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A little over 6 years ago I had a work trip to the US and one of the stops was at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. They said I should do a tour of the vault at lunch time, in fact they insisted.
It's a private tour, not open to the public, and you go through a huge revolving door that I think weighed 60 tons. There are then lots of cages, like a prison, and inside each is gold. It mostly belongs to foreign governments and when gold is sold from one government to an other it comes out of one cage, is weighed and goes in another. They let me hold a gold bar, which was very heavy, but not rediculously heavy like some people make out.
I leant against a crate and the tour woman asked if I knew what it was? I had no idea, but she said it was cash. There was about $3 billion in cash, to be used if there was an emergency and Manhatten was cut off. It was enough for 5 days trading.
At prices then there was in total well over $120 billion there, the most amount of money or near money anywhere in the world, even Fort Knox only had about 2/3 of that. I'm not normally that impressed by big wads of cash but I will admit it did give me a buzz.
And no, they didn't let me take any.
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9th Dec 2012 4:27pm
