Not only so, but when it comes to traders, differing investment options are graded on a curve. When surveying the world and all the differing investment securities available (from stocks and shares, to bonds, to cash, to foreign currencies or securities, etc) investors execute a mental accounting to rank various investment options against each another. Since there is the real probability the U.S.
Then there’s the purity question. Mr. Turk said there are “questions in precious metal circles concerning what’s in an actual bar.” One theory, he said: They may be gold-plated tungsten, which would weigh almost the same. Within a 2012 audit of U.S. Fed’s vault, the U.S. Mint and the Treasury’s Office of Inspector General delivered 367 samples to an unbiased lab for screening.
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All but three examples returned within 0.13% of the purity recorded by the government, within standard industry tolerance, based on the Treasury and Mint. Since that time, annual government audits of the Fed’s vault have inspected only the locks and joint seals on the compartments to check they haven’t been tampered with, a Mint spokesman said. That’s not enough, said Peter Boehringer, founder of the German GOLD AND SILVER COINS Society.
New legislation, nicknamed the “Audit the Fed” costs, could permit the Government Accountability Office to audit the Fed’s vault, said a spokesman for the bill’s Senate sponsor, Rand Paul (R., Ky.,). GAO lawyers wouldn’t speculate on the bill’s reach. Mr. Paul’s spokesman said the Senator has organized a personal trip to Fort Knox this fall. Former U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, the senator’s dad, has been outspoken in what he says is taxpayers’ need for more transparency about silver from the Fed. Eighty feet below the streets of lower Manhattan, a Federal Reserve vault guarded by equipped guards includes about 6,200 tons of gold.
But “no one at all can be certain the gold is really there except Fed employees with gain access to,” said Ronan Manly, a precious-metals analyst at platinum dealer BullionStar in Singapore. Mr. Manly is among gold aficionados who question if the bank is hiding something about what it’s hiding. Other theorists suspect the gold beneath the New York Fed’s head office at 33 Liberty St. may be gold-plated fakes.
Some conspiracy-minded traders think the Fed has been secretly renting out the gold to control prices. John Embry, an investment strategist for Sprott Asset Management in Toronto until 2014 who once managed its gold fund. Fed action, said Mr. Embry. The Fed declined to comment. It’s been secretive about the material of the vault and in the past has said it can’t comment on individual customer accounts due to confidentiality contracts.