POLL: The US Govt should SELL GOLD to pay down the debt/ save the Dollar/ etc.

who did the treasury sell the gold too? LOL

What your alleging is possible, but if so then the U.S. govt is covering it up. As it claims to have 8,133.5 tonnes of gold.

 

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well it wouldn't be the 1st time the governments lie and cheat.

 

djsmalls, the gold in Ft. Knox has nothing to do with the Fed. That gold was confiscated and is under the purview of the US Treasury which is what would be sold if anything. The gold that is under the purview of the Fed is in Manhattan, and that is foreign gold which the Fed also does not itself own. The Fed does have gold certificates on their balance sheets, but those are representative of gold held by the US Treasury.

More info about that here: http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2009/10/how-much-gold-does-us-have-in-its.html

If you were to ask me, do I believe there is as much gold in Ft. Knox as they say? I would say not likely, but I have yet to see evidence either way. The lack of an audit can be taken one of two ways. Either the gold isn't really there, or they want people to question whether it's really there as a shrewd security precaution. Both are plausible.

 

Let's say for the sake of argument that the gold IS there. Should they sell it? No. Why? because if they do the politicians will just spend 140% of what it was sold for and we will be right back where we started only with more debt and no gold.

 

No

 

Let's use the gold we have to create a currency backed by precious metals and federal land.

 

And federal land. That sounds intriguing.

 

Well there isn't enough gold. At least land is an asset and the US has a lot of it. But knowing the government they would just tax it.

 

As they do everything.

 

All of you are grossly overestimating the amount and value of gold involved, compared with the Federal budget. That 8,133.5 tonnes of gold, if sold at spot price, would bring about $432 billion dollars, which is about 1/3 of the DEFICIT for 2012. In other words, all our gold not only wouldn't pay for governmental operations, it would cover only a third of the deficit.


[TABLE="class: infobox vevent"]

[TH="align: left"]Total revenue[/TH]
$2.627 trillion (requested)
$2.469 trillion (enacted)

[TH="align: left"]Total expenditures[/TH]
$3.729 trillion (requested)
$3.796 trillion (enacted)

[/TABLE]

Here's the math:
8,133.5 tonnes = 8,133,500 kilograms of gold (1000 kg per tonne)
32.151 Troy ounces in a kilogram
261,500,158 Troy ounces in 8,133.5 tonnes

Today's spot, around $1,675.

Multiply those to get $438,012,764,650. ($438 billion+)

In other words, ALL that gold covers a little over 1/3 of the Federal budget deficit for ONE YEAR. It's chicken feed. IF it's there.

============

Another way of looking at a sale -- ALL our GOLD would fund the government for about seven weeks.

 

The government can't sell what thet don't have...

Oh, wait a minute, yes they can!

 

Some day the US may have to sell their gold stockpile but until then the stockpile does what it's supposed to do. Which is, it shows the rest of the world that we have power. Unfortunately we (the US) is so far in debt that we may all be working for the Chinese government if our leaders don't play their cards right. Should we sell the gold? No way!! If we sold the gold, that would be like admitting we don't have any confidence in our country to pay off our deficit and China would come at us like an unwanted step child.

 

that just sounds wacko to me they haven’t audited it for 40 years? maybe they are guarding the roswell aliens at fort know ??

 

I would say that a currency "backed" by gold and land is no improvement on what we have now. If the gold is used as money and currency is fully convertible, that's a different story -- but it isn't going to happen.

 

http://www.minyanville.com/sectors/...ullion-Depositary/1/2/2013/id/47071?page=full

Here is some more interesting reading on this topic. The last time the gold in Ft Knox was actually subjected to a full audit with drilling/assaying and testing was 1953. The 1974 audit was more of a walkthrough/show and tell staged to appease some members of congress who had demanded an audit.


In this article is a great graph: This chart presents the … relation of US debt to Treasury gold reserves – the amount of debt per one ounce of gold – up to 2012.

Debt levels exceeded US gold reserves over 10 years ago, and the ratio continues to climb. A public audit at this point would further erode confidence in the dollar. Which partially explains why the government is resisting an audit. Also, it would cost a lot of money to conduct an audit, but hey...cost hasn't really stopped the US government from doing anything in the past...which is why the debt level is so high in the first place.

 

I think there are probably two reasons for not auditing the gold at Ft Knox. The first is security. They don't want people inside examining the security measures. The second is that most of the gold is probably 90% and not .999, and they don't want to deal with the negative publicity from that. Of course, if it is 90%, they should just melt it into coins and sell them back to the public at melt value. They could use the old liberty and saint designs with new dates, and people would go wild for them.

 

Reality is that the value of all the gold claimed to be owned by the US government pales in comparison to the debts it has. Selling off the gold reserves may make some bureaucrat somewhere "feel good" but it is a mere drop in the bucket of the problem. Selloffs should begin at the highest level of the government. Whoops, I mean mass firings on an unprecedented scale in elected offices in the House, the Senate, the Executive branch. Then, and only then, can real change be effected, and our economy thus improve.

 

Fort Knox is a fiction concocted by the government to give people confidence in the dollar. I think the gold may be there, or it might not, but the fact remains that even if we sold it all tomorrow we wouldn't even pay half of the deficit this year.

Does it matter if you kept the family silver if you lost the manor house? I guess it would pay for your needs for a couple of weeks anyway.

I don't know how it backs up dollars nowadays, since the Federal Reserve note doesn't say that it is convertible to anything. At least the paper Continental said they could be redeemed for Spanish Milled Dollars, or the equivalent.

 

The gold does nothing for the dollar, isn't enough to back the dollar, there is no will or intent to back the dollar, and it can't pay off the debt. So I think it should be minted into coins and sold back to the public, not because it does any good for the government, but because it will do some good for the people. And that's the real point, after all.

 

Make it fully convertible just like gold and silver certificates were. Even if it weren't convertible it would limit the amount of bills that could be printed. Either method would be better than what we have today which rob citizens that save and reward those who spend what they don't have.