America’s Missing Gold: The BIGGEST Cover-up in History

The United States claims to have over 8,000 tons of gold. But what if I told you no one's actually seen that gold in decades? Now supposedly these bars are stored in heavily guarded vaults, the most famous of which is the Fort Knox Bullion Depository in Kentucky, which alone holds about 4,580 tons, almost half of the country's gold. The rest is split between the U.S. Mint and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's vault. In total, though, the U.S. reserves have stayed at about 8,100 tons for decades, with only small changes. And the value of all this gold, or something called the book value, is set at a very specific price, $42.22 per ounce, totaling about $11 billion. But there's a problem. That price is way below today's market value. At recent market prices, this gold would be worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The U.S. gold reserve is a hugely valuable asset, even if its official accounting value hasn't been updated since the 1970s. But why? Surely the gold reserves are reviewed every year, right? Supposedly it should be. It isn't. And just recently, U.S. banks have been flying in thousands and thousands of gold bars from London to New York, sparking a lot of theories as to what is actually happening. So the question is, if we looked in there today, what would we find? Why doesn't the government just do an audit and tell us? And if it's missing, how would that affect ordinary people? It's one of the most interesting stories you're going to hear about, and that's what I want to share with you. So with that said, let's get into it. Hi, my name is Andre Jik. Hope you're doing well. Come for the finance and stay for the gold. Now, gold is part of America's mythical lore. And throughout history, there have been rumors that the United States doesn't actually have the gold it says it does. But first I got to ask, how did the U.S. even end up with over 8,000 tons of gold? In 1933, during the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt ended the gold standard for U.S. citizens and ordered the confiscation of most privately held gold through Executive Order 6102. Americans were required to turn in all their gold coins and all their bullion to the government in exchange for paper dollars. This was super controversial at the time, and it resulted in a huge inflow of gold to the U.S. Treasury. Now, to store it, Fort Knox Depository was built in 1936. And by 1937, there were trainloads of seized and stolen gold that were moved into these new vaults. Now, as global tensions rose before World War II, the U.S. got even more gold from other countries to help them protect it. And by 1941, U.S. gold reserves peaked. By the end of 1941, Fort Knox alone held over 20,000 metric tons. Now, at that time, the U.S. controlled about two-thirds of the world's official gold, a concentration of wealth unlike any time in human history. And all of this happened because decades of trade surpluses and the influx of gold from Europe, which it gave to the U.S. for safekeeping during World War II. And gold was seen as this huge part of the monetary system. And under the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement, the U.S. dollar was directly attached to gold at $35 per ounce. And other countries linked their money to the dollar. America's huge pile of gold gave other countries confidence in the dollar's value. Then in the 1950s to the 1960s, in the post-war decades, everything started to reverse. The U.S. gold reserves started to go down, and America started to run what are called trade deficits. And it spent a lot of money on overseas commitments. The U.S. was sending money to countries left and right. And before long, countries started asking for their gold back in exchange for the dollars they had held, which was allowed at the time under the Bretton Woods Agreement. And systematically, gold flowed out of U.S. vaults to pay other countries. And U.S. holdings fell from the World War II peak. And by 1971, U.S. gold reserves were down to about the same level they are today. So what did the U.S. do? It was kind of a rug pull. President Richard Nixon closed the gold window on August 15, 1971, ending the convertibility of the dollar into gold. This action broke the Bretton Woods Agreement, and it put the world on a pure fiat or paper currency standard. At that point, the United States decided to keep what was left of the gold rather than continue allowing people to redeem it. So the next question is, if the U.S. dollar is not backed by gold anymore, why does the Federal Reserve supposedly have so much gold still? And the truth is, it doesn't. In reality, the Federal Reserve does not directly own any of the country's gold since 1934 because all the federal gold was turned over to the Treasury. But the Fed does have a claim on it in the form of a gold certificate issued by the Treasury. This gold certificate is recorded on the Fed's balance sheet, which is sort of like its portfolio of assets, which totals gold at about $11 billion. That represents the nation's entire official gold stock. So the Federal Reserve holds the certificate, and the physical gold stays in the Treasury's vaults. Now, even though the U.S. dollar is no longer backed by gold reserves, there's still an important part of what gives the dollar its perceived value. Because ever since 1973, the gold has been fixed at this $42 per ounce rate, which totals $11 billion, on paper. But in reality, the market's value is way higher. However, the Treasury does not do what's called mark-to-market the asset. And that's why any increase in gold's market price today is not reflected in their official accounts. So the question is, why hold all of that gold? And why the U.S. has so much gold is because it's seen as a hedge against currency risk. Senator Rand Paul once said, gold still gives value to the dollar, and that's why we don't get rid of it. Also, it brings attention to the fact that gold still has value, and implicitly, not explicitly, but implicitly, gold still gives value to the dollar. That's why we don't get rid of it. So it's a symbol of stability carried over from the old era of monetary history. But here's what's interesting. If gold was marked-to-market, and the price was raised from the $42 an ounce to the current market value, in theory, the Treasury could issue more gold certificates to the Fed in exchange for more dollars. And that's why people have pointed out that we should look at revaluing the U.S. gold reserves to market prices so we could add hundreds of billions of dollars to the Treasury's assets. Because if the Treasury has more assets, it can use them to reduce the national debt and stabilize the economy. So then the question is, why don't we do that? And here's where we get into some really interesting theories. Even though the U.S. government tells us that the gold is still there and it's still very safe, a lot of people don't believe the government. First of all, there's a lot of secrecy around all of this. You can't just visit Fort Knox and the other vaults to look at the gold. And that has fueled a lot of speculation that not everything is what it seems. In the 1960s and 1970s, for example, several people claimed that most of Fort Knox's gold was secretly removed, with rumors even suggesting that President Lyndon B. Johnson shipped tons of U.S. gold to London during the late 1960s. According to this theory, the U.S. gold stash might have been used or lent out without the public's knowledge, and Fort Knox became a giant empty shell guarded for show. These claims actually captured the public's imagination, especially as the U.S. gold supply was really shrinking in the 1960s. Now, other people say that, no, actually, the U.S. has all the gold. But the gold in Fort Knox doesn't actually belong to the United States. Historically, Fort Knox safeguards the gold of other countries during World War II and the Cold War. Gold from European countries, for example, was stored in the U.S. to protect it from Nazi and Soviet threats. So maybe the U.S. does have the gold. It's just not ours. But according to official accounts in the government, almost all foreign-owned gold has long been moved out to the owning countries, and Fort Knox today is supposed to be what's left of U.S.-owned deep storage gold. Other people believe the U.S. gold has been swapped or loaned out secretly. But U.S. officials have denied these claims, saying that none of the Treasury's gold is encumbered with any loans or swaps. And some people believe that some of the gold bars in official reserves are maybe even counterfeit gold-plated bars of tungsten or other metals. Tungsten almost has an identical density to gold, making it possible to create a bar that passes a weight test but isn't pure gold. This theory actually gained traction from an unverified 2009 report claiming China received a batch of gold bars that turned out to be fakes. That report was never confirmed. It sparked speculation that if counterfeit bars do exist in the market, maybe even Fort Knox has them. This was such a big theory that Congressman Ron Paul publicly questioned whether Fort Knox gold bars are authentic or if some of them might be these gold-plated tungsten bricks. And during the 2008 financial crisis, people believed the U.S. might have quietly sold or leased out some of its gold to suppress prices or raise cash. But okay, hold on. If some people believe this stuff and it's supposedly not true, why doesn't the government just do an audit and tell us what's really going on? And the answer is complicated. Officials claim the gold is audited, but there has never been a comprehensive, up-to-date audit that has ever been publicly released. But here's what we do know. When President Dwight Eisenhower took office in 1953, rumors were circulating that some Fort Knox gold has been used to pay wartime bills. And in response, a group of auditors conducted a limited inspection of the gold. And this is cited as the last full audit of the U.S. gold, which happened over 70 years ago. Although it also wasn't super detailed by modern standards either. Reports say that it was essentially a spot check of about 5-7% of the gold bars. And the auditors didn't actually count or test every bar, but they sampled enough to say that, at that time, the gold appeared to be in order. People in the 1950s were like, okay, cool. Then, in the 1970s, the U.S. economy started to struggle. High inflation, the oil shock, and the country had come off the gold standard. So the question about gold started to be asked again. Where is the gold? In 1974, a Washington attorney published a book claiming $20 billion worth of gold was missing from Fort Knox. And that story became really popular. So to silence the doubters, the Treasury decided to put on a show to prove everybody wrong. Then in 1974, the US Treasury and the General Accounting Office made a more systematic audit program. And from 1975 to 1981, there was a series of yearly audits on portions of the gold with oversight by the General Accounting Office and the US Mint. Those audits involved opening the vaults, counting bars, and testing random samples for purity. By 1981, they reported that there were no discrepancies that were found between the recorded and the actual numbers of gold in storage. After 1981, though, the audits stopped. And since the 1980s, according to the US Mint and US Treasury, the gold is inventoried and audited regularly, on the basis of trust me bro. The details of those audits, of course, are not told to the public. That is until 2017. That's when Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin made a publicized trip to Fort Knox along with Senator Mitch McConnell and a few other officials. This was the first time that a sitting Treasury had visited Fort Knox since 1948. After the visit, Mnuchin said, glad the gold is there. Unfortunately, one visit by government insiders is still not an actual audit. And that brings us to today. One of the biggest reasons why people are talking about gold again is because of the trade war and reports that banks are flying over 8,000 gold bars, about 2% of the total, out of London and into the US. And some people think that this absolutely confirms that the US is out of gold. But the real reason is actually something else. It's a banking strategy called arbitrage, and here's how it works. Right now, JP Morgan and HSBC are literally flying gold bars across the ocean from London to New York. And they're doing that because they're trying to fix their short positions and make some extra cash while they're doing it. That's because right now, gold is more expensive in New York than it is in London by about $20 per ounce. I know that doesn't sound like a lot, but when you're dealing with billions of dollars of gold, it adds up really fast. JP Morgan and HSBC are what's called gold market makers, meaning they help move gold around the world and they provide liquidity to buyers and sellers. And part of their business plan is gold leasing, where they lend out physical gold to other banks, investors, and institutions. In return, they earn an interest on these loans. But here's the catch. When they lease the gold out, they hedge their risk by selling gold futures in New York. In simple terms, they're betting on the gold price to stay stable so they don't take on unnecessary risk. But something went wrong. There was geopolitical tension and uncertainty, especially around Trump's new tariffs. So gold prices in New York went up more than they did in London. This is called arbitrage. By shipping physical gold to New York, they can sell it at a higher price. Then they can use that money to cover their short positions and maybe pocket some of the difference. JP Morgan alone is reportedly moving over $4 billion worth of gold across the Atlantic this month. That's what they're really doing. It's not necessarily some giant cover-up for Fort Knox. But even that explanation by itself is just not good enough. Even Elon thinks we should audit Fort Knox. He's openly suggested live streaming the vaults because, let's be honest, who wouldn't want to see what's inside of there? So why won't the government just do it? Is it really about security? Or are they trying to hide something? What's most interesting to me is that there's always been this duality of what we're told. Economists like Barry Eichengreen and central bankers say that the Fed and Treasury have no incentive to lie to us about the gold.