Deep beneath the streets of Manhattan, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York houses the largest known depository of gold in the entire world, resting on bedrock eighty feet underground.

A closer look

Deep beneath the streets of Manhattan, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York houses the largest known depository of gold in the entire world, resting on bedrock eighty feet underground. However, nearly all of the roughly six thousand tons of gold bricks in the highly secure vault do not actually belong to the United States government at all. It is mostly owned by foreign nations, central banks, and international organizations who simply trust the Americans to guard their shiny yellow metal better than they can do it themselves. When countries trade gold with each other, nobody physically moves the bars across the ocean; a guy in a forklift just drives the pallets from one designated international cage to another in the same basement. It is essentially the most highly militarized, hyper-secure storage unit on earth, heavily guarded by snipers and heavily armed police, just to watch over an underground game of musical chairs