[8/10/17]  Eighty feet below the streets of lower Manhattan, a Federal Reserve vault protected by armed guards contains about 6,200 tons of gold.

Or doesn’t.

The Fed tells visitors its basement vault holds the world’s biggest official gold stash and values it at $240 billion to $260 billion.

But “no one at all can be sure the gold is really there except Fed employees with access,” said Ronan Manly, a precious-metals analyst at gold dealer BullionStar in Singapore. If it is all there, he said, the central bank has “never in its history provided any proof.”

Mr. Manly is among gold aficionados who wonder if the bank is hiding something about what it’s hiding.

Other theorists suspect the ....READ ON