The government has become so good at bluffing that most people feel compelled to watch how the biggest players in the game react to determine their own investment strategy.

A week into the government shutdown, Jeffrey Currie, head of commodities research at Goldman Sachs, declared that gold would be a “slam dunk sell” if Washington resolved the budget debate and raised the debt ceiling. The call was based on an underlying narrative that the US economy is experiencing a slow, but inevitable, recovery.

Taking this recovery as a foregone conclusion, conventional Wall Street analysts saw two clear choices for Washington. On the one hand, Congress could reach an agreement, raise the debt ceiling, and allow the recovery to continue. This would allegedly have been the final nail in the coffin of the safe-haven appeal of gold.