I don't fully understand movements in the gold price.

Like gold, U.S. dollars have value only to the extent that they are strictly limited in supply. But the U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost. By increasing the number of U.S. dollars in circulation, or even by credibly threatening to do so, the U.S. government can also reduce the value of a dollar in terms of goods and services, which is equivalent to raising the prices in dollars of those goods and services.

The GSEs are adequately capitalized. They are in no danger of failing.

Economics is a highly sophisticated field of thought that is superb at explaining to policymakers precisely why the choices they made in the past were wrong. About the future, not so much.

In fact, the world needs more nerds.

I don't think that Chinese ownership of U.S. assets is so large as to put our country at risk economically.

Nobody really understands gold prices and I don't pretend to understand them either.