The Fed owns no gold...

Fed Lawyer Alvarez: “The Federal Reserve Does NOT Own Any Gold at All”

Thats right. The Fed owns NO gold. Zero, zip, ziltch.

For those of you who did not watch yesterday’s monetary policy hearing in the house of representatives, you most likely missed this bombshell exchange between Federal Reserve lawyer Scott Alvarez and committee chairman Dr. Ron Paul. My jaw literally dropped when I heard the Fed’s general counsel declare that the Federal Reserve owns no gold. After 1934, Alvarez explains that the Fed handed its gold over to the Treasury in exchange for gold certificates. When pressed further, Alvarez noted that the gold certificates do not represent any interest whatsoever in the gold itself. He explained the gold certificate listings on the Fed balance sheet, not as a claim to gold, but at most a claim to dollars from the Treasury. See the quotes here (and watch the videos at the bottom of the post):

Scott Alvarez: “The Federal Reserve does not own any gold at all… we have not owned gold since 1934, um, so we have not engaged in any gold swap. Before 1934 the Federal Reserve did, we did own gold. We turned that over by law to the Treasury and received in return for that gold certificates.”

Ron Paul: “…You have the securities for essentially all the gold?”

Scott Alvarez: “No. No we have no interest in the gold that is owned by the Treasury. We have simply an accounting document that is called gold certificates that represents the value at a statutory rate that we gave to the Treasury in 1934″...

...In any case, we can analyze the implications of the basic facts and come to a couple of conclusions:

1) The widespread notion that the Fed owns gold is false. The corollary to this is the mistaken belief that the Fed understates its gold holdings on its balance sheet by only reporting certificates based on the $42.22 statutory gold value. The Fed does not in fact own the US gold stock multiplied by the market price of gold, unless the Treasury defaults and even then its not clear. The Fed does, however, own a claim to currency totaling $11.1 billion and this value has a remote chance of going up significantly if the Treasury revalues its gold and maintains the practice initiated in the Par Value Modification Act.

2) The fact that the Fed owns no gold, nor claims to any gold, means the fundamental value of the dollar lacks any backing besides dollars themselves, not including Fed building and equipment. Dollars are in essence worth a lot less than many people thought, and the Fed is much more impotent in using the prowess of their assets, and conducting monetary policy in general, than many believed. In all, Alvarez’s clarification strengthens the case for gold’s high dollar value immensely.



Read more:
http://goldnews.com/2011/06/02/fed-lawyer-alvarez-the-federal-reserve-does-not-own-any-gold-at-all/