Susan Kokinda believes the Trump administration is “very seriously and very quietly” rethinking the dollar-based financial system, and points to Judy Shelton, a gold-standard advocate now advising Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, as a sign. With US debt above $40 trillion and gold now a bigger share of central-bank reserves than US Treasuries, here is her argument, what is confirmed, and what is not.
In an interview with Michelle Makori of Miles Franklin Media on 31 October 2026, Kokinda, a co-founder of Promethean Action and coalition vice chair of the Michigan Republican Party, turned from politics to money: the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency, the debt, and whether a new monetary order is coming. This is the second article in our series on the interview.
Key figures
- US federal debt: $40.5 trillion (26 October 2026), of which $32.6 trillion is held by the public
- Net interest on the debt, fiscal 2026: about $1.1 trillion, a record 3.4% of GDP; the deficit was about $2 trillion
- Gold’s share of global official reserves: 27% at the end of 2025, against 22% for US Treasuries (ECB)
- Over-the-counter derivatives outstanding: $845 trillion notional, $22.8 trillion gross market value (BIS, end-2025)
The reserve-currency trap
Makori raised the Triffin dilemma, set out by the economist Robert Triffin in 1960: the country that issues the world’s reserve currency has to run persistent deficits to supply everyone else with it, and those deficits slowly erode confidence in the currency. Many analysts argue that supplying the world with dollars has also hollowed out the US manufacturing base that made the dollar strong in the first place.
Kokinda traces the problem to 15 August 1971, when President Nixon ended the dollar’s convertibility into gold. Being the reserve currency “in a world of stable currencies” tied to gold, she says, is very different from being the reserve currency “in the wild west, which is what we’ve had since 1971”, with eurodollar and petrodollar markets and “dollars being created out of thin air everywhere.” The result, in her view, is a system in which the United States no longer controls “the issuance of dollar-denominated value.”
“A ticking time bomb”
The difficulty, she argues, is that the system cannot simply be switched off. Decades of financial speculation have left “a huge speculative overhang” in derivatives: “You do have like a ticking time bomb out there. You have to be very careful not to just detonate that in some kind of chaotic way.”
Her example is Operation Economic Outcast, the sanctions campaign against Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and their financial networks that Bessent announced on 24 August 2026. Treasury gave foreign banks and companies a grace period to unwind their dealings before secondary sanctions apply; asked why it didn’t act at once, Bessent replied, in Kokinda’s paraphrase, “What do you want me to do? Blow up the whole world financial system?” Bessent has also warned Iranian elites: “We know where in the British Virgin Islands your accounts are at these trust companies.” Kokinda says he understands that the problem is “not a Tehran problem”, pointing to Iranian elites’ homes in Britain and Paris, and in the interview his choice of the British Virgin Islands was described as “a pretty clear signal.”
On the debt, Kokinda rejects the IMF’s usual medicine of “cut, cut, cut.” Her comparison: a family deep in debt doesn’t throw the children overboard to save on food; it finds a better job. The administration, she says, intends to “grow our way out of it.” Makori pushed back: the attempt at large spending cuts through the Department of Government Efficiency fell far short, and the administration is spending more, not less.
Hamilton’s precedent
Kokinda’s model is Alexander Hamilton. After the Revolution, the new republic carried a debt far larger than it could pay, and some wanted to repudiate it. Hamilton refused: under the Funding Act of 1790 the federal government honoured the debt and took over the states’ war debts. When the First Bank of the United States was chartered in 1791, private investors could pay up to three-quarters of their subscriptions in government debt securities, which turned the debt into capital for a bank that financed the economy. That is broadly what Kokinda describes: debt converted into long-term investment that builds the real wealth needed to retire it.
Judy Shelton at the Treasury
The appointment Kokinda finds most telling is Judy Shelton’s. On 9 October 2026, Bessent named Shelton a Counselor in the Office of the Secretary, working on currency policy with a focus on financial conditions in China. Shelton is a long-time advocate of sound money and a greater role for gold; President Trump nominated her to the Federal Reserve Board in his first term, but the Senate did not confirm her.
Her best-known proposal is “Treasury Trust Bonds”: zero-coupon Treasury bonds that holders could redeem at maturity either in dollars or in a fixed weight of gold. The flagship version would run 50 years, to 4 July 2076. The idea is to borrow at lower cost by giving lenders a guarantee against inflation that only gold can provide. Arizona’s legislature has asked Congress and the Treasury to authorise them; there is no sign the Treasury has adopted the plan.
Kokinda links Shelton’s proposal to Hamilton: long-term debt backed by “something tangible” to restore confidence. “I am convinced they are thinking about this,” she says, as a way of dealing with “all of the imbalances and instabilities and vulnerabilities that come from being the world reserve currency.”
Bessent and “Bretton Woods 2.0”
Shortly before the 2024 election, Bessent told the Capital Allocators podcast: “a Bretton Woods realignment’s coming… I’d like to be part of it, either on the inside or the out.” Kokinda puts him firmly on the side of what she calls the American System, pointing to his speech to the Reagan National Economic Forum in May 2026, “While America Slept”, in which he argued that a nation that “cannot manufacture, mine, ship, or refine its needs… cedes its strength—and sovereignty—to others.”
She also reads his approach to the IMF as a quiet challenge. Bessent skipped the IMF and World Bank annual meetings in Bangkok in October, citing domestic commitments (Kokinda says it is the first time a Treasury Secretary has done so; we could not confirm that). His written statement asked the IMF to drop “inefficient and distortionary climate finance targets”, stop restricting finance for oil and gas, and analyse the “non-market policies and practices and exchange rates” behind global imbalances, and announced a US contribution to a World Bank fund for nuclear energy in developing countries. Kokinda hears in it a criticism of floating exchange rates and IMF austerity, delivered “very, very quietly in a Scott Bessent way.” Makori noted that Bessent knows the system from the inside: he was chief investment officer of George Soros’s fund from 2011 to 2015.
Where gold fits
Central banks have already moved. According to the European Central Bank, gold made up 27% of global official reserves at the end of 2025, up from 20% a year earlier, overtaking US Treasuries at 22%. Much of that rise reflects gold’s price rather than new buying, and dollar assets as a whole, at 42%, are still the largest share. But it shows how reserve managers have hedged against the system Kokinda describes.
The case against
- Most economists oppose a return to gold. When the University of Chicago’s IGM Forum surveyed leading US economists in 2012, none agreed that a gold standard would improve price stability and employment. A fixed link to gold limits how far a central bank can respond to recessions and banking crises, which many historians blame for deepening the Great Depression.
- Gold-convertible bonds shift risk to taxpayers. If gold rises sharply over 50 years, the Treasury would owe far more than it borrowed. The US holds about 8,100 tonnes of gold, so a large programme would effectively be a bet on the gold price.
- Growing out of debt needs growth above interest rates. With net interest now above $1 trillion a year and deficits near $2 trillion, growth alone would have to outrun a rising interest bill.
- Ideas are not yet policy. Shelton is an adviser, Bessent has talked about a “realignment”, and no plan for a new Bretton Woods has been published.
The series: 1. The great systemic clash · 2. Triffin, debt and gold: is a “Bretton Woods 2.0” on Trump’s table? · 3. Tariffs, tax breaks and credit: is America’s factory revival real? · 4. Sovereignty versus empire: Iran, Ukraine and a Trump–Putin–Xi summit · 5. The “image of man”: culture, ideology and the fight over Western civilization.
Live gold prices, gold in other currencies and the history of the Fed’s rate decisions are on goldprice.corgano.com and its fed funds rate page; the link between gold and inflation-adjusted interest rates is on gold vs real yields.
Data: Corgano Gold Price — gold price history, as of November 4, 2026, 17:45 UTC.
This article summarizes the views Susan Kokinda expressed in an interview with Miles Franklin Media (31 October 2026), with figures checked against official sources and context added by Corgano. Her views are her own. This article is commentary; it is not investment, tax or financial advice.
