I like to feel that I’m at least slightly inured to the daily eruption of flaky conservative ideas, but maybe not. Here’s today’s:
With the United States poised to slam into its debt limit Monday, conservative economists are eyeballing all that gold in Fort Knox. There’s about 147 million ounces of gold parked in the legendary vault. Gold is selling at nearly $1,500 an ounce. That’s many billions of dollars in bullion.
“It’s just sort of sitting there,” said Ron Utt, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. “Given the high price it is now, and the tremendous debt problem we now have, by all means, sell at the peak.”
Yes, indeed. Let’s sell at the peak. I wonder how long Utt thinks the peak would last once word got out that the federal government had started selling its gold stocks. A week? A day? An hour? Given the migration of algo trading into the commodities markets, the correct answer might be closer to a minute.
I doubt that there’s really any good reason for the federal government to retain massive amounts of gold these days. Selling it off over the course of, say, ten or twenty years, might make sense. But trying to sell truckloads of it right now in order to forestall raising the debt ceiling? Surely even flaky conservatives can see the problem with that.
On the bright side, it would probably cause Glenn Beck to invent a whole new universe of conspiracy theories. That might make it worthwhile all on its own.
