They said the same thing in the 1970's and when they opened up Fort Knox, there were thousands of tons of it.
The same thing would happen if they opened it up today.
If the government dumped a ton of gold on the market, the price would slump, and might slump hard, taking years to recover to anything close to current values, if it recovered at all.
It's a bad idea.
In the thirties, governments routinely made payments in gold for public debts to foreign powers. If the US paid out some billions in gold to, say, Germany in 1937, it would have been an ordinary transaction and raised no eyebrows at all. It was a different world back then.
If the government dumped a ton of gold on the market, the price would slump, and might slump hard, taking years to recover to anything close to current values, if it recovered at all.
Yeah, then they could buy it back for a third of what they sold it for. I agree though, real estate should be what the Federal government sells.
That would be fine with me and I own a lot of gold and silver. The reason that I own it is precisely because the Federal government can't do what you say because they are too far past the point where it would make a difference. The only way they could conceivably pay off enormous debts is for the price to shoot up a lot more, and believe me, I would be selling by then.
“If the government dumped a ton of gold on the market, the price would slump, and might slump hard, taking years to recover to anything close to current values, if it recovered at all. It’s a bad idea.”
Oh, it’s a bad idea alright, but not for the reason you cite. Aggressive buyers, led by China, would simply scarf it up as they’ve been doing for the last couple of years.