US Mint Gold Bars?

Quick question. Does the US mint sell gold bars at all like other foreign country mints. (eg. Royal Canadian Mint).

 

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No, they sell bullion coins in the AGE American gold eagle which are 22K and the Gold buffalo's which are 24k both contain one troy ounce of gold.

 

Ok thanks Blissskr. Appreciate the fast response.

 

The mints and the assay offices did make gold bars, usually in somewhat odd sizes that were then sold to jewellers etc. This was post gold recall in 1933 so you can imagine they are pretty scarce.
https://coins.ha.com/itm/territoria...a/330-8624.s?ic4=GalleryView-Thumbnail-071515

They do turn up from time to time in auctions like Stacks, but usually what you find are silver bars.

 

You can learn a little something every day and this is mine for today. I was unaware of the gold bars but of course know about the 1933 Roosevelt recall scam.

 

What was the "scam" factor in the 1933 recall?

 

The gold was recalled at something like $32 an ounce and as soon as that was done I believe they changed the valuation ratio on the dollar so that the currency was devalued by around 10%, but I am going on memory. And then you could declare some gold coins as collectible and keep them, but those declaration rules escape me. So if you were just a common guy and played by the rules, turned in your gold to help old Uncle Sam, then Uncle Sam was the winner. Fortunately for collectors a lot of people did not play by the rules and kept their gold coins.

And then good old FDR was a stamp collector. He had the postmaster create stamps just for him and some of his buddies that he planned to autograph and sell years later. He gave them out to friends and family. Congress caught him and had the postmaster print millions of them to devalue what he was doing.

Died in Warm Springs, Georgia with his girlfriend. Unfortunately some things just don't change. My parents thought he hung the moon and saved us all. I see him as an elitist crook.

 

Before the call in, gold was at $20.67 an ounce which is the price at which it was recalled at. As soon as the government had accumulated enough gold and the recall was largely a thing of the past the price of gold was raised to $35 an ounce. So in effect the dollar lost approximately 75% of it's value relative to gold. Obviously the Federal Reserve printed up literally hundreds of millions of dollars in Series 1934 notes to replace all the gold, gold certificates etc.

The lucky ones were the ones well off enough to have the means to ship their gold off to Europe - think Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Astors, Morgans etc.

William Woodin was the Secretary of the Treasury when all the recall happened. He was also an avid coin collector that somehow managed to buy patterns, by trading at face value. The one good thing he did before he croaked in 1934 was made sure that there was a provision for coin collectors to save rare gold coins. Of course he was really looking out for his own holdings but collectors in general benefited.

 

More like $20/oz and then revalued to $35/oz. The dollar was devalued by about 42%.

 

I had never heard the word "scam" attached to the gold recall before, and believed it was rather straightforward.

 

Are there any estimates of what % of gold was actually turned in during the recall?

 

I've seen the answer to your question, but can't locate it right now. Tomorrow is the anniversary, by the way:

Executive Order 6102 is a United States presidential executive order signed on April 5, 1933, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt "forbidding the Hoarding of gold..." [Wikipedia]

and note it was done by Executive Order, not by an Act of Congress. Yes, it could happen again.

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My understanding is, it was done to strengthen the Fed's balance sheet. The subsequent "reset" from $20.67 to $35 per ounce boosted the Fed's "capital valuation" by 70%, give or take, in nominal terms.

The actual increase is, in effect, the answer to the OP's question.

 

Interesting, isn't it, that they devalued the dollar by about 42% and then just a little over a decade later it was the world's reserve currency.

 

Since we are down the rabbit hole, I wonder how they defined hoarding. Will have to start researching, I mean googling.

 

If you google then they will know you have gold. Better to avoid that one and use on of the anonymous search engines.

 

Pretty sure it was allowed to keep $100 in gold per person, even children in families and also any coins with a numismatic or historic value. One can only wonder though just what types of coins ended up getting recalled and melted. It's too bad the government didn't just store all the coins instead of just melting it into bars that they didn't even refine to the Intl standard for purity anyways.

 

On the one hand, the passage of time gives a better historical perspective.

On the other hand, I give significant respect to the opinions of people who lived through the thing they're opining about.

 

No gold here. Or anything of value for that matter.

Not surprisingly Google searches on the subject return lots of fringe websites. Fear not, the dollar will definitely collapse, its just a matter of whose lifetime it will occur in.

 

sakata, they didn't devalue the dollar by 42%; the next day, a dollar still bought a dozen cans of soup, or lunch for a woman and two kids, or 9 gallons of gas (these are approximations).

A dollar bought less gold, but that was intentional, and allowed the Fed's balance sheet to be reset without harming the general population.

I seem to recall reading, and maybe someone else can find this, that a major no-holds-barred confiscation only yields about enough money to run the country for three days, and on that basis, confiscation of gold or silver is unlikely, considering how much violence and hatred it would cause.

The real money comes from raising income taxes and shrinking the brackets. In 1950, the top bracket ($400K +) was 84%. By 1960, it was 91%. In 1970, it was "only" 72%, but for $200K +. These are for married filing jointly.

You can study the chart at:
https://web.stanford.edu/class/polisci120a/immigration/Federal Tax Brackets.pdf

 

I did not say next day. It took a quite (forget hot long) and it was done in two steps. But they did devalue it. You are confusing inflation with devaluation but they are not the same.

Sure a dollar still bought the same amount of domestic produce, at least initially. But eventually prices had to catch up with the devaluation. Don't forget, back then the world was still on a gold standard for the most part and was not driven by fiat. So it most definitely was devalued 42% relative to all other currencies. Imported products cost 75% more because it took that much more in dollars to buy them.

In such a scenario prices of domestic produce will not go up initially but overall prices will increase by an amount which is dependent on the proportion of all goods which are imported. This causes an over increase in costs. Hence the dollar buys less and is devalued. It takes a while for inflation to catch up, but it does.