My Tour of the US Treasury Department

Sweet jesus I had never seen so many official documents in one place in my entire life!
"Can I...touch it?" I asked the US Treasury Secretary, as we both eyed a waist-high stack of what appeared to be diplomas of some kind, embellished with a fire-breathing dragon in gorgeously rendered ink.
"Well...all right. Put these gloves on first."
He handed me a pair of white cotton gloves.
I picked up the first document gingerly. The top part below the dragon was in Chinese.
"I.O.U., the People's Republic of China," I read. "Four trillion hindweight in precious metals."
"What is a hindweight?" I asked.
"I'll try to explain it in layman's terms. Say that you have an ass that weighs several tons."
"An ass? Like a donkey?"
"No, like the ass on a bus driver. Now, say that the rest of the bus driver weighs very little, a negligible fraction of his ass, and we put him on a scale, opposite the inventory of Harry Winston's. Well, we'd have to keep piling the counterweight with gold, diamonds, sapphires, rubies and the like, and of course irridium or silver or what have you, in order to balance the bus driver with the precious metals."
"And..."
"Eventually the bus driver and the precious metals will weigh roughly the same amount. I can see you're a little confused."
"Well, there must be a million of these things down here. I thought you printed money in this place."
"We do! We do! We're printing several tons of it right now!"
"Why can't you just...I don't know, give the People's Republic of China that money instead of a lot of precious metals?"
"BECAUSE THE MONEY IS WORTHLESS, it's just fancy paper and engraving!"
"You mean--"
"Oh, you can use it to buy shampoo, or laxative, I don't mean worthless in the sense of absolutely worthless, there's quite a demand for it at Duane Reade and so forth. No, by worthless I mean--"
Just then, something entirely unanticipated occurred.