The "true fact{s}" of FDR's 1933 confiscation can be found in "The Bank Runs of the Early 1930s and FDR's Ban on Gold" (forbes.com) from which the following excerpt comes:
"In April 1933 FDR and his allies at the Fed and Treasury attributed widespread bank runs and failures to private “gold hoarding.” Using the “Trading With the Enemy Act” (1917) as a precedent – an act that gave the president wide latitude to restrict exchanges and seize assets during “emergencies” – FDR declared that private gold should be seized and given over to the Fed, in return for irredeemable Federal Reserve Notes, to stem an emergency in the banking system. This was sanctified in the Gold Reserve Act (January 1934), which required that any gold held contrary to U. S. law must be forfeited to the U. S. government. Key parts of the “Trading With the Enemy Act” pertaining to gold seizures persist in the U.S. Code even today."Such bank run have recently occurred in Argentina, where citizens created the run to buy US dollars (rather than gold) and the government enacted draconian restrictions on buying and owning US dollars.
If such a bank run would occur today in the US it would not be to buy/own US dollars (since that is the currency the bank already holds it in) it would be to buy and own gold. Under such circumstance the ill founded assurances in this thread's article that 'gold would not be confiscated' should be no assurance at all.
What I recall reading, it was very common for Argentinians to have dollar denominated bank accounts. What the government did, was convert those accounts into Peso accounts. And then restrict withdrawals to a trifling amount of the trifle purchasing power it represented.
This isn’t exactly a new phenomenon, which explains the existence of overseas accounts going back centuries. From time to time, creditors say “no more” and people get left holding the bag. Just prior to WW first, thousands of tourists were left stranded on the continent or in London, because overnight their checks drawn on foreign banks were not honored anymore. In more recent decades, those holding dollars, at least outside banking circles in the parasite, er, host country, did quite well. Deutschmarks, Swiss Francs, and other currencies issued by stable governments did quite well.
Sinclair brings up a valid point - why is gold subject to such visceral anger, but not say, Yahoo stock or Muni bonds? I don’t care what other people do with their money, or at least not enough to make it a full time hobby trying to dissuade people with arguments like “it’s really heavy”. Hm.