Is the Federal Reserve's gold there?

The Federal Reserve in New York says it keeps about 6,200 tons of gold in its vault under Manhattan, but is that gold still there? And how can we be sure that there are not multiple claims on the gold? The Wall Street Journal We surveyed several gold experts and found that there are still many questions about the second largest gold vault in the United States.

In 2011, Ron Paul tried to  Gold Reserve Transparency Act (H.R. 1495) to force a full audit of the New York Fed's gold stockpiles, but that proposal failed to win a majority in Congress. Later, the central bank published a list of Gold bars, but it cannot be checked by an outsider. "Only the employees of the Federal Reserve can access the gold and the central bank has never shown that it is all there"Bullionstar analyst Ronan Manly told the Wall Street Journal.

Checking the gold stock?

In 2012 there was an audit of the gold bars of the Federal Reserve, but that was a test of 'only' 367 gold bars. That seems like a lot, but it isn't when you realize that there are many tens of thousands of these kinds of gold bars worth half a million dollars each in the vaults of the US central bank. Since then, the auditors have only checked whether the seals of the various compartments of the gold vault are still intact.

In the absence of comprehensive monitoring, several persistent rumors continue to hang over the market, such as the theory that the Federal Reserve sold or lent the gold in order to Gold price suppression. "There must have been a central bank that dumped its gold on the market, because the gold price did not react as I expected in the period that I followed it. The most likely explanation for this is the intervention of the Federal Reserve.", according to analyst John Embry of Canada's Sprott Asset Management, who also ran a gold fund until 2014.

Gold expert James Turk also has his reservations about the gold reserves in the vault of the New York Fed."All you can see is the front row of gold bars. It is impossible for an outsider to see how many rows of gold bars there are in a row and how large the space is where it is stored," Turk said. He believes that most of the gold in the central bank's vault has been lent to other parties, who in turn have lent it out. According to him, this would mean that much more gold has been provided on paper than what is actually present in the safe .

Who owns the gold at the New York Fed?

Some gold investors believe that the Federal Reserve is secretly making its gold holdings available to market participants in order to suppress the price of gold and defend the value of the dollar. A spokesperson for the Federal Reserve told the Wall Street Journal that the gold at the New York Fed is not owned by the central bank and therefore cannot be lent out at all.

Most of the gold in New York is owned by foreign central banks, which pay $1.75 per gold bar if they want to move the gold. The storage of the gold is offered as a free service by the Federal Reserve. Despite this free service, more and more countries in the world are recovering their gold, including the Netherlands and Germany. The Netherlands withdrew almost 120 tonnes of gold from its own country, while the German Bundesbank withdrew 300 tonnes of gold from New York in less than five years.

Is the Federal Reserve's gold there?