Yesterday I had a trivia question about Fort Knox. We all thought it was in Tennessee, turns out it’s in Kentucky. Anyway we went to wikipedia to check it out. According to wikipedia there is about 4603 tonnes of gold stored at Fort Knox, but it isn’t the largest reserve of gold in the U.S. The federal reserve bank of New York holds about 5000 metric tons of gold in an underground vault in Manhattan - this gold belongs to foreign governments, central banks and international institutions.

So how much is all this gold worth? Well at today’s price of about $964 an ounce there is only about $140 Billion worth of gold in Fort Knox and another $160 Billion or so at the Federal Reserve bank of New York. I know a billion dollars is a lot of money but there isn’t enough gold in Fort Knox to cover the TARP, let alone the latest Stimulus package. It probably isn’t even enough to keep the auto makers afloat.