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by Stewart Stogel
CNSNews.com
Correspondent
September 12, 2001
New York (CNSNews.com)
- As New Yorkers try to recover from the attack on the World Trade
Center, financial markets have yet to feel the full impact of the
terrorist action.
Far beneath the
shattered buildings, screaming ambulances and dazed New Yorkers on the
streets of Manhattan are two of the world's largest gold depositories.
One belongs to the
US Federal Reserve Bank; another to a group of financial institutions.
The Fed's gold
reserve is housed 100 ft. beneath its headquarters, only blocks from the
World Trade Center, whose twin towers collapsed into mammoth heaps of
rubble after two hijacked jetliners were crashed into the buildings.
The Fed boasts
that its gold depository spans the length of two football fields and
contains more gold than any other vault on earth.
Its deposits are
believed to surpass the value of the legendary Fort Knox gold reserves
in the mid-1980s.
While the Fed
declines to release the total value of gold on deposit, it is
unofficially estimated at more than $25 billion. But the gold stored in
that facility does not belong to the U.S.; it's owned by foreign
nations, including Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
At the World Trade
Center itself is another, smaller gold storage facility owned by a group
of commercial banks.
When Islamic
radicals bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, the New York Police
Department and FBI at one point thought that the attack might have been
a raid on the gold depository.
The explosion
eight years ago was close to the vault, which withstood the explosion.
It's not known how much gold was kept in the World Trade Center vaults
in 1993, but it's believed as much as $1 billion in Kuwaiti gold eight
years ago.
It's also believed
that the amount gold currently buried beneath the debris of the World
Trade Center today far exceeds the 1993 levels. Kuwaiti officials in New
York declined to discuss the matter.
Copyright
1998-2006 Cybercast News Service
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