Fort Knox is one of the official gold repositories of the United States (the other, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York). In these two vaults lie total US reserves: 8,133 tonnes of gold.
Flat fact: a ton of gold would make a cube about 15 inches on a side. (The Yukon Gold Rush was kicked off by a single ton of gold arriving on a ship in San Francisco one day)
15-inches on a side. That's it. That's a cube & a whole ton of gold.
So 8,133 tonnes of US gold reserves would therefore make a cube about 25 feet on each side.
To put this in perspective, the US supply of gold... the largest such hoard ever amassed by one country in all of human history.. would look like this if you were to put that cube inside AT&T Park in San Francisco (click).
That yellow cube anchored on home plate represents the entire US Gold Reserves. And it's the largest such concentration anywhere, anytime. Split between Fort Knox and the US Federal Reserve.
Silver.
Silver appears to be more rare than gold, and has been trending that way for decades.
This is because most above ground silver has been apparently used for electronics, wires, medical uses, and so forth. There is a bit of silver in every cell phone, flat-screen TV, medical devices, computer, and increasingly, solar panels. Highly conductive, ductile, germ-killing, in many respects the perfect metal for so many applications. And stockpiles acquired over millenia appear to have been used up in the Consumer Era of the past half century.
There are no reported central bank vaults of silver bullion, anywhere in the world. No IMF holdings, no World Bank stores, not even in a Swiss mountainside. These may have gold, and even then not as much as the United States.
It's hard to know how much bullion actually exists above ground, because so much is unreported and lives in little places here and there, in jewelry, in electronics, some coins & metals, silverware. Ubiquitous and yet nowhere.
Market Pricing suggests we have far more silver than gold.
Silver currently trades at a price 45x that of gold. But if silver is less plentiful and available than gold, shouldn't that gap be closer? Perhaps much closer?
Fort Knox holds about 4,500 tonnes of gold bullion. If we assumed that silver is 45x more plentiful than gold (based upon the price differential) and this physical silver exists somewhere ... it would be the equivalent of trying to verify that 45 more storage depots the size and importance of Fort Knox exist somewhere in the United States to match this pricing expectation.
Have you ever heard of dozens upon dozens of Fort Knox-type installations that keep massive silver hoards under guard, lock and key?
We actually used to have one in the United States, just one. Our last strategic silver depot was established by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937 at West Point, site of our premier military academy for the US Army. It was referred to at the time as the 'Fort Knox of Silver'. Sadly, successive administrations dumped that silver onto the market, heavily in the late 1960-1970 time frame. (Franklin Mint, anyone?) So there goes that.
Relative to gold, silver is primarily used industrially and only lately seems to be finding its former use as a monetary metal. The price has risen 9x in the last 10 years, reflecting increasing uncertainty about the monopoly money games being played.
I don't know what silver will do on price tomorrow or any other definitive date. But the fundamentals indicate bullion (not this SLV junk) will continue to be rare relative to not just paper dollars, but even to gold itself.
And that discrepancy .. as with any investment opp.. is what makes this so interesting to research.
Flat fact: a ton of gold would make a cube about 15 inches on a side. (The Yukon Gold Rush was kicked off by a single ton of gold arriving on a ship in San Francisco one day)
15-inches on a side. That's it. That's a cube & a whole ton of gold.
So 8,133 tonnes of US gold reserves would therefore make a cube about 25 feet on each side.
To put this in perspective, the US supply of gold... the largest such hoard ever amassed by one country in all of human history.. would look like this if you were to put that cube inside AT&T Park in San Francisco (click).
That yellow cube anchored on home plate represents the entire US Gold Reserves. And it's the largest such concentration anywhere, anytime. Split between Fort Knox and the US Federal Reserve.
Silver.
Silver appears to be more rare than gold, and has been trending that way for decades.
This is because most above ground silver has been apparently used for electronics, wires, medical uses, and so forth. There is a bit of silver in every cell phone, flat-screen TV, medical devices, computer, and increasingly, solar panels. Highly conductive, ductile, germ-killing, in many respects the perfect metal for so many applications. And stockpiles acquired over millenia appear to have been used up in the Consumer Era of the past half century.
There are no reported central bank vaults of silver bullion, anywhere in the world. No IMF holdings, no World Bank stores, not even in a Swiss mountainside. These may have gold, and even then not as much as the United States.
It's hard to know how much bullion actually exists above ground, because so much is unreported and lives in little places here and there, in jewelry, in electronics, some coins & metals, silverware. Ubiquitous and yet nowhere.
Market Pricing suggests we have far more silver than gold.
Silver currently trades at a price 45x that of gold. But if silver is less plentiful and available than gold, shouldn't that gap be closer? Perhaps much closer?
Fort Knox holds about 4,500 tonnes of gold bullion. If we assumed that silver is 45x more plentiful than gold (based upon the price differential) and this physical silver exists somewhere ... it would be the equivalent of trying to verify that 45 more storage depots the size and importance of Fort Knox exist somewhere in the United States to match this pricing expectation.
Have you ever heard of dozens upon dozens of Fort Knox-type installations that keep massive silver hoards under guard, lock and key?
We actually used to have one in the United States, just one. Our last strategic silver depot was established by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937 at West Point, site of our premier military academy for the US Army. It was referred to at the time as the 'Fort Knox of Silver'. Sadly, successive administrations dumped that silver onto the market, heavily in the late 1960-1970 time frame. (Franklin Mint, anyone?) So there goes that.
Relative to gold, silver is primarily used industrially and only lately seems to be finding its former use as a monetary metal. The price has risen 9x in the last 10 years, reflecting increasing uncertainty about the monopoly money games being played.
I don't know what silver will do on price tomorrow or any other definitive date. But the fundamentals indicate bullion (not this SLV junk) will continue to be rare relative to not just paper dollars, but even to gold itself.
And that discrepancy .. as with any investment opp.. is what makes this so interesting to research.
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