London's Daily Mail has jumped on Elon Musk's interest in whether the U.S. government still has gold reserves at Fort Knox in Kentucky --
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14403697/gold-reserve-doge-audit-fort-knox-elon-musk.html
-- but no one yet seems to be addressing the key detail.
The big issue is not so much whether gold remains in the depository as much as whether it is encumbered by leases or swaps undertaken by the Federal Reserve or the Treasury Department. That is, the big issue is whether U.S. gold reserves are, to put it politely, oversubscribed, along with the gold the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has held as custodian for other nations.
Just as experts have said the London and New York gold markets trade as much as 100 times the metal actually available for delivery there, with each ounce of real metal supporting scores of derivative claims to it, what is the U.S. government's true position in gold in domestic and international markets?
During its freedom-of-information litigation against the Federal Reserve in 2009 GATA extracted an admission that the Fed had secret gold swap arrangements with foreign banks:
https://www.gata.org/node/7819
The Fed refused to detail those arrangements.
In 2012 gold researcher Ronan Manly obtained the secret 1999 report of the staff of the International Monetary Fund confirming that the IMF was allowing its member central banks to include their gold swaps and leases as part of their official gold reserve totals so markets would not discover how much official gold had been deployed for price suppression:
https://www.gata.org/node/12016
That's one reason -- there are others -- why official gold reserve data is not reliable and, indeed, why a mere inspection of the vaults at Fort Knox or any other official depository can never be dispositive.
Only a full audit of possible encumbrances of the U.S. gold reserve or any gold reserve can establish the status of the reserve and tell the story of gold market intervention.
How much gold has been shorted by the U.S. government in the last 50 years of gold price suppression policy? That is the question that Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency should try to answer.
In the meantime, GATA may be forgiven for suspecting that the supposed frantic shipments of gold to the United States from London and other locations have nothing to do with the fear of tariffs but everything to do with a desperate rush to recover gold used during by many years of naked shorting under price suppression policy.
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