There is a vault under lower Manhattan containing roughly 507,000 gold bars weighing 6,331 metric tons.
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And here's the first surprise: Almost none of it belongs to America.
The New York Fed says the gold belongs to foreign governments, central banks, international organizations and the U.S. government.
The Fed itself doesn't own the gold. Individuals and private companies aren't allowed to store gold there.
Now here's the part that makes the story wonderfully strange.
The Fed doesn't merely say:
“Sure, we'll keep 6,000 tons of gold for you.”
It keeps track of the actual bars.
If Country A deposits 10,000 bars, those bars remain Country A's. If Country A comes back for them, the New York Fed says it returns the exact bars that were deposited.
Gold, in this vault, is not considered fungible. Which sounds absurd. Gold is gold, right? Apparently not when you're a central bank.