The total amount of gold in 1917 was about $3.08 billion. Today that’s more than tripled to $11.04 billion, according to the Treasury Department. About 56 percent of that is held in the famed and heavily-guarded Fort Knox location in Kentucky.

The U.S. has had a long and complicated relationship with gold. American money used to be backed up by a gold standard since 1879, until President Franklin D. Roosevelt largely took the country off it in 1933. We were formally and fully taken off the gold standard by President Richard Nixon in 1971, and some critics such as former U.S. Rep. Ron Paul criticize this decision as being one of the key factors in subsequent inflation and the Great Recession of 2008-09.

U.S. Has Nearly as Much Gold as All Europe: Precious Metal Has Been Sent Across Atlantic Until We Have Accumulated $3,089,000,000

From Sunday, April 29, 1917