Mnuchin's Fort Knox Quip: ‘I Assume the Gold Is Still There’

(Bloomberg) -- U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin paid a rare official visit to Fort Knox to check out the nation’s gold stash on Monday -- while keeping an open mind for future film projects.

“I assume the gold is still there,” the former Hollywood producer quipped to an audience in Louisville, Kentucky, 40 miles (64 km) north of the U.S. Bullion Depository. “It would really be quite a movie if we walked in and there was no gold.” After the visit, he playfully reassured Americans the treasure was still secure.

“Glad gold is safe!” he wrote in a post on Twitter.

Fort Knox has been seared into the public imagination since the 1964 James Bond movie “Goldfinger,” in which the British spy, played by Sean Connery, foiled a plot to contaminate the nation’s bullion.

Mnuchin, whose action-film credits include ‘‘Mad Max: Fury Road,” “The Lego Batman Movie” and “Suicide Squad,” said that he would be only the third secretary of the Treasury to go inside the vault since it was created in 1936 by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

“We have approximately $200 billion of gold at Fort Knox,” said Mnuchin. “The last time anybody went in to see the gold, other than the Fort Knox people, was in 1974 when there was a congressional visit. And the last time it was counted was actually in 1953.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Alister Bull in Washington at abull7@bloomberg.net, Saleha Mohsin in Washington at smohsin2@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Brendan Murray at brmurray@bloomberg.net, Sarah McGregor, Randall Woods