What's driving the gold frenzy
The buying spree is sending a message
The villain played by Jeremy Irons in the 1995 thriller Die Hard with a Vengeance barks orders in a stilted German accent to gangmates who bomb a subway station and use a tunnel-boring machine to break through to the nearby New York Federal Reserve Bank’s gold vault.
“One hundred and forty billion dollars!” Irons’ character, Simon Gruber, gushes as he surveys the thousands of neatly stacked gold bars he is stealing. “Ten times what is in Kentucky.”
“Fort Knox, ha, is for tourists!”
The movie is pure fiction; the part about the size of the Fed’s New York gold stash isn’t.
It is indeed a larger horde of gold than Fort Knox, and by the current market price, the amount stored at 33 Liberty Street in lower Manhattan is worth more than $800 billion.
