On Wednesday evening, President Trump made reference to visiting Fort Knox while speaking to reporters on Air Force One. Several times.
In answer to a query about potential Pentagon cuts, he stated, “We’re going to go into Fort Knox to make sure the gold is still there,” “We hope everything is fine with Fort Knox, the fabled Fort Knox, but we’re going to go to Fort Knox and make sure the gold is still there,” he stated.
Do you understand? Their destination is Fort Knox. “If the gold isn’t there we’re going to be very upset,” Trump stated.
The Trump White House is aware that Fort Knox is undoubtedly a gold mine.
It is audited annually, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told a radio talk-show host. “All the gold is present and accounted for,” he stated.
Is Trump asking for any other reason, then?
Perhaps it’s simply a harmless rumor to dispel. In a social media post, Elon Musk described a possible livestreaming audit using two fire emojis. Sen. Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah, mockingly informed one user that Pez candy might be kept at Fort Knox instead, claiming he has attempted but failed to visit the military post.
However, Treasury might take a drastic step and revalue its gold reserves as a result of a second, independent audit of Fort Knox. Since gold (GC00) is currently selling at a record high of around $3,000 per ounce, they are currently on the book at $42 per ounce.
The Treasury would suddenly have hundreds of billions of dollars—by one estimate, $750 billion—at the press of a keystroke if it did so.
Bessent did dispel the notion that revaluing gold was a step toward creating a sovereign-wealth fund, which some had derived from his cryptic remark about monetizing the asset side of the U.S. balance sheet, according to Bloomberg.
If nothing else, there might be additional advantages to delaying the point at which the Treasury requires Congress to raise the debt ceiling.
According to Jan Nieuwenhuijs, author of The Gold Observer blog, Congress would have to authorize a rise in the official price of gold before a revaluation could take place.
The Treasury’s own general account would then rise by the same amount as the Treasury issued additional gold certificates to the Federal Reserve.
Nieuwenhuijs notes that the Treasury previously employed similar strategy in 1972, which gave it an additional $800 million to work with.