Was US Gold Repatriated To Refill Fort Knox? (Uncut) 03-07-2025

Was US Gold Repatriated To Refill Fort Knox?

The question we ask today is, was the U.S. gold repatriated to refill Fort Knox? There’s been a lot of speculation as to why the gold was brought back, and we’re going to throw a little something out there that should narrow the field for everyone. Welcome to the Morning Markets and Metals with Vince Lancey, where each morning Vince brings you the financial and precious metals news to get you ready for your day. And now, here’s Vince.

Good morning. I’m Vincent Lancey, and this is the Goldfix Market Rundown. The question we ask today is, was the U.S. gold repatriated to refill Fort Knox? There’s been a lot of speculation as to why the gold was brought back, and we’re going to throw a little something out there that should narrow the field for everyone.

Before we do that, let’s check into the markets. Ten-year yields are down three basis points. Let’s leave the broader markets up there so you can get a feel for what’s been going on this week.

The dollar is 103.70, down 43 again. The S&P 500 is down 12 at 57.40. The VIX is 25 and change, up 16, 25, right, it used to base at 12, then it based at 15, now it’s basing at 20. Gold is 29.11, up practically a buck, well off the highs, it was up about 10 bucks at one point last night.

Silver at 32.31, down 30 cents. Copper, 4.67, down 5 cents. WTI, 67.36, up a little less than a buck.

Natural gas, 4.25, down 11 cents, almost 12. Bitcoin, 89,300, oscillating back and forth after the Bitcoin strategic reserve was created. Palladium, 9.40, down a buck.

Platinum, 9.64, down three and change. Gold, silver, now basing below 91. So we can see what’s going on now a little bit better.

Soy, 10.12. Corn, 4.51. Wheat, 5.48, down two, unchanged, down six. The chart you’re looking at there on the top left-hand side, that’s the euro on the week, appreciating against the dollar. Top right-hand side, that’s silver having not as exciting looking as the euro or these other charts here.

But that’s a pretty impressive move. The week’s not over yet, we know. But look at that candle, this one here, followed by this one completely negating the down move.

Better than gold. Euro bond futures, the DAX has been strong on the back of bond weakness. The DAX is now stalling, but German and European bonds in general are weaker because Europe has figured out that they have to spend more to defend themselves if they want to keep their social safety net up.

Now, I don’t mean to deride Europe, but what they’ve had to do is they’ve had to have a to their own loss. And as a result of that, Europe has to spend more. And the spending more means raising the deficit ceiling, or the debt ceiling, I should say.

Lower right-hand side, Bitcoin longs. I’m sorry, that’s Bitcoin longs. I mean that to be Bitcoin.

Well, let’s leave that up there. There are too many Bitcoin longs. That’s what we’ll say right now.

All right. These are the stories we put out yesterday, starting with the third one. Gold fixed PM, oil, copper, and gold.

Oil special. Bank gets uber bearish between 11% and 27% lower as a forecast. That’s a very important post as it ties together Trump’s policy choices, what banks are now discussing, something that we have been discussing for the last two weeks or so, that when you drill down into Trump’s various policy choices, it will all boil down to if nothing else works, he needs a weaker dollar, which he’s getting, and he needs lower oil, which he’s getting.

Everything else, I won’t call it fanfare or nonsense, but I will say it’s secondary. And then the last one, the genie is out of the bottle. And there’s the front page to that effect.

Fort Knox holds nothing but moths and IOUs. That was a story that we put out in November. We believe we know why gold is being brought back to the US.

It is to close open contracts on the books since the 1990s. It is to satisfy a debt. It is to partially refill Fort Knox or wherever else we’re storing the gold.

On November 16, 2024, Goldfix posted a very popular piece entitled Fort Knox holds nothing but moths and IOUs, calling back to a story that we had heard on the floor and that stuck with us. In that piece, we stated the Fed, the Treasury, and most central banks, when it comes to Fort Knox gold, only hold IOUs issued by bullion banks that have already sold the borrowed metal. Over the years, that gold has found its way into more patient hands.

Here is Egon von Greyerz making a similar statement. In reality, a central bank only holds an IOU issued by a bullion bank. If the central bank attempts to reclaim its gold, it will never get it back, as the gold has likely been sold to buyers in China or India, who have purchased it outright with no obligation to return it.

Since that story went up, the U.S. has begun repatriating gold by the ton. To what ultimate end, no one knows, but it is happening late as day. This repatriation started after that Goldfix post, which was picked up by Zero Hedge, thank you, and Front Pageworthy by more broadly read mainstream journals such as the Jerusalem Post.

Could the gold buyers have read it and reacted? Very unlikely. That’s a nice fantasy, right? As this was, this has been going on since 2020 at least. Could our story have catalyzed a speeding up a process that already had started? Maybe, but whatever the real reason, the Goldfix moth story did coincide with a changing zeitgeist surrounding gold.

We were lucky, but luck is also the residue of hard work. There is more to this story that we have held back on or have been reticent to elaborate on, but we want to start elaborating on it now because people are ready for some meat to go and find out the truth. Okay.

In that post, we used broad strokes to describe a relationship that persisted between bullion banks and the Fed starting during the Clinton-Greenspan era. We believe the gold is currently being repatriated to end that era. We believe it is being done prior to any gold audit of Fort Knox were one to actually happen.

We also believe that when one connects the dots between the Greenspan era with the 2020 COVID crisis and the 2022 OCC accounting change, which, by the way, forced bullion banks to show the public their gold derivatives books labeled as such, revealing they had been hiding 90% of their gold trades in a non-trading account. Not hiding. Everything they were doing was legal, but it was still hiding, which GoldFix covered in detail, as you can see on your screen.

When you combine these things just mentioned, those three things, with the current repatriation situation, you will see that this is an unwind of a decades-long position that used Treasury gold legally to generate income for the Fed, one, to free up money, enabling banks to engage in a massive carry trade for generations, two, shorts they just kept rolling, and three, the result was a price suppression. This has been my contention since the mid-’90s. The result was a price suppression, a manipulation of gold price at the market structure level unseen by anyone outside of the market structure level for 40 years.

Here’s another example of that OCC change. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in 2022 announced a change to the accounting. All banks that were holding gold derivatives not in the gold derivative basket on their balance sheets for risk purposes had to bring it back.

So gold derivatives were held in their FX basket, and it didn’t show as gold. It showed as a very small number in a very big FX basket, and the case they made back then was, well, there was no case made, but the rationale simply back then was, well, it was an FX trade, and gold is money, right? Well, gold’s not money, so why is it an FX trade? Because they were fucking carry trades. More details later.

So when this rule is changed, those derivatives that were conveniently hidden and paired with their FX counterparts sold gold, take the money, buy Aussie bonds, stuff like that, had to be brought back on the balance sheet, had to be separated for governmental risk as opposed to kept in house for bank risk. And the result was 90% of the derivatives risk in gold was not shown. And of that 90% that was not shown, it was held by J.P. Morgan and Citibank.

Other banks did this too, but they had the lion’s share of it. So look at that chart there. This is the gold derivatives risk, and this is the gold derivatives risk with a true up.

Get an idea. It’s worth looking at again. So to ask the question everyone else is now speculating on, to what purpose is all this gold being repatriated? Well, here’s the answer.

The answer is, well, there is speculation of a gold bond, a return to a gold standard, or some other repurposing of a suddenly useful collateral. And any of those may be true down the road, but why is this gold being brought back right now? What is the proximate need? What is the proximate purpose? There is no crisis. You can talk about the trade war.

Yeah, you can talk about that. That’s true. You can talk about what was the reason? Oh, the tariffs are why the gold’s being brought back.

No, it’s covered, right? We offer another far simpler, far more logical, less sensational reason. It’s based on information and legacy positioning of gold bullion banks concurrent with an agreement made during the Clinton era that is just now unwinding. It’s really simple.

The IOUs that we joked about, they existed. Those IOUs are being satisfied by the banks repatriating the gold. Are they repatriating it for themselves? Are they repatriating it for the Fed? Well, legally, they’re probably repatriating it for themselves to satisfy an IOU that has been called.

Chits are being called now. So they are closing out their IOUs to Fort Knox or West Point or wherever it is in Colorado. There is far more evidence to this being the reason than anything else out there.

Gold bonds, well, at one point, we thought it would happen. We don’t think it’ll happen for reasons we won’t get into right now. Gold standard, never happened.

Never happened. I mean, if it happens, happy to be wrong. But I don’t think it’ll ever happen.

It would just destroy the world. Disagree with me if you want. I don’t care.

This weekend, Goldfix will do a special post filling in the blanks on this idea. And so we would say to you that the IOUs and the moths that have been eating them in Fort Knox have been migrating to London. That’s why London has essentially the Bank of England or the LBMA or however you want to look at this artificial separation has been adding 60 days and 90 days to its gold delivery.

That’s not, you know, T plus two. You can have your gold in T plus two days like FedEx. Now it’s 62.

Now it’s 90. But they keep the two days in there because they want to give the illusion that it’s a temporary delay. It’s a default.

We don’t have the gold. Or put it this way, we’re not sure our gold is unencumbered. They’re either disorganized or they don’t have it.

And my guess is the U.S. has been pulling it back for the last, ooh, four years slowly. And China has been pulling it out for years. And what you have now in the gold situation is you have musical chairs.

It’s almost like a daisy chain. Look, everybody out there who’s a neokeynesian in this market, in finance, looks at gold like a pet rock. It’s not used for anything.

So you can find it anywhere you want. You can always borrow it from someone else to satisfy someone who absolutely needs it now. And whoever needs it now is an idiot.

That’s what you think when you’re a neokeynesian. You’re an idiot. You’re an idiot if you need it now.

Fine. You want it? I’ll borrow from someone else. Okay.

Well, China is taking more and more gold. The BRICs are taking more and more gold. There’s less available collateral.

Remember what Zoltan Pozar said? Well, if there’s less available collateral, then it becomes harder and harder to find. The BIS, which keeps a little gold, is running out of gold to keep a little in the market with. So you’re looking at a situation now where the musical chairs, the music is stopping and there’s less chairs.

And every time it stops, there’s less chairs. There’s someone out there who’s looking for a seat. And it might ultimately be the Bank of England.

They’ll be bailed out. Don’t get me wrong. But this is a slow motion default.

And they will never characterize it as a default because all the gold that’s in the world is available at a price. It’s not used. It’s not consumed.

That’s the rationale that creates this crowded trade. And that’s what happens when you set yourself up to be squeezed. An oversubscribed idea.

Anyway, at the bottom of this post in the premium section, you can see it right there. We have included one of the dots discussed here. It is the Goldman Sachs report discussing GDP as being artificially low because of large gold imports.

It includes the chart we posted on social media. You know the chart with the gold repatriation, COVID, Ukraine war, and now off the charts. That’s a Goldman chart.

And big hat tip to Zero Hedge on that. But that’s a Goldman chart. And if you’ve seen it on the internet, there’s a good chance that it will find its way back to us somehow.

We didn’t invent the chart. But yeah, we share that chart. The point is, that chart, as cool as it is, is not the point of the article.

The point of the article is that GDP is too low because gold is being bought. And our trade deficit is too big because of the gold that’s being bought. So the question we asked and we’re posing to you is, why would a Neo-Keynesian who views gold as a pet rock and knows that buying it doesn’t help GDP and actually worsens the trade deficit do that? Why would anyone do that if it cooks their books against them, unless they had to? We would say to you that an IOU is being called and banks are satisfying that IOU.

What they do with it afterwards, gold bonds, all that other stuff, fine. It can happen. But right now, the banks are settling a debt.

The whole two-page report giving a context is attached right there. And over the weekend, we will write a more broader, more comprehensive post on this idea. So those of you out there who want to start looking into this, that’s how you start.

Start looking into it from this point. In 1993, after Bill Clinton took office, Alan Greenspan was approached by Robert Rubin and whoever the CEO was at Goldman at the time. And they and other bullion banks, Rubin was the chair of Citi or important in Citi at the time.

They and other bullion banks started borrowing gold from the Fed for carry trades. And now they’re closing the debt out, we believe. Look at that, gold’s rallying $12 or $10 or $11.

Just pretty cool, right? Okay, so the world is a shit show right now. And gold is where you need to be. And even the US government needs that, don’t they? See you later.

Well, thank you, Vince, for this morning’s show. And thank you watching at home for being here. And especially for everyone who comes here live every day and participates in the chat.

Sure is a lot of fun being there with you. Hope you had a great week and enjoyed everything that has been going on. And at least following it and seeing the metals come back a bit.

Real quick before we wrap up, I would like to thank Fortuna Mining who kindly brought us today’s video. And as I mentioned yesterday, Fortuna did have their earnings out a late Wednesday night. And before yesterday’s session was received well, they were up about 4% on the day.

As they did record a record free cash flow of $95.6 million in the fourth quarter. And to hear a few words from Jorge Genoza, the CEO of Fortuna Mining on the latest results. Well, here you go.

They have been taken positively by the market. And basically what we have been able to show is a track record of expanding margins. As an outcome of what? Of higher gold prices, continued rising prices.

And being able to keep our cost steady. I think a big demand from the investors community is, okay, prices are rising. But show me that you can expand your margins.

And all of that is not eaten away by cost creep or those things, right? So as you well mentioned, we had for the quarter record free cash flow. But what’s important here is that quarter over quarter margin on cash from operations grew from 33% to 50%. How? Capturing the opportunities of prices and keeping our cost and capital under control, right? So I think the market is rewarding us today because we’re showing that we can fully capture the benefit of increased prices.

Again, that is Jorge Genoza, the CEO of Fortuna Mining. And they are ticker symbol FSM. And you can also find them at fortunamining.com. And if you’d like to hear that full call that we did with them, I know we do have a lot of mining stock investors in our audience.

Well, then I will wish you a good weekend and let you know that that call is coming your way now.