Does anyone know where the nations gold reserve went after the Government illegally created the Federal Reserve in 1913?

Anyone?

Swiss banks mostly... and I hear South AFrica has some pretty decent banks as well.

Then there is the money laundering of capital investments here in the U.S.... Money goes in for projects that have inflated value and comes out clean as a whistle... THEN it goes overseas to the swiss banks.

After a while, with a printing press going day and nite it becomes a shell game figuring out where the real money is.

Right now, it's a promisary note based on how much work or products the average American can produce for whoever is in office.

Of course, THAT patently SUCKS.

Does anyone know where the nations gold reserve went after the Government illegally created the Federal Reserve in 1913?

Anyone?Wasn't the Fort Knox depository built after that date? From what I hear, it's full of gold...perhaps as much as 2000 tons (I wasn't even aware that much gold existed). Some of that gold may belong to foreign nations and in the hands of the US government for "safe keeping".

As for private ownership of gold...there's a lot of it. People buy, sell and collect gold coins all the time.

Wasn't the Fort Knox depository built after that date? From what I hear, it's full of gold...perhaps as much as 2000 tons (I wasn't even aware that much gold existed). Some of that gold may belong to foreign nations and in the hands of the US government for "safe keeping". ...

And a lot of that, I dare say, came from this:

Gold Confiscation Act - 1933 (http://www.the-privateer.com/1933-gold-confiscation.html)

And a lot of that, I dare say, came from this:

Gold Confiscation Act - 1933 (http://www.the-privateer.com/1933-gold-confiscation.html)Yup. What a crime.

How much gold is there ?
In the world there are currently somewhere between 120,000 and 140,000 tonnes of gold ‘above ground’. To visualise this imagine a single solid gold cube with edges of about 19 metres (about three metres short of the length of a tennis court). That's all that has ever been produced.

Divided amongst the population of the world there are about 23 grams per person, about 1.2 cubic centimetres each. This equates to about $250 - $350 worth per person on Earth, depending on the current price.

What's it worth ?
The value of that short tennis court sized cube is about $1.8 trillion. This compares to the US government’s sovereign debt of $6.9 trillion, which until 1971 was part-backed by gold. The US Gold Reserve is just over 8,000 tonnes - which is about 6% of the total gold ever mined. It is worth about $100 billion, or 1.5% of the US national debt.

$1.8 trillion is about one fourteenth of the paper based international bond markets, which themselves, at about $26 trillion, are about two thirds composed of western government sovereign debt almost all of which has appeared, co-incidentally, since 1971 and the declared supremacy of paper money, which was what allowed governments to borrow without caution. The total gold content of the world would pay - at current values - about 7% of the international bond market's sovereign debt. But of course 75% of the world's gold is not available to governments - being held privately as jewellery, bullion and coin. In fact only about 30,000 tonnes, about 1% of the world's sovereign debt is what is held in central bank gold reserves.

Meanwhile the entire gold stock of the world - including the privately held bulk - is much less than one half of one percent of the underwritten risk in the global financial derivatives markets.

The world has placed absolute trust in paper currency denominated assets. Investors have shunned gold for about twenty years while the notional value of paper based financial assets has exploded.

Who owns the gold ?
About 30,000 tonnes of the world’s gold [20-25% of above ground inventory] is held in central bank vaults.

Major Central Bank Reserves (2000)

Nations & institutions Reserves (Tonnes)
USA 8139
Germany 3469
IMF 3217
France 3025
Switzerland 2590
Italy 2452

The totals for other central banks tail off rapidly after these main holders. Most only hold a few hundred tonnes, and together they make up a bit over 30,000 tonnes in all.

The rest is held by individuals in the form of gold jewellery [approx 70,000 - 80,000 tonnes], coin and privately held bullion [combined at 20,000 tonnes].

90% of the gold above ground has been mined since the start of the California gold rush in 1848. Modern power machinery and chemicals have steadily lowered the price at which gold can be extracted. The average production cost of the world's biggest producer - South Africa - is about $238 per troy ounce. 1997 industry estimates by the Federal Reserve Board suggested an average production cost worldwide of $300 per ounce.



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There is no reason to base currency on the shiny yellow metal .. there simply is not enough of it on the planet to cover the value of currency

There is no reason today to base currency on ANY specific commodity, there is nothing intrinsically special about AU other than its historical uses .. it simply would be impossible and undesirable to base the dollar on gold today

M3 (currency and bank deposits) is about 13 trillion US dollars which is much more than the current value of all the gold in ft knox .. so either the value of the dollar would have to be deflated about 7-fold (and that does not even include the value of bonds and other treasury debts) or the value of gold would have to increase about 7-fold (making south africa the Saudi Arabia of gold) .. this is just hypothetical pondering because it will never happen

Because of this huge disparity between the value of credit (which the current dollar is based on) and the current value of AU .. even IF it were possible to convert to AU based currency .. there would be all sorts of bizarre economic side effects such as continuous deflation (due to economic growth exceeding the supply of AU) and zero or negative interest rates ( since the value of borrowed money would increase with time ) on the other hand, with fixed currency there might not be any economic growth becuase there would be no incentive to lend .. god only knows what would happen to the world markets with the dollar existing in a sort of antimatter universe .. this financial fever-dream fortunately is just more hypothetical musing

IF an asteroid hit the central bank and the economy imploded, THEN I am sure people would revert to a frontier existence of hunting, gathering, dirt farming and AU based currency

[url]There is no reason to base currency on the shiny yellow metal .. there simply is not enough of it on the planet to cover the value of currency

There is no reason today to base currency on ANY specific commodity, there is nothing intrinsically special about AU other than its historical uses .. it simply would be impossible and undesirable to base the dollar on gold today
I tend to agree...in part. I think there are things of value beyond gold. Of course! There are assests of all sorts...real estate, equipment, machinery, supplies, etc. The way I see it, paper money is simply a medium with which to exchange goods based on their relative value.