Nobody chose that number for a reason that still exists. Congress set it in 1973, moved on, and never came back to it. What got left behind is a strange line item: the gap between the statutory price and the market price is now north of a trillion dollars, and there is a legal mechanism for realizing it that does not involve selling a single bar.
How the price got stuck
The statutory price has moved exactly three times in a century.
From 1879 to 1933, gold was $20.67 an ounce, the definition of the dollar itself. In January 1934, the Gold Reserve Act revalued it to $35: a 41 percent devaluation of the dollar executed as an accounting entry. In December 1971, after the gold window closed, the Smithsonian Agreement moved it to $38. In February 1973, one last devaluation took it to $42.22, technically $42 and two-ninths. Then the world moved to floating exchange rates, gold became just another market price, and Congress never touched the statutory number again. It has been $42.22 for fifty-three years.
So today the books say $11 billion, and the vaults hold roughly $1.1 trillion.
The 1934 precedent, and what it built
The last time the United States revalued its gold, the profit built an institution that still operates today. This part rarely gets told.
When the 1934 Act moved gold from $20.67 to $35, the Treasury's existing hoard was suddenly worth $2.81 billion more, in 1934 dollars, than the day before. That paper profit was real money to the government: Section 10 of the Act took $2 billion of it and created the Exchange Stabilization Fund, the Treasury's in-house vehicle for intervening in currency markets, with the remainder swept into the general fund. The ESF exists today. When you read about the Treasury participating in a currency operation, that is the 1934 gold revaluation profit's descendant doing the work, ninety-two years later.
None of this is hypothetical. It happened once, and the money built something permanent.
The mechanics, which are stranger than you'd think
The Federal Reserve does not hold the gold. Fort Knox, West Point, Denver, and the New York Fed's vault hold the metal, and the metal belongs to the Treasury. What the Fed holds is gold certificates: claims the Treasury issued against the gold, valued, again by law, at $42.22 an ounce.
This plumbing is what makes a modern revaluation mechanically trivial. If Congress changed the statutory price to the market price, the Treasury could issue new certificates against the same gold, and the Federal Reserve would credit the Treasury's account with the difference: roughly $1.1 trillion of spendable balance, created without an auction and without selling an ounce. Nothing in the vaults would change.
In plain terms: the government would give itself money by changing a number in its own books.
Others have stared at this lever
In 1997, Germany's finance minister, Theo Waigel, pressed the Bundesbank to revalue its gold reserves so the proceeds could shrink the deficit in time for euro-entry criteria. The Bundesbank treated the plan as an attack on its independence, and the fight became a famous episode. The bank's position was that revaluation gains are not income, and that spending them is deficit financing under another name. The compromise is the instructive part: the reserves were revalued in 1997, but the money was not allowed to touch the 1997 deficit. Distribution waited a year, so that everyone involved could say the revaluation had not been done for the reason it was done.
The idea is not foreign to Washington either. On February 3, 2025, the U.S. Treasury Secretary said, "We're going to monetize the asset side of the U.S. balance sheet for the American people," at the signing of the sovereign wealth fund executive order, a phrase that sent analysts straight to the $42.22 line item before officials walked the gold-specific speculation back. The Federal Reserve's own staff published a note in 2025 titled "Official Reserve Revaluations: The International Experience." Central banks do not usually publish research on questions nobody is asking.
And while the lever gets studied, central banks have been buying the metal itself: more than a thousand tonnes in each of 2022, 2023, and 2024, the heaviest official buying since 1950, with the 2025 pace still near double the previous decade's average, per World Gold Council data. For four years running, the institutions that issue currencies have been accumulating the one reserve asset that is nobody's liability.
Why it sits unused
If the lever is right there, why has no one pulled it in fifty years?
Partly because it was never needed. The Treasury can borrow at scale, and the Fed can create reserves against Treasuries, so the gold shortcut solved no problem worth its signal. And the signal is the real cost: revaluing the gold is the kind of thing a government does when the ordinary machinery is strained. It is a one-time move, and a loud one. Once used, it cannot be un-used, and every future observer would know the escape hatch opens under pressure.
One more thing about unused levers: they change behavior before they are ever pulled. A player holding an ace plays the rest of the hand differently. Nobody outside the room can prove that a trillion-dollar line item changes how a government runs its ordinary risks. But nobody who has held a good card believes it changes nothing.
That is why the line item is worth knowing about: a trillion dollars of optionality that costs nothing to hold and something to reveal. If you ever wake up to headlines that the gold certificates are being revalued, you will know where the money came from, and you will know somebody decided the ordinary machinery was no longer enough.
The number to watch, meanwhile, stays frozen where 1973 left it: $42 and two-ninths.