They call it Bullion Boulevard for good reason, for there are very few roads in the world where you can drive past £330bn worth of gold. The boulevard is of course next to Fort Knox in Kentucky, a base of the United States army that also happens to double up as the home of America’s central bullion depository, holding well over half of the country’s gold reserves. So well protected is the facility that the expression “as safe as Fort Knox” has long been an epithet for security in the United States and beyond.
The only person who has come close to stealing the bullion was a certain Latvian called Auric Goldfinger in 1959, but then he was the figment of the imagination of one Ian Fleming, whose novel Goldfinger would be turned into the third James Bond film.
Little wonder then, that during the Second World War, Fort Knox was used to store the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, as well as a Gutenberg Bible, a copy of Magna Carta, and the crown jewels of Hungary.
Fort Knox was inspected by outsiders in 2017, when no less a figure than Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin visited the vaults, accompanied by Kentucky governor Matt Bevin, as well as various other Congressional representatives. The visitors were the first outsiders allowed access since 1974 – they were photographed handling the gold, which certainly looked very shiny and gold-like.
But while the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve carry out regular inspections, nobody has apparently sat down and analysed the contents of the legendary vault for over 70 years, giving rise to one small niggling question that some people are asking with increasing frequency. What if the gold is not actually there? It’s all well and good to assume that it is, but how do we really know?
While £330bn of bullion may sound like it would take up a lot of room, it occupies less space than you might think – about the size of three and a half standard 40ft shipping containers, or around one-tenth of an Olympic swimming pool. Could it have disappeared?
Such a question sounds like something from the wilder shores of internet conspiracy websites, which unsurprisingly means that it is now being posed by the president of the United States and his stooge, Elon Musk.
“We have found hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of fraud,” said Donald Trump recently. “And we’ve just started. We’re actually going to Fort Knox to see if the gold is there, because maybe somebody stole the gold. Tonnes of gold.”
Musk is also what might be called a “bullion denier”, as exemplified by a post he put on X last month: “Who is confirming that gold wasn’t stolen from Fort Knox? Maybe it’s there, maybe it’s not. That gold is owned by the American public! We want to know if it’s still there.”
What fuels the suspicions of people like Trump and Musk is that there has not been an independent audit of the gold at Fort Knox in several decades. As a result, four main conspiracy theories have emerged. The first claims that the gold has been secretly sold to foreign entities or private banks for the United States to secretly pay off some of its national debt. The second claims that there has never been any gold at Fort Knox, and that the whole facility is just some huge bluff to deceive the global markets.
The third theory advances the idea that the gold is not pure gold at all, but gold-plated tungsten bars. This theory gained some traction back in 2009, when the Chinese reported that some fake gold bars were emerging on the international market, some of which supposedly originated from US reserves. Finally, the fourth theory is the one put forward by Trump and Musk – that the gold has somehow been swiped.
The first two theories are easily scotched. The notion that such a vast amount of gold can be sold secretly is farcical, even if it was sold gradually. Furthermore, while £330bn might sound like it could be useful in paying off some debt, it barely makes a dent in the side of America’s national debt, which currently stands at £28.3 trillion. What’s held at Fort Knox therefore represents just 1.17 per cent of what the United States owes. Carrying out some form of deception or secret sale just doesn’t seem worth it.
The third theory can be dismantled in two ways. First, while there has been no thorough audit, there was that aforementioned independent inspection eight years ago. “The gold was there when I visited it,” said Mnuchin two weeks ago. “I hope nobody’s moved it. I’m sure they haven’t. If President Trump wants it to be audited, that’s something that can easily be done.”
Unfortunately, Mnuchin is very wrong that the bullion can be easily audited. In fact, auditing the gold would be a very lengthy and expensive business, which is the reason why it hasn’t been carried out in decades. According to the gold investment company JM Bullion, the auditing process would take no less than 18 months to complete, with roughly 44,400 man-hours of work to be done.
The company estimates that it would require 20 personnel, 18 high-quality scales, 18 portable X-ray fluorescence scanners, two boring drills, 18 item carts, and appropriate additional lighting. With the scanners alone costing £25,000 a piece, it’s clear that such a project would cost many millions – all at a time when Trump and Musk are seeking to cut budgets. The only alternative would be to carry out a partial and selective audit, by analysing just a random selection of the estimated 368,000 gold bars held in the vaults.
Then there is Trump’s notion that the gold could have been stolen. If that were the case, it would not just be the heist of the century but the biggest in human history. Even if one leaves aside the obvious problem of having to fence £330bn worth of bullion down the local boozer, stealing the gold is essentially impossible.
While the precise nature of the security measures is naturally highly secret, what is known is that to steal the gold you would have to somehow outwit the US Mint Police – a highly specialised and well-trained force – as well as the local army units. The vault itself consists of 13 separately sealed compartments, which would involve busting open a 20-tonne door. Blowing it up is simply not an option; the vault also has multiple forms of access, all of which are held by many individuals, which means that no single person on the planet can gain access to the vault.
Like so much else spouted by Trump and Musk, the idea that there is no gold at Fort Knox is pure nonsense. But if either of them were allowed a guided tour of the vaults in Kentucky, who knows if they would ever admit it?
