1934 gold confiscation questions

Economics Economics Questions
1

Some background: http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0906e.asp

So, the gold confiscation began on April 5, 1933 when Roosevelt issued EO 6102. The ultimate purpose was to drive gold out of hand-to-hand circulation to make way for a monopoly on currency by Federal Reserve Notes.

  1. In January 1934, the Congress passed the Gold Reserve Act which nationalized the Federal Reserve’s gold holdings, among other things. Where did this gold come from? Was this gold which was part of the gold seizure process, that is, was it money stolen from the public? Or, was this money which was “put into” the Federal Reserve system by the member banks during the time between its creation in 1913 and 1934 when the FR gold was nationalized?

  2. This is an ancillary to the first question - to whom were US citizens forced to turn in their gold? Did they go down to their branch bank? To a Dept. of Treasury office? Where did you go to turn in your gold? If it was turned in to a branch bank, was that bank the one who sent the gold to the central authority? And was that central authority the US Treasury?

The US gold confiscation is one of the dirtiest events in US history and I’m trying to understand who was screwing who over other than the obvious point that the US public was being screwed over by Roosevelt and the “money trust”. The point of my first question is that if the US government seized the Federal Reserve’s private gold holdings, then this is a double-cross of the Federal Reserve by the US government. Otherwise, if the Federal Reserve’s gold holdings were just siphoned from the public one way or another, then they were just participating and unqualifiedly benefiting from the gold confiscation.

Help me out!

Clayton -

2

FDR’s gold confiscation was small, only 110 tons of gold. By contrast, the US would need to accumulate at least several thousand tons today, something that will likely be much more fiercely opposed.

  1. In 1933, the dollar was on the gold standard backed by 5800 tons of gold in US vaults, so those turning in gold for dollars only experienced a 69% loss.

http://www.marketskeptics.com/2009/03/gold-confiscation-not-likely.html

i dont know if the above is true or not.

if so, it seems odd that a cook like rooseveldt would take 110 tons of gold from people when, if true, 5800 tons of gold were in us (owned??) vaults or in private banks??? i am not exactly sure.

3

but a 69 percent loss, if true seems bad in itself…certainly not good in an "only’ sense.

4

In 1933 approximately 500 tonnes of gold were turned in to the Treasury “voluntarily” at the exchange rate of $20.67 per troy ounce.[7]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

this link says 500 tonnes.