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Excerpts:

Not for the first time, the US Treasury has just gone and frozen the US held assets of Afghanistan’s central bank, the Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB). Chief among these assets are 1731 old gold bars (just less than 22 tonnes) supposedly stored in the gold vault of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in Manhattan under 33 Liberty Street.

These 1,731 gold bars (if they even still exist) were deposited with the Fed by the Afghan central bank in 1939, and are old US Assay Office gold bars that have cracks, fissures, holes and other imperfections.

While the US Treasury has not yet released an official statement on blocking the Afghan central bank assets, the Washington Post on Tuesday 17 August broke the story that a few days previously on Sunday 15 August, the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the Treasury department under the direction of Janet Yellen had made the decision to execute the freeze.

Among central banks of the world, the DAB has always been one of the more transparent when it comes to divulging information about it’s gold reserve holdings, and looking at the DAB’s annual financial statements, you can see why.

In the latest annual financial statements of the DAB for the year ended 30 Qaws of solar year 1399 (which is 20 December 2020), note 7.1 to the financial statements states that the DAB holds:

“703,004.944 fine troy ounces of gold in bar from held at the Federal Reserve Bank (FRB), New York as the Bank’s international reserve.”

This 703,004.944 ozs is approximately 21.87 tonnes of gold.

However, note 7.1 of the 2020 accounts goes on to say that even though the Afghan central bank’s gold bars have a minimum gold purity of at least 99.5%, they are not London Good Delivery bars because the dimensions of the bars do not comply with Good Delivery gold bar dimensions, and critically, some of the bars contain cracks, fissures, holds and other imperfections.

In short, the Afghan central bank’s gold at the New York Fed looks to be a pile of old US Assay Office gold bars...

...How long has the Afghan central bank held an unchanging amount of 703,004.944 ozs of gold at the NY Fed in the form of 1,731 old US Assay Office gold bars? Startlingly, this question is also answered by looking at the DAB’s 2004 financial statements, also in Note 4 (see above), which reveals that the Afghan central bank gold was deposited with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 1939, which is 82 year ago!