Trump's black hand reached 8100 tons of gold

Source: The Surplus Food of the Rich Family

Recently, gold can be said to have gone crazy.

Comex gold started at less than $2600 in early December and has risen sharply to nearly $3000 per ounce in just two months - the key is that there has been almost no decent pullback in these two months, meaning it has been rising and rising and rising…

According to the traditional interest rate pricing theory of gold, in the past two months, the yield of TIPS of various maturities, which represents the real interest rate of the United States, has not fallen outrageously, so the reason for the real interest rate does not explain the sharp rise in gold prices.

Judging from the scale of gold ETFs closely related to gold prices in the past few months, the scale of gold ETFs has actually been declining in the past two months, which cannot explain the sharp rise in gold prices.

From a geopolitical perspective, the war in Gaza, Israel, has ended, and after Trump took office, the probability of the Russia-Ukraine war stopping or maintaining the current ceasefire for a period of time is very high. According to the impact of traditional geopolitical crises, at this stage, the price of gold should decrease significantly.

Even in terms of the credit of the US Dollar, after Trump took office, the Department of Government Efficiency led by Musk (DOGE) is conducting a large-scale ‘audit’ of federal government spending, from the International Development Agency to the Department of Education, Social Security payments, and even military spending. The call for federal government spending cuts is getting louder and louder, which is clearly a negative impact on the price of gold…

Even if news about whether Trump’s tariff policy will include gold, theoretically, can only lead to a few days of fluctuations in the price of gold, and the actual price of gold has been strong for the past three weeks…

Even the so-called gold buying activities of central mothers in various countries are not what everyone imagines, take the world’s largest gold implied buyer - the People’s Bank of China, in the past three weeks when the price of gold increased the most fiercely, China’s gold reserves, only slightly increased by 160,000 ounces, is nothing?

So, what is the reason for the sharp rise in gold prices?

The reason for my personal guess is -

The hand of the Trump administration has reached the gold reserves of the United States.

As is well known, since the Second World War, the United States has always been the world’s largest gold reserve country. Today, the United States’ gold reserves still exceed 8100 tons, firmly ranking first in the world.

In the vast majority of governments, gold reserves are held by central banks, and their buying and selling affairs are basically handled by the central bank, but this is not the case in the United States.

The gold reserves of the United States are indeed recorded under the name of the Federal Reserve, but in terms of ownership, they clearly belong to the Department of the Treasury - these gold reserves are equivalent to a special deposit of the Department of the Treasury at the Federal Reserve.

According to the latest balance sheet report of the Federal Reserve on February 20, 2025, the total value of the US gold reserves is 110.41 billion dollars.

If you click on the calculator a little, you will find that something is wrong - 8,133.5 tons of gold, equivalent to 261.5 million troy ounces of gold, is worth only $11 billion?

Yes, according to the last time the US Treasury set the value of gold reserves (when the Bretton Woods system collapsed in 1973), gold is calculated in the Fed’s accounting system based on the price 50 years ago.

Yes, you heard it right, calculated at the price 50 years ago, $42.22 per ounce, so the United States, which has 8100 tons of gold reserves, only shows $110 billion on the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve.

If calculated based on the current market price of $2935 per ounce, the actual value of this portion of gold is $767.5 billion.

The newly appointed Treasury Secretary of the Trump administration, Scott Bessent, recently issued a statement:

Monetize U.S. industrial assets in the next 12 months!

It was this sentence that caused huge ripples in the gold market.

You know, the gold that originally belonged to the Ministry of Finance in the accounts shows $11 billion on the Fed’s books, but its actual value is as high as $767.5 billion. The Ministry of Finance can demand the Fed to recalculate the gold reserves based on market prices, which means the Fed needs to print an additional $756.5 billion in cash for the Ministry of Finance.

For the U.S. Department of the Treasury, which has been living beyond its means, this is a big sum of money.

How should we look at this matter?

In my opinion, from the perspective of currency credit, this is the shameless + shameless square…

First of all, we need to know why this part of gold is priced at $42.22 per ounce.

After the end of the Second World War, the United States led the establishment of the global Bretton Woods system, which stipulated:

The dollar is equivalent to gold.

Any central bank or finance ministry of any other country can, at any time, exchange US dollars for gold from the US Treasury at a price of $35 per ounce.

This has been the basis of the financial hegemony of the United States since the end of World War II.

At that time, the U.S. Treasury, which owned 2.13 million tons of gold, accounted for 70% of the gold reserves of all governments in the world at that time. With abundant financial resources, for every 1 U.S. dollar, at least 40% of the gold reserves supported it, so such a commitment was made.

However, the U.S. government spends its money unrestrained, printing dollars increasingly reliant on treasuries rather than gold.

From 1945 to 1971, central banks and governments in other countries continued to exchange dollars for US gold reserves, which fell all the way to 8,222 tons, and the share of gold in the Fed’s balance sheet fell all the way to about 20%.

At this time, the Nixon administration began to play tricks. On August 15, 1971, Nixon used the excuse that there were too many speculators in the international gold market, so he closed the gold exchange window, which was equivalent to the United States openly playing tricks on the whole world.

After that, the international financial market went through three years of turmoil. Finally, the United States and Western countries agreed to set the official price of gold in the United States at $42.22 per ounce (but not allowed for other countries to exchange). This is the reason for the price of $42.22, and from the year 2000 until today, the United States’ gold reserves have been maintained at a basic level between 8130-8200 tons.

So, according to the original price of $35 per ounce under the Bretton Woods system, the 8100 tons of gold were originally used as collateral to print dollars. If the Treasury Department prints additional dollars for the Federal Reserve at the current price, isn’t this shameless to the second power?

This is equivalent to that 50 years ago, your house was worth 10,000 yuan, and you mortgaged all of it for 10,000 yuan, and you completely spent the 10,000 yuan, and the house was no longer yours, but today, you suddenly asked for another 790,000 yuan according to the current house price, which has risen 80 times…

Think about it, to what extent must a shameless person go to have such thoughts?

This is just one possible way the Trump administration is “reassessing” the value of gold— in fact, a bigger issue that many gold investors in the United States and around the world are suspicious of is:

The gold reserves of the United States are simply not as much as 8100 tons!

!

For many years, the United States has been one of the world’s largest gold exporters, and its gold exports far exceed the total amount of mineral gold in the United States every year, so there have always been gold investors who believe that the 8,100 tons of gold reserves on the books of the United States have long been sold off by major commercial banks in the market through gold leasing transactions.

On February 18, 2025, Elon Musk, who is the head of the Trump administration’s Department of Efficiency (DOGE), said he would investigate and audit the gold in Fort Knox because it is the most important gold reserve in the United States, which according to Federal Reserve documents is as high as 147 million ounces, accounting for 56.35% of the 262 million ounces of gold reserves in the United States. Mint Police) is responsible for protecting the gold.

Trump said on February 20 that he would go to Knoxburg to make sure the gold is indeed there.

After the Nixon administration ended the gold standard in 1971, the frequency of audits of U.S. gold reserves dropped from once a year to once every decade. It is reported that the last time the U.S. Treasury Department audited Fort Knox’s gold reserves was on September 23, 1974.

Since then, apart from the annual formal ‘gold vault seal inspection’, there has been no independent audit department to verify the approximately 4580 tons of gold stored in Fort Knox.

Musk said:

“Who can confirm that the gold of Fort Knox has not been stolen? Maybe yes, maybe no. The gold belongs to the American public! We want to know if it is still there.”

The recent surge in the price of gold is due to concerns that the US government may indeed re-monetize America’s gold reserves, and more importantly, investors are worried that America’s 8100 tons of gold reserves are just on paper, and the actual gold reserves are far below this amount.

If the United States’ gold reserves, after Musk’s audit, really have disappeared as countless gold investors have speculated, it will surely create a monstrous wave in the gold market, and gold rising to $5000 per ounce would be a piece of cake.