Fort Knox has been a source of fascination for Americans for generations. The vault, built in 1936 adjacent to the U.S. Army post in Fort Knox, Kentucky, currently holds 147.3 million ounces of gold, about 59% of total U.S. gold reserves, according to the U.S. Mint. The rest is stored at the West Point Bullion Depository, the Denver Mint, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Fort Knox doesn't allow visitors and has removed only small quantities of bullion for purity testing during audits. That limited access has fueled decades of speculation about whether the gold is actually still there.
So when Fox News host Jesse Watters asked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent directly whether the gold was still there, the answer got attention. "The treasurer has been to Fort Knox, and I'm happy to say all gold is present and accounted for," Bessent said. Bessent himself has not visited Fort Knox, but U.S. Treasurer Brendan Beach has, he said. What came next is the part worth paying closer attention to.
Watters had framed displays of older U.S. currencies hanging on the wall behind him, and Bessent used them to explain something most Americans don't think much about.
"We used to have silver certificates. We used to be backed by silver, sometimes gold. And then in the '70s, we just went to what was called fiat currency, where you didn't have to keep gold or silver in the vault," he said.
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He also confirmed the U.S. is still receiving gold from Venezuela. "We are getting a lot from Venezuela. We are getting gold," Bessent said. And on the question of how much the country holds overall: "The U.S. has the largest pile of gold in the world, over $1 trillion at current market value."
The system Bessent described as "the '70s" has a precise start date. In August 1971, President Richard Nixon closed what was known as the gold window. Before that, foreign governments could hand the United States dollars and receive gold in return at a fixed rate of $35 an ounce.
That arrangement, part of the Bretton Woods monetary system, gave the dollar its status as the world's reserve currency in the decades following World War II.
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