How Much Gold Does the US Have?

If you are new to precious metals, a question you might ask is -- Just how much gold does the US have? It's a reasonable question and you would think the answer would be pretty simple. Surely, the US would keep a record of how much gold it has and everyone who wanted to know would be able to get that information. The US does in fact publish a record of it's gold holdings which you can review here in the most recent Status Report of US Government Gold Reserve published as of 4-30-2021.

Pretty simple, right? The US clearly states that as of 4-30-2021. it had 261,498,926.24 ounces of gold reserves. By my math, that comes to about 8,171 tons of gold. But, like many things related to precious metals, some feel the answer is not so simple. 

For decades, the true amount of gold the US actually owns has been questioned by skeptics and doubters. This is not a new phenomenon. Back in the 1970's, there was so much public doubt about whether "the gold is really there" in Fort Knox that a rare public opening of the vault took place in 1974. So, that surely settled the question once and for all, right? 

Of course not. This documentary on Fort Knox released by The History Channel in 2020 described the 1974 event and noted that this effort to calm public doubts only fueled more questions and skepticism (start at about the 21:40 mark of the video). Here are just some of the questions the documentary says were raised even after the vault was opened for public review by a select group of members of Congress and journalists:

- Why did they only open one vault compartment with only about 12 million reported ounces of gold in it? How do we know if the other roughly 250 million ounces were really there?

- Was the gold even real or could it have been faked using gold plating covering tungsten bars? (tungsten has a similar density to gold)

- Why did some of the gold bars look so discolored in the pictures and videos taken at the event? How pure was the gold in the vaults?

- Why did the one sample gold bar pulled out and weighed for display on camera show to weigh less than the bars were supposed to weigh? The History Channel documentary says that US officials blamed the scale being used as poor quality. All this just further raised public suspicions since they admitted the bar should have weighed more than the scale showed and blamed the scale for the discrepancy.

These kinds of questions above raised by skeptics centered on whether the amount of physical gold stored in Fort Knox was actually equal to the amount of gold the US claimed to own. Later in the History Channel documentary linked above, Chris Powell (of the Gold Anti Trust Action Committee or GATA) questions whether the gold has been leased or swapped out by the US even if the physical gold is sitting in the vault (start at around the 39 minute mark of the video). Here is one example article GATA has published on this topic.

So the debate continues to this day and is not likely to end any time soon. Skeptics (since they are skeptics) will continue to argue the lack of full and open transparency in the precious metals markets means we cannot accept public assurances such as the Gold Reserve Status Report linked above and the public vault openings in 1974 and once again in 2017. Of course establishment officials will dismiss the skeptics and say things like the status report linked above are full transparency and can be trusted by the public.

So How Much Gold Does the US Have? 

Clearly, the answer to that question depends upon who you believe. If you believe US officials, the answer is pretty simple. On 4-30-2021 the US owned a bit over 261,498,926 ounces of gold. If you don't believe US officials (or at least have some doubts), the answer is not simple at all and is hidden in an opaque world not truly open to the general public. We report what facts we can find, you decide.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

My added comments: A fascinating aspect of the gold debate to me is how some central bank and government monetary officials will offer comments from time to time about how gold is a relic of the past and is of no importance to a modern monetary and financial system. On the other hand, not only do many central banks own tons and tons of it (a reported 33,000 tons globally), they also try very hard to convince the public that "all the gold is really there" and have done so for decades as we reported above. 

Reasonable questions to ask are  ---  if gold is a meaningless relic from the past, why would you own tons and tons of it and why would you care if the public believes you own tons and tons of it or not? 

It seems like that if gold is truly meaningless and plays no role at all in public confidence in the monetary system, there would be no reason to own a lot of it or care what the public believed about that.