Just because he saw gold in the NY Fed does not mean the US owns that gold. Gold changes ownership and not necessarily location. Example German gold in NYC!
Furthermore, gold can have MANY “owners”. In other words, been hypothecated and rehypothecated many times. That’s the Achilles heel of gold derivatives and paper gold.
The question then becomes, when the music stops, who really owns that gold. In reality, it’ll probably be the “owner” that is the last holder of the physical.
I worked in the nuclear industry for 20+ years. Part of that is buying and selling within the supply chain — ore, chemical treatment/refining, enrichment, storage, making actual fuel elements that go into the nuclear reactors, yada yada.
A company deep into all that was Nuexco. Partly owned by some TWOT who owned a large chunk of the football team nicknamed the Orange Crush.
Anyhoo, Nuexco operated a storage facility. Basically a big warehouse with barrel after barrel of nuclear fuel in its various physical forms. A utility could buy some stuff from SAfrica, who would ship it to the warehouse, where it would sit until a company in the next step of the process would take possession and get on with it.
Well, they were running a scam. Your utility would go in to do an audit and all the barrels would have your stickers, which would tie to the paperwork. Hunky dorey.
Uhh, until the CCP agents showed up and discovered that the stickers had been swapped out time after time. A single physical barrel was “listed” during multiple audits as owned by half a dozen utilities.
A very significant portion of those barrels were owned by the Russian gov’mt. Hundreds of millions of $$$. The football owner disappeared.
My company lost ~$2M.
This sort of thing is all too common when 3rd parties hold your asset. Think gold.