Oh, so you mean that they may just be a rock covered with silver? I get it.
But then why do governments stock up gold with bars? I assume they don't check every single bar?
Why would governments stack up gold bars?
As far as I know, some countries still need to depend on their gold storage to print money, and that gold is stored in bars.
I know we learned that in the school,
but is a lie. The gold backed up money system was replaced after 2nd world war with fiat, and ultimately killed in the 70ties by Nixon (if I remember right).
It is possible that some countries has gold backup, not that they need to since there is no such "dependency" in world economic.
All the significant world currency use fiat not backed by gold, especially U.S.
What scares me is that most people have not realized this...
Toke is right. The US gold in all likelihood was leased out by the banks and is gone. However, any country retaining their gold reserves in US borders like at the Fed Reserve will never ever see their gold again. Look at Germany. Gold held by central banks do not represent even half of the worlds gold so why we give them so much power I have no idea.
Nixon closed the gold window august 15, 1971. During WWII, the US amassed more than half the gold reserves of the world. Countries can buy back at a fixed US dollar price. When Charles De Gaulle suspected the US was printing more dollars than they claimed (exorbitant privilege of having world reserve currency), he started to repatriate gold and Nixon had to close the gold window or the dollar would've defaulted. Luckily for the US, a new scheme emerged, the petro dollar system which is being challenged today.
