Tis the season of gratitude, you know, and I wanted to take a minute to thank our marketplace

investors. That is a community of listeners who've gone above and beyond to support our work

and to ensure that trustworthy news and information is available to all. And in a year like this one,

that means a lot. Each and every investor matters and makes a real difference here at marketplace.

So on behalf of all of us, thank you.

In which the theme of the program is why? From American public media, this is Marketplace.

In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizdole. It is the 22nd day of November. This one's a Tuesday.

It is always to have you along, everybody. All right, so look, let's call this the day of the three

wise. Shall we? Why is this happening? This being the key variable here.

Variable number one and hence why? Number one on the program today, W-H-Y. By the way,

just because this is radio and that can be tough. Anyway, variable number one, Y number one is gold.

Someone or something is buying a lot of it right now. 400 tons of it in the third quarter.

That's $20 billion worth. Give or take it today's price. And it's double the amount

that changed hands in the second quarter, all of this according to the World Gold Council.

Central banks bought a quarter of that total. But the rest, we don't know, a country or countries.

And why? Marketplace to sub-rebenishore is on the case. When Ken Cutner used to work at the

New York Federal Reserve Bank back in the 90s, he sometimes got to go to the basement.

Very deep in the Manhattan granite was a gold vault. If I remember correctly, about 800,000

bars of gold in our basement. One time he got to pick one up, it was super heavy.

And behind the main set of bars were all sort of cages. And each cage is aligned to different

countries. And so if a country X wanted to transfer gold to country Y, one of the guys

then in the gold vault would open the cage, take out some bars of gold, wheel it around in a

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