The Great Gold Heist
The more I get into this, the more I am amazed by the ridiculous assertions. Take this gem on why the WTC was destroyed. This is what happens when you smoke too much pot and watch Die Hard III
Rumor has it that over $160 billion dollars in gold were stored in the World Trade Center. So where did all the gold go?
Of course their defenders will complain that they are not actually arguing this, just saying that there are "rumors". This is ridiculous logic, if I posted on this blog, much less made a movie about it, that there were rumors that Al Gore was really an alien from the planet Zorgon, you could rightly make fun of me, rumors or not.
The point behind this being that these rumors are idiotic, as anyone with basic logic can figure out, and the filmmakers are idiots for repeating them.
In September 2001 gold was trading at less than $300 a troy ounce. Just to keep math simple I will round up to $300. $160 billion divided by $300 = 533,333,333 troy ounces. One pound is 14.583 troy ounces (it is a weird measurement, I had to look it up) so that makes 36,572,264 lbs. or 18,286 tons.
So if our conspirators had a bunch of really big dump trucks that could haul this gold away 10 tons at a time, they could do this in a mere 1,827 truck loads. If they hurried and managed to load each truck in an incredibly efficient 5 minutes, 24 hours a day. They could accomplish this heist in 6 days and 8 hours. All without someone noticing!
Of course a cynic could also just point out that the entire gold reserves of the United States only totaled 8,133 tons in 2006.
Who writes this stuff?
posted by James B. @ 1:38 AM
7 comments
7 Comments:
Your numbers are wrong. A standard 10 wheel truck can carry 50+ tonnes on the street. If speed and safety are not an issue it can carry more (expecially considering that there is about 60 cubic m of space on a large truck - that makes 1,140 tonnes of gold.
Also, the US gold reserves refer only to the gold owned by the US federal Government, not the amount of gold inside the US. Corporations, banks, and foreign countries store gold in the US.
But I agree, the gold heist story is unlikely.
Scott, click on my profile and you can find my e-mail.
CV - Good points. The tons per trip and time per trip were just pulled off the top of my head. I think the point still stands though, that even a cursory examination shows this theory is ridiculous.
Isn't this the same thing that happened in Die Hard with a Vengeance?
I have a relative that was working downtown after the attacks. He said that at the site these things were being moved to, they had the bars dumped right on the street on the sidewalk. There was no concern that they would be stolen because they were too heavy. Look at the bars in the pic in the link above. Your not going to just stick those in your pocket.
I don't know the weight restriction of any given truck. I was point out that James' limit of one tonne per trip is far too low. But yes, the 50 tonne limit quoted by truck manufacturer has more to do with road safty than the ability of the engine to pull the load. You don't want to buy a truck that claims 200 tonnes, only to find out it can only safely carry that much at 5km/h, because the brakes would fail at 80km/h.
Well if you loaded more gold per truck, then it would take much longer than 5 minutes to load the average truck. Moving this much gold secretly would still take an absurd amount of time. The point still stands that this story is ridiculous.
I agree. A more interesting question is where the gold was moved to? Were there hundreds of trucks driving out of WTC and down New York streets?
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