Recent correspondence between U.S. Rep. Alex X. Mooney, R-West Virginia, and the U.S. Treasury Department suggests that the department has given the Federal Reserve and International Monetary Fund unfettered control of a portion of U.S. gold reserves.

In a letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on June 9 this year, Mooney posed many questions about the U.S. gold reserves, which are owned by the Treasury.
A reply from the Treasury Department’s deputy assistant secretary for appropriations in the department’s Office of Legislative Affairs, Angel Nigaglioni, was released this week.
The U.S. Treasury declined to answer most of Mooney’s questions, suggesting that the congressman instead pose them to the Fed and the IMF, though the gold belongs to the Treasury

For most of this decade owning gold and gold-related investments has required the patience of Job, and the sector is so obscure that it is hard to be sure of anything.
But for months now the unusual developments have been piling up so much that it may be possible to regain some optimism.
There are indications of a shortage of metal not just at the New York Commodities Exchange, where for months now most contracts have been settled through a supposedly “emergency” procedure called “exchange for physicals,” but also in London, the hub of the world gold market, where the usual flow of metal to Switzerland recently reversed, with metal flowing back to London amid increasing demand.
This corresponded with announcements of gold acquisitions by central banks that had not

A U.S. representative who has been pressing the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve, and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) with questions about the gold and silver markets has asked Attorney General William P. Barr to try intervene and get answers from the commission.

In a letter dated November 1 and made public today, the U.S. representative, Alex W. Mooney, Republican of West Virginia, commends Barr for the Justice Department’s recent criminal prosecution of manipulation in the monetary metals futures markets.
But Mooney calls attention to the explosion in use of a mechanism called “exchange for physicals” for settling metals futures contracts in the United States, a mechanism that, Mooney contends, may pose “some danger of a systemic issue” if, as

Actually, Keynes’ “barbarous relic” remark was made not about gold itself but about the gold standard for currencies. Keynes wasn’t denying gold’s use as money. But that is the least of the problems with Wolf’s reply.
Who cares about the prices of useless metals? “No significance in the modern world”?
For starters, governments themselves care.
That’s why central banks, against Wolf’s advice, continue to hold huge inventories of gold and lately have been increasing them.
It’s why central banks classify gold as a Tier 1 asset, equivalent to government-issue bonds and cash.
It’s why central banks constantly trade the metal and its derivatives surreptitiously, directly and through the Bank for International Settlements,