Paul Solman:
People start a rumor. A rumor becomes a conspiracy theory. There must be something. And, I mean, anybody who’s ever played the game telephone, by the time you get to the end of the circle, it’s different than when it started, right?
That’s got to be the explanation here. Certainly, no one has come forth with evidence that somebody, hey, Uncle Harry has a gold bar in his freezer and it says Fort Knox on it. Now, you ask, why now? What’s the reason they’re going in?
Well, one possibility is they’re trying to satisfy the conspiracy theorists. So it might be just that, hey, don’t worry. It’s all there. President Trump or Elon Musk might say, here we are worried about the debt ceiling and how we don’t have enough money to pay our debts unless Congress raises the debt ceiling. But we have enough money. And so we don’t have to worry about the debt ceiling.
And that then could be prelude to some maneuvers by what’s called monetizing the gold, which is to say claiming it for ourselves at its true value, which is what’s called mark to market. You mark it up to the current market price.
