Originally Posted by DGG

Well, you cannot count it that way. Many countries around the world use Fort Knox as their gold bank. When they pay each other in gold, the payment goes from one room to the other at Fort Knox.

What you would ask is: how much of the US gold is left?

Then again, why do we need gold? The purpose of money is not to be able to buy or sell gold, but to buy and sell things we can use. Money is not gold, gold is not money. As a matter of fact, over the last decades the price of gold has been steadily shrinking on a long term basis, versus the price of most countries' money. Thus, it has been better to have a currency that is independent of the price of gold during this time.