The Right to Own Gold
Are we about to lose it?...Again!

What is so special about gold anyway? Fifty feet below sea level sitting on the bedrock of Manhattan Island in the basement of the New York Federal Reserve Bank sits the largest single deposit of gold in the world. Let's take a tour with John Rothschild (from his book, A Fool and His Money):

"A tour had formed in the lobby and I was allowed to join it. We were herded past security, taken down elevators, and led through a thick vault door into what looked like a typical New York basement storage. There were laundry carts and luggage racks, plastic bins and metal lockers, except these carts, bins and lockers were filled with gold. In all, they contained 960,000 gold bars weighing a cumulative 12, 000 tons. The guide said the gold was worth $120 billion and the 'official price' of $42 an ounce, but the official price was an artificial reference point that had nothing to do with the actual price. At the actual price of $350 an ounce, the gold was worth 1.2 trillion. One quarter of all the gold stored in the free world was stacked like cordwood in these bins."

"Apparently, each separate bin belonged to one of 86 different countries that used the Fed as their safe-deposit box. Some moved their gold here during World War 1, others during the carious uprisings and revolutions. The guide wouldn't tell us which bin belonged to which country."

"When one country owed money to another, they paid it back as follows: Three people unlocked the bin, an auditor slit the seal, and a number of bars equal to the amount of the debt was removed from the stack. Then the bars were weighed on a giant scale, lugged to the bin of the creditor nation and added to its stack. All locks were relocked, seals resealed, and the debt was paid."

"This method of settling accounts was very arduous, and the gold movers used dollies and pulley systems to aid their efforts. They also wore special shoes and slick overalls so tiny particles wouldn't stick to their clothing. Otherwise, they'd have made a small fortune from panning for gold dust in their washing machine at home."

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