A big chunk of our sovereign gold is stored in the basement of the New York Fed, as is the sovereign gold of many other nations. Workers wearing steel boots and operating heavy forklifts move gold bars from one cell to another as nations settle their gold accounts.
Our sovereign gold may only be sold with the permission of Congress, and Congress has never granted permission. So what the Fed does is lease their gold to the bullion banks, who sell it into the market, mostly in paper form with very little gold being delivered in physical form. The gold options market operates with 110-to-1 dollar leverage on paper gold, which means that a $1000 option controls $110,000. If the holder of a successful option attempts to collect his “winnings” in physical gold, the bullion banks will put obstacle after obstacle in his way, and at each obstacle it will offer to settle in cash. It may take as long as two years for a holder to receive his gold bars.
At the heart of this is a gentleman’s agreement between the Fed and the bullion banks to never demand return of the leased gold. Should that agreement fail due to some catastrophic event, gold would go “no bid,” which means that the price would go to infinity, and no holder of gold would be willing to sell into the market.
This selling of paper gold into the options market has been the Fed’s tool to control the gold price since 1980. In 2011 the price was about to cross $2000 per troy ounce, which would have crashed the dollar. The Fed sold massive amounts of paper gold to bring the price down by almost 50 percent. By now the goal posts have moved, and a gold price over $2000 might not necessarily be a problem. Keep in mind that during that engineered crash, the Fed did all it could to prevent physical gold from leaving its vault.
I have it on good authority that James Bond, with the help of Ms. Pussy Galore, secured the gold in Fort Knox in 1964.
And there’s a gold & silver depository in Texas:
https://comptroller.texas.gov/economy/fiscal-notes/2021/aug/bullion.php
And gold & silver is legal tender there: