Meanwhile, the Bank of Russia has more than doubled the pace of gold purchases, bringing the share of bullion in its international reserves to the highest of Mr Putin's 17 years in power, according to World Gold Council data.

In the second quarter alone, it accounted for 38pc of all gold purchased by central banks. The gold rush is allowing the Bank of Russia to continue growing its reserves while abstaining from purchases of foreign currency for more than two years. It's one of a handful of central banks to keep the faith as global demand for the precious metal fell to a two-year low in the second quarter. But what may matter most is that gold is as geopolitics-proof an investment as any in the age of sanctions and a deepening rift with the US.

The Truth About the Fort Knox Gold

One of the little-known items on the Fed’s balance sheet is a vital asset it received from the U.S. Treasury a long time ago…

During the Great Depression, in 1933, President Roosevelt issued an executive order requiring anyone with gold to surrender it to a Federal Reserve bank or any member bank of the Federal Reserve system.

The Federal Reserve banks also required the commercial banks to hand over their gold to the Fed. Now, suddenly, the gold went out of the commercial banks into the Federal Reserve Bank.

But under the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, the Fed was ordered to surrender all its gold to the Treasury Department. All the nation’s gold in effect came under direct government ownership.

Now, this is key: The Federal Reserve is actually a private system, while the Treasury is an arm of the U.S. government. And the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution prevents the government from taking private property without just compensation.

To get around that legality, the “just compensation” was a gold certificate the Treasury issued to the Fed in exchange for its physical gold.

To this day, the Fed carries that gold certificate on its balance sheet.

The Treasury officially values its gold at $42 an ounce. That was the official gold price from 1973, two years after the U.S. abandoned the Bretton Woods system. Of course, the market price of gold today is almost $1,300 an ounce.

But if you take the face value of the gold on the Fed balance sheet, divide it by $42 an ounce and then come up with a number of ounces and convert that into tons, it comes out to over 8,000 tons.

That’s highly interesting, because that’s how much gold the Treasury currently owns.

The Treasury needs at least 8,000 tons of gold to back up that paper certificate it handed the Fed back in the 1930s to satisfy the Fifth Amendment.

If you take the 8,000 tons on the Fed balance sheet in the form of this gold certificate, market to market at $1,300, that mounts to well over $300 billion.

So the secret to the Fed’s balance sheet is its “hidden gold asset,” that gold certificate it received from the Treasury in the 1930s.

Nobody talks about this or admits it. But our whole system is based on gold.

As a freebie trip for 4 select political insiders, last Monday’s trip to Fort Knox was undoubtedly a memorable one for them. In the same radio interview Bevin said that:

“This is like the mother of all field trips. This is pretty cool”

But as a validation and verification of over 56% of the supposed US Official Gold Reserves, the visit was a complete farce. Announced the morning it took place. No evidence that any media were allowed to participate. Only peaked into one of the 13 storage compartments. And then to round it off, Mnuchin (an ex Goldmanite) tweets that ‘Glad gold is safe“. You couldn’t make this up. And finally, no mention of the fact that most of the gold bars even supposedly stored in Fort Knox are low purity ‘coin bars’ made from melted down gold coins. In fact, of all the gold bars reported to be held within the US Gold Reserves, only 16% of these bars are of LBMA Good Delivery size and purity range.

The depository holds more than 147 million ounces of gold, which puts its market value at more than $186 billion. While primarily known as a vault for gold, the depository also held the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution during World War II.

Mnuchin said it was the first time Fort Knox opened its vaults to outsiders since a Congressional delegation and some journalists were let in to view the gold for the first time in 1974.

Eighty feet below the streets of lower Manhattan, a Federal Reserve vault protected by armed guards contains about 6,200 tons of gold.

Or doesn't.

Head of the Financial Markets Division of the Dutch central bank, Aerdt Houben, stated in an interview for newspaper Het Financieele Dagblad published in October 2016 that releasing a bar list of the Dutch official gold reserves “would cost hundreds of thousands of euros”. In this post we’ll expose this is virtually impossible – the costs to publish the bar list should be close to zero – and speculate about the far reaching implications of this falsehood.

This is Part 2 of a two-part series. The series focuses on collusive discussions and meetings that took place between the world’s most powerful central bankers in late 1979 and 1980 in an attempt to launch a central bank Gold Pool cartel to manipulate and control the free market price of gold. The meetings centered around the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basle, Switzerland.

he Swedish Riksbank claims to hold 10,000 large Good Delivery gold bars in 5 locations across the world and now claims to have conducted physical gold audits of this gold. Yet it has never published any physical gold audit results of any of these gold bars nor published any of the serial numbers of any of the 10,000 gold bars it claims to have in storage. For a so-called progressive democracy this is shocking, although not surprising given the arrogant and unaccountable company that central bankers keep with each other.

Last December, thanks to an official Request for Information by means of the Transparency Law, Banxico informed us that:

‘Of the 3.881 million ounces of gold that the Bank of Mexico has at the end of October 2016, 98.95% are held in the United Kingdom, 0.0004% at the Federal Reserve Bank in the United States and the remaining 1.05 % in Mexico.’

Banxico also told us that it had a total of 7,265 gold bars in allocated accounts at The Bank of England (BoE), which means that only about 2.9 million ounces are well identified with serial number, brand code, gross weight, assay and fine weight at that location.

The rest –more than 930,000 gold ounces at the BoE- are still ‘held’ on an unallocated basis. These unallocated accounts are those in which the ‘owner’ has not been assigned specific gold bars but simple ‘rights’ to a certain amount of gold. That is why Banxico could not tell us how many ingots it owned in this last case.