During the Johnson administration, as gold's role in the monetary system was about to implode, the U.S. government ran a secret project to look for the stuff in the oddest places: seawater, meteorites, plants, even deer antlers. Plans were even drawn up to use nuclear explosives to extract gold from deep inside the Earth. The project's name drew on popular culture: Operation Goldfinger.
From the New Yorker:
Operation Goldfinger represented the logical culmination of a government obsession with not having enough gold. The post-war global economy was expanding much faster than the gold supply that propped it up. Dollars freely convertible to gold were the underpinning of the world's monetary system, and President John F. Kennedy—and many others—feared that if holders of dollars and other U.S. securities were to cash in their paper for gold, there wouldn't be enough gold to exchange, and a global crisis could ensue. In a private 1962 conversation with the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Kennedy framed the shortage of monetary gold starkly: “My God, this is the time . . . if everyone wants gold, we're all going to be ruined because there is not enough gold to go around.”
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