WASHINGTON – Officials at the Federal Reserve released a statement tonight conceding that some of their high-security underground gold vaults may, in fact, be full of those little chocolate coins they make, you know, the ones that come in those mesh orange bag things, because the reality of the fiduciary job in question is one where it can be super duper hard to tell which one – the coin or the candy, that is – you are dealing with sometimes.
“Why in the world these gold coin candies need to have a flawlessly embossed Statue of Liberty on one side, complete with ‘1815’ or whatever incised into the flaky milk chocolate, and a ridiculously detailed etching of a bald eagle on the other, is beyond me,” complained a defensive Mickey Mason, whose job it is to turn the cartoonishly large metal wheel that opens the door to the vaults, to the Heckler, “It just causes confusion in my department! And even when one side of the chocolate coin only has a Chuck-E-Cheese-style smiley face pattern, and the other side reads ‘You’re #1!’, my staff is still getting ‘em mixed up with Half Dollars down there, and, before you know it, the U.S. government is making a loan payment to the Banque de France with gold that’s got delicious caramel filling leaking out of it.”
In an extended press conference, newly-appointed Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell skewered past leadership of the agency for their repeated failures to substantively distinguish between a humdrum chocolaty treat with a variety of treacly flavorings and a technically distinct albeit understandably visually alike, if we are purely talking in terms of how the exterior looks at a glance here, metallic form of reserve currency.
“On my watch, mint and Mint will never, ever be muddled again,” asserted Powell, “The operation they’ve been running down here has, quite frankly, been embarrassing. Now, merely getting gold Ingot bars jumbled with Crunch bars, that I can understand. But yesterday I saw an employee pack three consecutive vaults with solid dark chocolate Easter bunnies wrapped in gold foil, nestled on the cold tile floor in green plastic Easter grass, and not one – not one of you – batted so much as an eyelash.”
In a moment of exasperation, Powell went on to address confectionery companies directly, exclaiming, “Americans will eat literally anything made out of chocolate, you don’t have to keep putting it into shapes!”