmund Moy, saw the
gold ingots stored at Fort Knox, as he claimed during a speech
at a coin and collectible expo in Baltimore in 2013. The report
cited above issued by the Office of the Inspector General
states that a “mint headquarters representative” attended
the seal swap, not the director himself. Moy’s presence at
the event surely would have been noted in official reports.
The next aspect of Jansen’s research also involves statements
made by Moy that don’t hold up to investigation.
At the convention in 2013, Moy told attendees the following
story about how the gold got to Fort Knox to begin with:
And these bars up at Fort Knox … looked
like dirty gold with some corrosion on them and they’re
not as yellow.… And then you realize, Roosevelt had made
it illegal for Americans to physically possess gold coins,
and he melted all those gold coins and that’s what ended
up being the initial stock at Fort Knox. A lot of those
coins were 22 karat gold which then have impurities. You
know and a lot of it wasn’t refined when it was made into
these bars that ended up making it into Fort Knox. When
you take a look at them, at each bar, you realize what
history is behind it, how many coins must have been melted
in order to make the bar, and what life stories must’ve
been part of all that.
Not exactly true, Jansen claims. He reports:
In 1933 gold coins in the US accounted
for 2,515 tonnes, of which 1,901 tonnes were already held
at banks and the government. The difference, 614 tonnes,
could not have made US gold reserves increase 13,041 tonnes
(from 6,505 tonnes in 1933 to 19,546 tonnes in 1940).
The dramatic rise in US gold reserves was caused by imports.
Finally, what about the annual audit that
detractors of the missing gold theory — including Moy himself
— insist proves the gold is in Fort Knox and that none of
it is missing? Jansen blows the cover off that claim, too:
The official story from OIG is that 100%
of the gold stored at Fort Knox was audited in between
1974 and 1986, although there is no US government department
that has the audit reports…. After the gold was audited
by the Continuing Audit committee all compartments were
placed under Official Joint Seal. Currently, the OIG is
said to inspect the seals every year, that’s all they
do.
No gold is counted, no gold
is even inspected. The seals are checked and the “audit” is
complete.
In a message posted to Twitter in January, 2015, Moy himself
called on Congress to “authorize a comprehensive audit”
of the Deep Storage gold reserves.
There are many who claim that the Federal Reserve doesn’t
want a proper audit because the gold is not there, at least
not all of it. Some groups believe that as part of its effort
to manipulate the economy, the Federal Reserve has sold
the gold.
“The gold market is being manipulated by the Fed,” says
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee spokesman Chris Powell.
“It’s involved in gold swap agreements with foreign banks.
Gold is a major determinant of interest rates.”
An audit would answer this crucial question. Perhaps it’s
time to force open the 22-ton door that stands between our
alleged gold reserves and the eyes of our elected representatives.