The Biggest Deposit Of Monetary Gold? It Is Not Fort Knox, It's In A Manhattan Basement

Fort Knox is synonymous with gold. Lots of gold. But this Art Deco castle of concrete and granite is not actually the world’s largest depository of monetary gold on Earth. That title belongs to another US building in a far less conspicuous location. If you’ve ever wandered through downtown Manhattan, you may have walked right past it without realizing.

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Fort Knox, officially known as the United States Bullion Depository, is a fortified structure in Kentucky that holds much of the total gold reserves of the US Treasury. It’s nestled next to a US military post and often considered one of the most secure locations in the world. 

Its bomb-proof vaults currently contain over 4,583 metric tons (147.3 million ounces) of glittering gold bars, as of late November 2025, which represents around 2.3 percent of all the gold ever recovered and refined in the whole world. 

That’s about half of the Treasury’s total stash. The rest is spread across other high-security sites, including West Point, New York. But there is a much bigger load of gold on US soil – the only difference is that it’s not technically owned by the federal government.

The largest deposit of monetary gold in the world is officially in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a vast vault located in the basement of 33 Liberty Street in lower Manhattan. Buried 24 meters (80 feet) below street level, the vault houses around 6,331 metric tons of gold, stored in the form of approximately 507,000 bullion bars

None of it belongs to the Federal Reserve System. Instead, this location acts as a safehold that’s guarded on behalf of different account holders, including foreign governments, central banks from around the world, and official international organizations.

It even contains a small but significant amount of disputed gold, such as the billions of dollars of Nazi-looted gold once tied up in Swiss banks.

But why is all this treasure here instead of in the vaults of its home countries? Well, the official line from the Federal Reserve is that countries wanted a safe place to store their gold after the chaos of World War Two. 

The US emerged from the war with its economy relatively unscathed (at least compared to Europe and Asia), so it could offer unmatched security and infrastructure to safeguard the world’s gold and facilitate global trade. Instead of shipping bullion across oceans every time one nation paid another, the Fed could simply move bars from one cage to another. Easy. 

Of course, the US was very happy to put itself in this position. Other nations may own the gold, and the New York Fed may technically just be its caretaker, but the US ultimately runs the ship and is at the helm. When there are high levels of trust and confidence, this isn't too much of a problem, but it's a dynamic that's starting to be tested.

In today’s era of geopolitical tension, that arrangement is being reconsidered, with some major world powers looking to shift their gold out of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and ship it back home. Germany and Italy have expressed interest in repatriating gold to Europe to their own vaults, the world’s second- and third-largest national holdings.

"Trump is erratic and one cannot rule out that someday he will come up with creative ideas how to treat foreign gold reserves. The Bundesbank’s policy for gold reserves has to reflect the new geopolitical realities," Markus Ferber, an influential member of the European Parliament for Germany's ruling Christian Democrats, told Reuters in May 2025.