OCTOBER 21, 1935-Ernie Goes Deeply Into the Gold Brick Situation in U.S.
THE WASHINGTON DAILY NEWS — MONDAY, OCTOBER 21, 1935
Ernie Goes Deeply Into the Gold Brick Situation in U.S.
By ERNIE PYLE
This country at the moment is simply filthy with gold bricks. And the funny part of it is, they’re real gold.
The United States now has at least one-fourth of all the gold in the world. Maybe even more. And tons of it are arriving on every big liner from Europe. About $380,000,000 worth has come in during the last six weeks.
The reason? Well, the boys in Europe who own the gold are scared. They want to get their dough over here for safekeeping. It’s the war, you know.
All this gold arrives in gold bricks, about the size of a regular building brick. Each one weighs 30 pounds.
It doesn’t take much gold to make a lot of money. A ton of it is worth about a million dollars.
About 380 tons have arrived from Europe since Sept. 1. This is approximately 27,000 gold bricks. Now there’s only one thing a writin’ man can do with 27,000 gold bricks, or 27,000 of anything else, and that’s place them end to end. So we’ll do that with the bricks, and we have a row of gold bricks nearly three miles long. Mmmmm!
Under our law, all monetary gold in this country must be sold to the Government, and the Government must buy it. The Government, as far as I can learn, doesn’t want all this gold, but it has to take it.
The Government buys it at $35 an ounce, and pays off on a gold brick at 90 per cent of its actual weight. If assay shows it to be more than 90 per cent fine, they pay the rest later.
Most of this inflowing gold is owned, not by governments, but by private individuals and corporations. France is sending the most, and after her, England. But gold has also been coming from India, Canada, Holland, China and Russia.
Most of this new gold is still in New York, in vaults. Very little has been moved to Washington.
The Government is building a new safety vault for gold storage out in Kentucky, on the old Camp Knox grounds. It is familiarly referred to as the “hole in the ground.”
But it isn’t a hole at all. It will be a handsome stone building, about 100 feet square, looking like a mausoleum. They have just started work. It will be finished in seven months.
Right now, most of the gold is kept in Denver and New York. But when the “hole in the ground” is finished, our gold supply will be divided between there and Denver, with about $60,000,000 on hand both in New York and San Francisco for exchange purposes.
Our total gold supply right now is a little more than $9,500,000,000. I said a while ago that that was about one-fourth of the gold in the world. But you can’t say exactly, because nobody knows just how much there is in the world. They estimate it around 35 billions.
They didn’t start keeping track of the world production of gold until 1493. Why, that date, I don’t know. I suggested to the Treasury that maybe Christopher Columbus had something to do with it, but they didn’t think so.
Anyway, comparatively little gold had been mined before 1493. So we can say that, starting from scratch the year after America was discovered, and running up until the first of August this year, $41,216,048,000 worth of gold has been produced in the world.
But a lot of it has gone down in ships, or been buried in people’s teeth, or been hidden so well it will never be found. And a lot has simply worn off and floated away in thin air.
Nobody knows simply where this was lost, so they roughly estimate that about 35 billions. And after all, when you have a loss that doesn’t make much of a run either direction in matters of billions, it doesn’t matter. I assure you that to me, personally, it matters not even one small fraction of a whit.
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