On Feb 3, Trump's new Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, said “within the next 12 months, we are going to monetize the asset side of the US balance sheet”. These comments - which were in the context of US government  funding for a new sovereign wealth fund - prompted the FT's Gillian Tett to suggest that rising speculation of gold revaluation may be behind the surge in gold, to wit: "currently, [US gold stocks] are valued at just $42 an ounce in national accounts. But knowledgeable observers reckon that if these were marked at current values — $2,800 an ounce — this could inject $800bn into the Treasury General Account, via a repurchase agreement. That might reduce the need to issue quite so many Treasury bonds this year" (technically yes, practically - considering the US government spends over $7 trillion each year, the "benefit" would be equivalent to... less than 2 months of spending).

In any case, so pervasive is the panic across Wall Street that gold may suddenly be revalued by a factor of ~70, that none other than BofA's heaviest of Fed plumbing hitter, former NY Fed staffer Mark Cabana was looped in to opine on whether or not the Treasury may indeed shock the world by letting gold "float."

As Cabana writes in "US asset monetization & gold re-marking" (available to pro subscribers), while he admits that he doesn't know the details of Bessent’s plan yet, they could include non-traditional UST funding options.