As if US Treasury Security Scott Bessent didn't have enough stuff with which to deal, gold is literally exploding higher on his watch.

In any discussion of the global "debasement trade" gaining momentum in real time, the dollar is written between the lines in bold font. Gold is now at $5,200 for the very first time, and silver is trading more like a cryptocurrency than a precious metal — up 50% year-to-date.

"The rise in precious metals prices is breathtaking and profoundly scary," says Robin Brooks, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He warns that this month's head-spinning gold rush is "part of something much bigger."

One of those bigger things is the interplay between the US and China. And the battleground of the moment is currencies.

Officially, Bessent is Trump's finance minister. His real job, though, is as human Zamboni, driving behind Trump to clean, smooth out and disappear his increasingly unhinged rhetoric and actions. When Trump says he wants to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, it falls to Bessent to claim it won't happen. And to feign surprise that anyone could dare ask.

When Trump talks of debasing the dollar, it's become Bessent's job to counsel calm. The same goes for Trump's itchy tariff finger as he aimed at Europe, South Korea and any other place Trump World deems insufficiently obsequious.

Yet this good-cop/bad-cop routine is wearing thin, as events in Davos last week suggest. Efforts by Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and other Trump officials to Zamboni Trump's bizarre rants over Canada, China, Denmark, Greenland (which he kept calling Iceland), Russia, Somalia, Switzerland, the UK, how "you'd all be speaking German and a little Japanese if it wasn't for us,"  NATO, windmills and the Fed's rate policies fell flat.

So much so that it's hard not to wonder if seeing Trump and his people bomb so terribly on the Davos stage was an inflection point for trust in US assets.

In Davos, officials were peppered with questions about Trump's brutal immigration policies and crackdown on US cities like Minneapolis. The second killing of an American protester in the city in as many weeks has CEOs speaking out — a real rarity in the Trump era.

On the Davos stage, Bessent defended it all, including tariffs that are devastating world trade and policies that have US debt and gold surging in unison. Many are noticing that the man entrusted with protecting the value of the reserve currency is sounding more like a Trump PR staffer than an economic policymaker.