The gold trick, the 2023 edition

Along with the trillion dollar platinum coin and premium/perpetual bonds, the gold trick lies in the genre of strange-accounting-tricks-to-evade-the-US-debt-ceiling.

With the debt ceiling getting closer every day, gold bugs like James Rickards are calling for the U.S. to trigger the gold trick with "just one simple phone call."

I've explained the gold trick three times before [ here | here | here ]. I don't really feel like rehashing the intricacies of it again, so reread my posts if you want to absorb all the complexities.

The idea, in brief, is that by increasing the U.S.'s official price of gold, which currently lies at $42.22, to the current market price of $2000 or so, the accounting value of the U.S. Treasury's stock of gold would suddenly be worth hundreds of billions more. The Treasury could then take the newly-realized extra value of its gold (known as "free gold") and submit it as collateral at the Fed, in the form of gold certificates. Once that collateral is submitted, the Fed can in turn instantiate a bunch of fresh dollars that the Treasury can spend.

Since none of these gold-related accounting changes qualifies as an increase in the official debt, voila, the Treasury can spend without running into the debt ceiling.

There's one big caveat. Rickards, for instance, goes off the rails when he writes: "one phone call from the Treasury to the Federal Reserve could reprice the Treasury’s gold from $42.22 per ounce."

It's just not that easy. All previous gold price increases, including the 1934 increase to $35, the 1972 increase to $38, and the 1973 increase to $42.22 required approval from Congress. Given that it is Congress that is the impediment to a straight debt ceiling increase, why would that very same Congress consent to a pseudo-increase via an change in the official gold price?

I suppose there may be enough gold-loving Republicans that the bill would pass. But as you can see, the gold trick is just not as effective as the premium bond/perpetual bond trick or the platinum coin trick, both of which avoid Congressional approval altogether.

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The official price of gold illustrated: