Fort Knox has been a source of fascination for Americans for generations. The vault, built in 1936 adjacent to the U.S. Army post in Fort Knox, Kentucky, currently holds 147.3 million ounces of gold, about 59% of total U.S. gold reserves, according to the U.S. Mint. The rest is stored at the West Point Bullion Depository, the Denver Mint, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Fort Knox doesn’t allow visitors and has removed only small quantities of bullion for purity testing during audits. That limited access has fueled decades of speculation about whether the gold is actually still there.
So when Fox News host Jesse Watters asked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent directly whether the gold was still there, the answer got attention. “The treasurer has been to Fort Knox, and I’m happy to say all gold is present and accounted for,” Bessent said. Bessent himself has not visited Fort Knox, but U.S. Treasurer Brendan Beach has, he said. What came next is the part worth paying closer attention to.
What Scott Bessent said about gold, dollars, and fiat currency
Watters had framed displays of older U.S. currencies hanging on the wall behind him, and Bessent used them to explain something most Americans don’t think much about.
“We used to have silver certificates. We used to be backed by silver, sometimes gold. And then in the ’70s, we just went to what was called fiat currency, where you didn’t have to keep gold or silver in the vault,” he said.
Related: Bank of America’s latest gold outlook sends a different signal
He also confirmed the U.S. is still receiving gold from Venezuela. “We are getting a lot from Venezuela. We are getting gold,” Bessent said. And on the question of how much the country holds overall: “The U.S. has the largest pile of gold in the world, over $1 trillion at current market value.”
How the dollar lost its link to gold and what it means today
The system Bessent described as “the ’70s” has a precise start date. In August 1971, President Richard Nixon closed what was known as the gold window. Before that, foreign governments could hand the United States dollars and receive gold in return at a fixed rate of $35 an ounce.
That arrangement, part of the Bretton Woods monetary system, gave the dollar its status as the world’s reserve currency in the decades following World War II.
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Nixon ended it because the U.S. didn’t have enough gold to keep up with the dollars that had been printed. Once the gold window closed, the dollar became a fiat currency, backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government rather than any fixed amount of metal.
The practical consequence shows up in purchasing power. According to the Minneapolis Fed, $100 in 2026 has the same purchasing power as roughly $12.25 did in 1971. The gold in Fort Knox didn’t move. The dollar did.
Why central banks are buying gold faster than ever before
Understanding the fiat system helps explain something that’s been happening quietly in global finance. Central banks around the world have been buying gold at roughly twice the pace they did in the previous decade, according to the World Gold Council. The average annual purchase over the past four years has been approximately 1,000 metric tons, up from around 500 metric tons in the decade before.
The U.S. holds more gold than any other country. But the surge in buying by other governments signals that even in a world dominated by fiat currencies, physical gold still carries weight as a reserve asset. Gold can’t be printed. It can’t be created digitally. It can’t be sanctioned out of existence the way dollar reserves can when a country falls out of favor with Washington.
That’s precisely why central banks keep adding it, and why the pace of buying has accelerated since Russia’s dollar reserves were frozen in 2022.
Countries like China, Poland, Turkey, and India have been among the most aggressive buyers in recent years. Each of them is making a bet that gold offers a form of financial sovereignty that holding U.S. Treasuries doesn’t.
Bessent’s comments about the U.S. holding over $1 trillion in gold at current market values land in that context. America’s gold pile is an asset. It just isn’t backing the currency anymore.
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Gold’s 120% rally and what the biggest names in finance are saying
Gold has climbed roughly 120% over the past five years. It was trading at around $4,010 per ounce as of July 18, after hitting an all-time high of $5,589 in January 2026. That run has drawn attention from some of the most prominent names in finance.
Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, appeared on CNBC’s Squawk Box at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2026 and made his position clear. “People don’t have, typically, an adequate amount of gold in their portfolio,” he told CNBC. “When bad times come, gold is a very effective diversifier.”
He has suggested investors hold between 5% and 15% of their portfolio in gold or what he calls alternative money. His argument is less about return maximization and more about what happens to a traditional stock-and-bond portfolio during periods of monetary instability.
JPMorgan has set a price target of $6,300 per ounce for gold by the end of 2026. Jamie Dimon has said that in the current environment, gold can “easily” reach $10,000 an ounce.
What Bessent’s Fort Knox comments mean for investors watching gold now
Those are aggressive targets. Whether they prove accurate depends on how the dollar holds up, how central banks keep allocating reserves, and how much investors lean on gold as an inflation hedge in an environment where fiat currencies are doing what Bessent described: floating on faith rather than metal.
What Bessent’s Fort Knox comment underscores is that the gold is there. What the fiat system means, as he also explained, is that owning it and backing a currency with it are two very different things. The U.S. sits on the world’s largest gold reserve. It just chose, in 1971, to stop using that reserve as the foundation of its monetary system.
For investors, that distinction is the whole ballgame. If you believe the fiat system remains stable and the dollar holds its purchasing power, gold is a portfolio diversifier. If you believe the system is under more stress than it looks, the way Dalio and others have been arguing, then gold is something more fundamental than that. Bessent’s comments, intentionally or not, laid out exactly why that debate keeps coming back.
Related: Bank of America’s latest gold outlook sends a different signal
