3 - The end of metal for money

Summary

The Bank of England is located around the corner from Lombard Street in central London. When visitors walk in through the door, very few ever view the vault's gold, the value of which is second only to that of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

The United States also holds gold, in its US Mint depository at Fort Knox, made famous by the movie Goldfinger. Movies about gold made in the 1960s were filmed when the Bretton Woods system bound together the Western alliance in a US-based metallic gold monetary standard. The US gold backed the US dollar, just as the Bank of England's gold backed sterling after the Bank Charter Act of 1844, passed by the government headed by Sir Robert Peel, as described in Bagehot's Lombard Street (1873).

Once the Bretton Woods system had broken down, we might expect that the gold would be dispersed, and be used to finance normal spending by governments. In the United States, the Gold Reserve Act of 1934 required the Fed to transfer ownership of its gold to the US Treasury. The Treasury owns the gold in Fort Knox, issues US debt in order to borrow to cover deficits when its spending exceeds tax revenue and could sell the gold assets to cover some of the government deficits.

In the event, however, the main repositories of gold during the gold standard period retain much of the same gold today as they did when currency was redeemable in gold. Central bank gold stocks have not been sold off. They languish indefinitely in vaults at the cost of security and storage space, despite the paper-based fiat world in which we live.

The US Federal Reserve Bank of New York has the largest depository of gold in the world. The New York Fed holds only about 5 per cent of US Treasury gold, however, which in total is worth about $11 billion in 2018 prices. The rest of the gold is held for other countries.

The US Mint stores the remaining 95 per cent of US Treasury gold, weighing in at 8,133 metric tonnes.