Washington owns 261,498,926 ounces of gold. At this week’s market price of about $4,260 an ounce, that is roughly $1.1 trillion. On the Treasury’s own books it is worth $11,041,059,957.90, because federal law still values it at $42.22 an ounce, the price Congress set in 1973.
More than half of it, 147 million ounces, sits at Fort Knox. Most of the rest is split among West Point, Denver, and the vault of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, according to the Treasury’s report for the end of August.
The distance between those two numbers has made “revaluation” a recurring idea in gold markets. Washington would change the price in the law and book the difference. It would not have to sell an ounce. The Treasury has issued gold certificates to the Federal Reserve against the metal, and a revaluation would mark those certificates up and credit the Treasury with the gain, about $1.1 trillion at this week’s price.
No such plan has been announced. Discussing a proposed sovereign wealth fund in February 2025, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said revaluing the reserves was “not what I had in mind.” The idea has resurfaced repeatedly since.
The idea has been studied inside the central bank. In August 2025, Federal Reserve staff economist Colin Weiss reviewed cases in which governments tapped revaluation gains. Italy used them in 2002 to cover losses on a bond conversion. Lebanon used them the same year to retire $1.8 billion in treasury bills. South Africa committed 150 billion rand to debt reduction in 2024. In Germany in 1997, the central bank resisted a government plan to do the same. Weiss concluded that “while gold revaluations can provide funds for the government, their ability to offset larger structural challenges can be limited.”
The scale bears that out. The whole gain would come to less than 3 percent of the federal debt, which stood at $40.05 trillion on September 14.
It has happened here once before. Congress passed the Gold Reserve Act on January 30, 1934, and the official price went from $20.67 to $35 the next day. The Treasury booked about $2.8 billion, and $2 billion of it went to create the Exchange Stabilization Fund. Americans who had been ordered to turn in their gold at the old price the year before received none of the gain. Asked by Kitco News whether gold coin holders would share in a revaluation today, economic historian Phillip Magness of the Independent Institute said, “Not really.”
Texas has been building in the other direction. Since September 1, gold and silver have been legal tender in the state under House Bill 1056, though no one is required to accept them. The same law authorizes an electronic payment system backed by bullion in the Texas Bullion Depository, authorized to launch in the spring of 2027.
Measured against the official price Congress set in 1973, a dollar now buys about one percent of the gold it did. A revaluation would book that difference as a gain for Washington, and nothing for the people holding the dollars. Texas is building a way for Texans to use the metal itself as money.
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