21min chapter

Peak Prosperity cover image

Fort Knox: If the Gold Were There, They’d Let Us See It

Peak Prosperity

CHAPTER

Questions of Gold: Auditing Fort Knox

This chapter examines the complexities and controversies surrounding the auditing of U.S. gold reserves, particularly at Fort Knox. It raises concerns about the lack of transparency and infrequent audits that have not been conducted fully since 1982, questioning the integrity of the data presented to the public. The discussion highlights historical attempts to enhance oversight, the inadequacy of current practices, and the resulting public skepticism about the security of the nation's gold.

00:00
Speaker 2
up. We're going to go into Fort Knox to make sure the gold
Speaker 1
is there. I'm sorry, that came through really, really quietly. It's kind of a quiet recording. I thought it would come out a little better, but he's asked, you're going to go into Fort Knox? He says, yeah, we're going to go into Fort Knox to make sure the gold is there. You
Speaker 2
know that? We're going to go into Fort
Speaker 1
Knox? You know that? We're going to go into Fort Knox? Okay, that is pretty much a done deal at this point. Do you know about that? Do you know about that? It was a bad bump.
Speaker 2
Are they going to eliminate more national security positions, civilians there? Let's see what happens. Anyway,
Speaker 1
we're going to Fort Knox. Oh, so the United States Mint has three main repositories. One of them is at Fort Knox. It has about half the nation's gold, roughly. They've got some more stored in Denver, and they've got some more stored in another vault near in Maryland somewhere, I believe. And then a little bit at the New York Fed. Okay. So the mint, the U.S. mint under the Treasury is responsible for saying, yeah, we have all this gold. We have all this gold. We do. And that's Fort Knox. It's a little building. Most of its vaults in the action is underground. I assume it's very, it would be very hard to break in there. And even if you did, getting into the vaults would be another layer of difficulty. So you would think, you know what, finding out how much gold the United States has should be simple, right? You would walk into a room and you would count things like one, two, three, three be very, very easy to figure this out. Auditing gold, not that hard, but you wouldn't know that from the rigmarole. And by the way, before I start on taking you down this tour, this history tour here of what's happening with our gold and prior audits. My hypothesis is that if the gold was there, then there would be tours. It would be like you could go to the U.S. Treasury Department. You can go to the absolute place where they print money. There's a little catwalk and you can look down on the floor and see all the money being printed and stacked and going into the cutting machines and palleted out like they're proud. They're like, yeah, that's where your money gets printed right there. You see that all that printing happening? That's because nobody's afraid to show you them printing hundred dollar bills because it's actually happening. Conversely, nobody's really allowed to go into Fort Knox and see this stuff like, oh, no, it would violate security. Like in what walking in and seeing where they print hundred dollar bills isn't an insecure situation? That's not it. That's not it. If the gold was there, my prediction is, my expectation is, there would be a big wall of bulletproof glass. You could get the tour. You'd walk by, you know, vault number 38 and look in. Like, oh, look at all that gold there. And then you'd go through the coffee shop, maybe get a Viscone. And then on your way out, you could buy a T-shirt and a hat. That's what it would look like. Nobody gets to go in there. Okay. Our last full audit was 43 years ago in 1982. That's it. And here's what they said in this audit report here. They said here, you have to go all the way out of the footnotes, the footnotes to Appendix 1, 1986. They said here, but number in two slashy on a Smith-Corona, as of September 30th, 1982, 100% of the gold stored at the depository was audited under the initial continuing audit program. In between, excuse me, between July of 83 and July of 85, the gold was audited in accordance with a plan approved by the treasurer as follows. You can see that there's 147 million ounces there, but they audited 15 million ounces, 14, 11, 12. There are a bunch of different vaults, and they would open a door up and take some out and audit that chunk. So they didn't do full audits, right? And they say the continuing annual audit from the same document here, they say in fiscal year 1986, audits of government-owned gold were conducted at the United States Mint in Denver and in Fort Knox. That's in Kentucky. The audits were conducted in accordance with the revised audit guidelines, which is like, we don't have to look at it all anymore. We'll just look at some. And they said they conducted a required statistical sample of gold melts within randomly selected compartments at the facilities. And I have my first question is, can I find something in here that describes what that process of random selection was? There are 42 vaults down there. Did they have 42 little pieces of paper and a half that they shook and took out? Or was it random with one of the auditors going, I need you to look behind that door, not that one, and that one? They didn't describe, like, this would be a normal part of a normal report made by normal human beings who weren't trying to hide anything. You would explain what yours, what your random selection process was. They just they just threw it out there. It's like you have to accept it. Oh, yeah. We randomly selected compartments and everything checked out, bro. It's just the weirdest thing. And so, yeah, here you can see, know, what they did here during the years. And you can see there in 83, 84, 85, getting my laser pointer thing. They're missing 89 ounces, 27, 37. Those were because they were drawing samples out and they left. So they took 89 ounces out, 27 ounces out, 37 ounces out, and off it went. when they add up everything they're convinced that they have 147 342 million and 25 ounces of gold okay and i got all this from bullion star here and um kuz jensen uh uh was uh did that uh post that's really good stuff reporting there so this is what they said this is very hard to find pictures from Fort Knox. Very hard. But this is allegedly a picture from Fort Knox. And they say this is one of the compartments. I'm like, that is a really weird way to store gold. You know, that's just sort of stack it up there. And how would you randomly select bars out of that if you wanted to get bars that were super buried back there? You can just imagine the auditors coming in going, you know what, let's just go with this bar on the top, this one up front. I'm going to randomly select these three up front here because getting to the back would be a royal pain. This is a very, very interesting, difficult way to go about handling gold. Now, remember too, we had Steve Mnuchin show up with the old turtle head there, Mitch McConnell. And they said, oh, hey, yeah, first Treasury Secretary since John Snyder in 1948 to actually visit the gold. And then they come out, oh, glad gold is safe. That's a very declarative statement. What did they do to assure the gold was safe? Well, we had these wonderful pictures there, Steve Mnuchin. And he's got some gloves on and he's holding a gold bar and somebody handed him that gold bar. And again, look at this. It's just stacked up behind him there, like layer row after row, just stacked. You know, that's how, that's what you do. You just stack the gourd. We're not like a rich nation that could afford like a big vault where you could actually have like, you know, standard shelves. We just stack it up and it's all there trust us and you can see old turtle head doing the same thing here holding probably the same bar different pair of disposable gloves um glad he didn't glitch in that particular moment but way back in the day in the 40s we had uh mary here who was the mint secretary at the time uh i don't know why every she's in one or two vaults and she's always doing this that that was the approved photographer like mary show us how excited you are by the light bulb up there i think that's what's happening i'm not positive but look at like who stores gold this way just start it's like it's this is this is like when when my kids were like eight i'm like store the gold in the vault. And they're like, okay. And they just started stacking it up. Look at how it's just stacked to the ceiling in the back. It's like somebody was up there like shoving the last few up in that last row up there. This is crazy. This is proper gold storage right here. You can see that there's a little hole here. Every single bar, you can actually get your eyes on it. There's no such as a bar sort of stacked and hidden behind other bars you can see the number on every bar because somebody thought it through and had the bar numbers facing out and so everything is completely auditable and observable this is the new york fed two separate gold vaults i guess this is vault 31 here they slid the door open you can tell these are different vaults here because see this staggered row right here that one's missing from here and you have instead these these side gaps over here but again look at look at the leaning tower up there new york fed's like what are we gonna do with all this gorge mortimer i don't know we'll just just start stacking it up there and then when they audit it do you really think they dismantle all those tons of gold, pull that all out, make sure the gold bars in the back are fine? Or do they just kind of go, you know, why don't we just take these three from up top here? Well, I think that's what we're going to do. Now, Ron Paul, bless his heart, and I mean that in the positive sense, tried to get to the bottom of all this in 2011. And he held this meeting. And it was to investigate, it's called Investigating the Gold, House Resolution 1495, the Gold Reserve Transparency Act of 2011, and the oversight of the United States Gold Holdings. Now I'm going to get my highlighter out here and see. So as you can see here, the Honorable Ron Paul, Chairman of the Subcommittee, and we also had Paul Jones, Lutkemeyer, Huenziger, Schweikert, Clay, Maloney, and Green, Chairman Paul. He calls the meeting to order, and he says here, I will start with my opening statement and proceed to anybody else who's anxious to do the same. For far too long, the United States government has been less than transparent in releasing information relating to its gold holdings. Not surprisingly, this secrecy has given rise to a number of theories about the gold at Fort Knox and other depositories. Some people speculate that the gold has been involved in gold swaps with foreign governments or bullion banks. Others believe that the gold has been secretly shipped out of Fort Knox. Others still believe that the bars at Fort Knox are actually gold-plated tungsten. Historically, the Treasury and the Mint have dismissed these theories rather than addressing these concerns with substantive rebuttals. No one from Congress has been allowed to view the gold at Fort Knox in nearly 40 years. Recent photographs of gold holdings seem to be hard to come by, and the inspector general's audit statements contain only the bare minimum of information. Now, he's absolutely right. Later, Mnuchin came along and, you know, said, oh, I saw it with old turtle head there, and they had their white gloves. But they were brought into a special room, and some gold was wheeled over to them, and they were handed a bar. And then they said, oh, yeah, it's all safe. It's cool, man. It's here. Now, part of this 2011 oversight panel here by Ron Paul was this gentleman, Eric Thorson down here, who's the inspector general of the Treasury Department, came in and delivered a prepared statement to the committee. Now, the Treasury Department would be responsible for the mint as a subcomponent of the Treasury Department, and the mint is responsible for making sure all the gold is there at Fort Knox, also in Denver and other places. Okay. So here he said here, Mr. Thorson comes in and he says, oh, before I discuss the details of the audits that are the topic of this hearing, I want to make one point very clear. He says, 100% of the U.S. government's gold reserves in the custody of the mint has been inventoried and audited. Furthermore, these audits found no exceptions of any consequence. This is technically accurate, which is the best kind of accurate. But he didn't say here 100% of the gold reserves that were audited this year. He's actually in 2011 referring back to that last final full audit from 1982. And I'm going to show you what they did in the intervening years. And since this statement here, he says here, I also want to assure you that the physical security is absolute. I can say without any hesitation, because I have observed the gold and the security of the gold reserves myself. And you, if you don't trust this guy, can't you just see this guy slapping on the hood of a used car? This baby will get you where you need to go smack that's how i see it anyway i don't know maybe you shouldn't judge a book by the cover but listen this guy was hired in by george bush right yeah the guy who brought us 9-11, weapons of mass destruction, all those greatest hits also gave us Eric Thorson. So not exactly on the trusting sort when it comes to that administration at all. Carrying on accordingly, he says here, quote, the requirements of H.R. 1495, which calls for a full assay, inventory, audit of gold reserves of the United States, together with an analysis of the sufficiency of the measures taken for the security reserves of such reserves is redundant of audit work already done. Hey, trust me, bro, he says. He's like, no, no, we already did that. Yeah, you got this H.R. 1495, but it's redundant. We've already done it. Like, oh, it would be, you know, it takes so much time. You know how hard it is to audit these things. You got to, first off, you should see how we've stacked the compartments. I mean, you got to take all these bars out. Nobody can think of another way to do it. So it's really quite the pain. I mean, this is just, this is just ridiculous. It's pretty laughable. This is also from Eric Thorson's statement. He says, quote, in all 42 compartments at these three hardened facilities hold 699,515 gold bars with a fineness or a purity ranging from 0.47 to four nines, 0.9999, with an average fineness of 0.9006. The average fineness, these are not good for delivery bars. Good for delivery bars are 999.9, four nines, right? These are, this is melted coins. I don't even know what a.47 is. Is that to have some 14-carat brooches hanging out in the vault? I don't know what that is. But at any rate, he's saying, oh, yeah, yeah no no we have all this stuff and it's perfectly fine it's just got this really weird pure it's not a good for delivery gold that's for sure um carrying on down here he says uh pursuant to that order the committee for continuing audit of the u.s government owned gold performed annual audits of the Treasury's gold reserve from 1975 to 1986. And now it's 2011. Like, we haven't really seen the need to do it since then. But I assure you, 100% audited. And I've seen it myself. It's all there. Like, this is just... Trust me, bro. I'm not the trusting sort. Eric. The committee was made up by staff of the Treasury, the Federal Reserve, Bank of New York. Hey, listen, if you can't trust the scouts, if you can't trust the career bureaucrats who are overseeing the stuff that's, they're trusting, saying, trust us, we've audited it, right? What has Doge found so far? Doge has found that every single place it's looked, it's found massive waste fraud and corruption and a lot of thieving and stealing and double dealing by career bureaucrats. So he's like, I don't want the committee is treasury. We got people from mint, the federal reserve. If you can't trust them, who can you trust? Right. Carrying on quote, the annual audits by the gold Committee ended in 1986 after 97 percent of the government old gold held by the Mint had been audited and placed under official joint seal. You're going to hear this again. Official joint seal. This is a big concept. I'm going to show you. It's kind of funny when you get it's kind of funny. Skipping some stuff down at the bottom in yellow. Quote, the financial statement audit is performed by KPMG, the big audit firm. Under contract with my office, KPMG has relied on our audits of the gold reserves when rendering its opinions on the Minson Treasury's financial statements. they have assured themselves as to the independence, reputation, and qualifications of my audit staff. Hey, we got this audit report from KPMG. Yeah, where'd they get their information? We gave it to them. But they checked us out, man, and they said we're swell guys. It's crazy. All right. So carrying on from Eric Thorson's frankly unbelievable testimony here in front of Ron Paul. Ron must have just been tearing his hair out of all of this. He says, quote, furthermore, in addition to observing the inventory of the gold for all the audit periods, we selected and tested a statistically valid random sample of gold bars using a 95% confidence level. How do you randomly sample bars that are stacked like that? Like, let's say you have a true random generator. You throw the dice and it says, I need a bar from all the way in the back right corner. Do you seriously think they unstacked all those bars and went to the one in the back corner? Or do you think they just pulled the ones on sort of the top surface there? They don't explain. A standard audit procedure would say for each one of these 42 compartments, here's the of the compartment here's the stacking of the gold bars here's how we did our random selection and here's specifically how we asked they're just like oh we assayed these bars did you drill all the way through the bars did you scrape a little off the surface which would have maybe missed the fact that there was tungsten in the center did you put them down through some sort of a ping in the analyzer or spectral source so that you could look and see if there was anything sort of like lead bars in the center of this? Did you perform a specific gravity test just to make sure it was the right density? Did you do any of that? No, we assayed them after randomly selecting them. And they give you no detail on that as if that would be too complicated to explain how you might perform an audit. When people don't tell you something in their materials and methods section, it's because they're trying to hide something. I'm a scientist. I know all about that game. I've seen it way too many times. It's not so much what they do say is what they don't say. So they never told us how they randomly selected the compartments. They never told us how they randomly selected bars. They never told us how they went about assaying the bars. Like the three only most important things when it comes to doing these sorts of work. It's crazy talk. At any rate, he says down here, last quote in yellow, as discussed earlier, by the end of fiscal year 2008, all of the gold reserves in the men's custody had been 100% inventoried and audited. End of story. You know what's fascinating? You know what happened just recently? Trump fired 17 inspectors general, including one from the Department of Treasury. That's fascinating to me. So we have Trump saying, because this happened first, I'm going to fire some inspectors general. And maybe he didn't really care about firing the inspector general from, say, HUD or labor. Maybe he really needed the one from Treasury out of the way so that he could get on the plane and say, maybe we should go to Fort Knox and see what's there. Okay, this is fascinating. So just some guessing there. Now, Eric Thorson, again, to Ron Paul, because this is the last statement. This is the last piece of data we have. There's a lot of audit reports from earlier, but they're, again, mysterious and incomplete. And some of them are missing, by the way. Can't find them. But here we go, and he says, okay, look, the annual audit work performed by my office, here's what we did, direct physical observation of the gold reserves in deep storage compartments inventory. And this included, he said, one, reviewing and evaluating internal controls, and to include the physical controls over the deep storage gold, we verified the existence of the bars in each compartment by visually inspecting the gold bars. Yeah, they're there. I see gold bars. Let's guess they're all there because we can count X across and Y deep and Z. Yeah, they must be there. He said, oh, we visually inspect it. Like, open the door. Yeah, look, there's gold bars in there. So look about the right dimensions. Yep. Close the door. This is insane that he thinks he can get away with this. We visually, we looked in there. We visually inspected the bars. This is crazy. Talk to me. Yep. That's, trust me, bro. We visually inspected the bars. And then they compared the records for each compartment inventory to, he doesn't say that, you know what we did? We took every bar out.

Get the Snipd
podcast app

Unlock the knowledge in podcasts with the podcast player of the future.
App store bannerPlay store banner

AI-powered
podcast player

Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features

Discover
highlights

Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode

Save any
moment

Hear something you like? Tap your headphones to save it with AI-generated key takeaways

Share
& Export

Send highlights to Twitter, WhatsApp or export them to Notion, Readwise & more

AI-powered
podcast player

Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features

Discover
highlights

Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode