Buried in the Treasury’s International Reserve Position report is an intriguing bit of math. The document details the total amount, by weight, of the Treasury’s gold reserves, plus a dollar value for said metal. But some fast division reveals something interesting: The Treasury marks the value of its gold at $42 an ounce, the price settled on in 1973, two years after the United States scrapped the Bretton Woods System, which had held gold at $35 an ounce for decades.

Wait — what? Spot gold is heading toward $1,100 per ounce, and the Treasury is embracing a Cold War relic of a price? If the Treasury’s bling were valued at the spot price, we’d be sitting on a literal gold mine of nearly $288 billion. Why doesn’t the Treasury account for the huge run-up in gold prices?

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