Fort Knox and the man with a golden conspiracy theory

The US president wants to check that half of the country's gold reserves haven't been stolen. Is that a leap (or a vault) too far? Guy Walters attempts to sift the bull from the bullion

- Guy Walters

They call it Bullion Boulevard for good reason, for there are very few roads in the world where you can drive past £330bn worth of gold. The boulevard is of course next to Fort Knox in Kentucky, a base of the United States army that also happens to double up as the home of America’s central bullion depository, holding well over half of the country’s gold reserves. So well protected is the facility that the expression “as safe as Fort Knox” has long been an epithet for security in the United States and beyond.

The only person who has come close to stealing the bullion was a certain Latvian called Auric Goldfinger in 1959, but then he was the figment of the imagination of one Ian Fleming, whose novel Goldfinger would be turned into the third James Bond film.

Little wonder, then, that during the Second World War, Fort Knox was used to store such precious documents as the Declaration of Independence, the constitution and the Bill of Rights, as well as a Gutenberg Bible, a copy of Magna Carta and the crown jewels of Hungary.

Fort Knox was inspected by outsiders in 2017, when no less a figure than Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin visited the vaults, accompanied by Kentucky governor Matt Bevin, as well as various other Congressional representatives. The visitors were the first outsiders allowed access since 1974 – they were photographed handling the gold, which certainly looked very shiny and gold-like.

But while the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve carry out regular inspections, nobody has apparently sat down and analysed the contents of the legendary vault for over 70 years, giving rise to one small niggling question that some people are asking with increasing frequency. What if the gold is not actually there? It’s all well and good to assume that it is, but how do we really know?