Fort Knox, an Impregnable Monument to Security Theater
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Oct. 16 (Bloomberg) -- During the panic of 1792, theBank of North America tried to stave off a run by havingemployees “carry its specie busily to and from the cellarin order to give a magnified notion of what it had,”historian Bray Hammond wrote. Bank managers “ostentatiouslybrought in deposits of gold and silver that hadunostentatiously been carried out a little while before.”
The show of specie reassured jittery customers, savingthe bank from failure. As a young clerk in Iowa during thepanic of 1907, Hammond recalled employing exactly the samedodge: heaping impressively large sacks of low-value coinin plain view and ostentatiously counting it to give theimpression of overflowing vaults.