Sitting in a vault on Salt Lake City’s west side is a bit of Utah treasure — $60 million in gold purchased over the course of the last several months, part of a minor gold rush led by state Rep. Ken Ivory.
Legislation that the West Jordan Republican sponsored last year allowed State Treasurer Marlo Oaks to invest up to 10% of the state’s rainy day funds in gold. Since its passage, the state’s gold reserve has grown to $60 million as of the end of this legislative session, according to Oaks.
Because Utah’s rainy day funds now have about $1.4 billion, Oaks has the authority to buy an additional $90 million in gold, which is intended as a precaution against economic downturns or major emergencies.
Today, Utah has more than half a ton of gold stashed inside a Brink’s vault in Salt Lake City and, per Ivory, has already realized several million dollars in gains as gold prices have climbed since the initial purchase.
This year, Ivory and the Legislature are poised to travel even further down the gold highway. HB306, which passed and is on Gov. Spencer Cox’s desk, would have the treasurer hire a company to create a payment system that would make Utah the first state in the nation allowing vendors with state contracts to be paid in gold.
“We know that in our lifetime the nature of money is changing. … This merely allows vendors to choose their option to receive payment in gold and silver” Ivory said in presenting the bill on the House floor. “For the state, it’s really nothing more than having an additional bank account, so [the state] would push dollars and the vendor would receive gold.”
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Rep. Ken Ivory, R-West Jordan, during a committee hearing at the Capitol in Salt Lake City Thursday, Jan. 23, 2025.
The Precious Metals Working Group, which was established last year and met four times in the run-up to this session, heard from two possible vendors who offer platforms enabling gold transactions — Glint Pay and Goldback, which is headquartered in Alpine, Utah.
Goldback executives Lawrence and Mark Hilton — who presented to the working group — gave Ivory’s 2024 campaign $4,312 in 2024, $1,000 of it in Goldback dollars, and the company gave Ivory another $7,500 in June, the same time the working group meetings were taking place, according to campaign finance disclosures. Lawrence Hilton also testified on behalf of the Utah Precious Metals Association in favor of Ivory’s bill in a legislative committee.
Presumably, those companies, and perhaps others, would submit bids to run the state’s transaction system. Fiscal analysts initially estimated that it would cost taxpayers about $1 million, but that later was scaled back to $177,000. Under a provision added to the bill 12 minutes before the Legislature adjourned, about $147,000 would be paid for by private donors.
According to Ivory, the money to get the project off the ground will come from Kevin Freeman, who was a member of the state’s gold working group and is host of the “Economic War Room” podcast and author of the book “Pirate Money.”
In his book, Freeman argues that states can facilitate gold-backed transactions to protect citizens’ liberty and defeat “The Great Reset” — a conspiracy theory that espouses elites are manipulating economies to build a tyrannical globalist regime.
Another Ivory bill that would have given a 5% tax break to mining companies that pay their severance taxes in gold, failed to get through the House.
The value in purchasing gold, Oaks said in an interview, is that it lets the state diversify its investments and, in the event of an emergency — which the rainy day funds are designed to address — is liquid enough that the state can still get access to the funds when it needs them.
Gold prices also tend to rise during bad economic times, when rainy day funds would also be tapped into.
“The key is that it’s a relatively small component and it’s also a way to diversify,” Oaks said. “It’s hard to know how to diversify a rainy day fund because it’s sort of for the long term until you suddenly need it. … It’s just hard to find assets that can diversify and you can liquidate fairly quickly in an emergency.”
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There was a similar attempt to expand Utah’s unconventional investment strategy beyond gold. Rep. Jordan Teuscher, R-South Jordan, sponsored HB230, which would have allowed Oaks to use an additional 5% of the state’s rainy day funds to buy cryptocurrency. As the bill was structured, it appears that only Bitcoin would have met the criteria to qualify.
The bill would also limit local governments’ ability to restrict crypto trading and mining. It narrowly passed the House, but the provision allowing Utah’s reserve to be invested in crypto was stripped out before it made it through the Senate.
‘Would be great to have some guardrails’
Utah’s present fascination with gold began back in 2011, when the state became the first in the nation to recognize gold and silver coins minted by the federal government as legal currency.
Last year, in addition to permitting the treasurer to start using the rainy day funds to buy gold, the Legislature set up the Precious Metals Working Group. It included Sophia DiCaro, Gov. Spencer Cox’s budget director; former Federal Reserve Vice Chair Randal Quarles; Gary Crittenden, the former chief financial officer for Citi and American Express; members of the mining and banking industries; and representatives of the attorney general’s office and Sen. Mike Lee’s office.
It was led by Oaks, but Ivory was the driving force in its four meetings.
Ivory repeatedly argued during the meetings — as he has done since — that the burgeoning national debt is requiring the government to print more money, devaluing the dollar to the point that it is in danger of collapse. Other nations, he said, are abandoning it and gold is the best safeguard for when that day comes.
Some of the group sounded a cautionary tone. DiCaro reminded the group that they were dealing with taxpayer money and suggested it might be better to move cautiously, perhaps limiting the purchases to a smaller portion of the emergency funds the state maintains. The gold purchases, she noted, are completely exempt from the Utah Money Management Act, which governs the state’s investments.
“It would be great to have some guardrails in place,” she said. Without those safeguards, she said she would not be able to support the legislation.
Quarles, in particular, pushed back on Ivory’s premise, cautioning against tying the state’s action to the collapse of the dollar, suggesting it could scare Utahns into hastily investing in gold.
“There is no realistic risk that the dollar stops being the world’s reserve currency in the lifetime of anybody on this call,” he said in the working group’s October meeting. “People should be free to use gold if they want to if they’re more speculative. I’m 100% in favor of that. But if, as part of the legislation, we say we’re doing this because the dollar is going to hell in a handbasket, then you’re going to have a lot of people who will then say, ‘Oh, then I want to go into gold.’ And then when gold shifts in value, they’ll say, ‘You misled me.’ We just shouldn’t do that.”
When the report came out, it focused almost entirely on the eroding value of the dollar and leaned on the input of a handful of conservative commentators who have promoted gold. It presented Quarles’ concerns over dire warnings about the dollar as a dissenting opinion to the group’s consensus.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Utah State Treasurer Marlo Oaks in 2023.
It also presented a series of recommendations to legislators that were never discussed in the group. Instead, Oaks made recommendations in the report that tracked closely with what Ivory had pushed the group to adopt — including the hiring of a vendor to let the state transact with gold.
Ultimately being able to transact with the state using gold is only part of the purpose of the modern gold rush.
When people use gold to purchase goods or services, the IRS considers that transferring an asset, making any appreciation in the value of the gold subject to a high capital gains tax rate. Ivory said that, if the Utah government is officially using gold to do business, it is legal tender and would open the door for a challenge to the IRS policy and potentially eliminate the capital gains tax on gold-backed transactions.
Tribune reporter Emily Anderson Stern contributed to this story.
Correction, March 18, 2:10 p.m. • This story has been corrected to reflect Utah’s rainy day funds amount to around $1.4 billion.
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