http://agonist.org/rip-trillion-dollar-coin/
RIP Trillion Dollar Coin
The Treasury Department will not mint a trillion-dollar platinum coin to get around the debt ceiling. If they did, the Federal Reserve would not accept it.So long, and thanks for all the fish.
That’s the bottom line of the statement that Anthony Coley, a spokesman for the Treasury Department, gave me today. ”Neither the Treasury Department nor the Federal Reserve believes that the law can or should be used to facilitate the production of platinum coins for the purpose of avoiding an increase in the debt limit,” he said.
A very short time later:
A moment of silence for Krugman’s answer to
The Treasury Department will not mint a trillion-dollar platinum coin to get around the debt ceiling. If they did, the Federal Reserve would not accept it.So long, and thanks for all the fish.
That’s the bottom line of the statement that Anthony Coley, a spokesman for the Treasury Department, gave me today. ”Neither the Treasury Department nor the Federal Reserve believes that the law can or should be used to facilitate the production of platinum coins for the purpose of avoiding an increase in the debt limit,” he said.
(h/t)
Update (by SH): More Krugman.
If I’d spent the past five years living in a monastery or something, I would take the Treasury Department’s declaration that the coin option is out as a sign that there’s some other plan ready to go. Maybe 14th Amendment, maybe moral obligation coupons or some other form of scrip, something.Meanwhile I’m seeing tweets like this from Dem stalwarts:
And maybe there is a plan.
But as we all know, the last debt ceiling confrontation crept up on the White House because Obama refused to believe that Republicans would actually threaten to provoke default. Is the WH being realistic this time, or does it still rely on the sanity of crazies?
…As I said, if we didn’t have some history here I might be confident that the administration knows what it’s doing. But we do have that history, and you have to fear the worst.
That’s how it should be. RT @theplumlinegs: Nixing of coin presents GOP with stark choice: Compromise, or be seen destroying US economy.
— Kevin Drum (@kdrum) January 12, 2013
Which rather smacks of Democrats playing their own game of chicken with the national economy for their own political gain, to me. In fact, it sounds very like the Dem plan, from people who all earn more than the national average, is something along the lines of “The Republicans will blink first but even if they don’t and the economy tanks all the poor people who will get even poorer will blame them and vote for us, so where’s the downside?”
This is an Austin, Texas site.
It looks to me like there should be a personnel change at Treasury.
Treasury does not have opinions.The Krugman:
So What Will You Do, Mr. President?
And maybe there is a plan.
But as we all know, the last debt ceiling confrontation crept up on the White House because Obama refused to believe that Republicans would actually threaten to provoke default. Is the WH being realistic this time, or does it still rely on the sanity of crazies?
The thing is, the coin option sounds silly, but it clearly obeys the letter of the law. As far as I can tell, none of the other options — other than outright surrender — has the same virtue. Failing to pay debt service would be a breach of contract. Paying contractors, and maybe Social Security recipients, in scrip would violate the law, which says that they should be paid — not given IOUs. Deciding that the president has the right to ignore the debt limit after all would avoid these legal breaches at the expense of another breach.
And default in any of these senses would risk a huge collapse of confidence.
So is there a plan, or will it just be another case of tough talk followed by a tail-between-the-legs retreat?
As I said, if we didn’t have some history here I might be confident that the administration knows what it’s doing. But we do have that history, and you have to fear the worst."
Here is the column in the Washington Post:
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Treasury: We won’t mint a platinum coin to sidestep the debt ceiling
That’s the bottom line of the statement that Anthony Coley, a spokesman for the Treasury Department, gave me today. “Neither the Treasury Department nor the Federal Reserve believes that the law can or should be used to facilitate the production of platinum coins for the purpose of avoiding an increase in the debt limit,” he said.
An Australian $1 coin stands on a U.S. $1 note. (Tim Wimborne – Reuters)
The idea of minting a platinum coin to invalidate the debt ceiling comes from a few key sentences tacked onto the 1997 Omnibus Consolidated Appropriations Act. “Notwithstanding any other provision of law,” it reads, “the Secretary of the Treasury may mint and issue platinum coins in such quantity and of such variety as the Secretary determines to be appropriate.”
The author of those sentences was Mike Castle, a Republican congressman from Delaware. The intent was to help coin collectors who wanted the Treasury Department to mint cheaper platinum coins. “People couldn’t afford the $600 investment, so they wanted the flexibility to put in smaller coinage so that people could collect them,” Castle told Wonkblog this month. But in giving the Treasury Department the flexibility to mint platinum coins of little value, Castle accidentally gave them the flexibility to mint platinum coins of unlimited value. “That was never the intent of anything that I drafted or that anyone who worked with me drafted,” Castle continued.
The platinum coin idea gained some powerful adherents during the debt-ceiling crisis of 2011, but it really developed traction following the 2012 fiscal cliff deal, as politicians and economics writers realized that the country would, indeed, be facing another debt-ceiling crisis in a matter of months. A Twitter campaign by Joe Weisenthal, of Business Insider, and Josh Barro, of Bloomberg View, forced it into the conversation, and subsequent endorsements by Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman and former U.S. Mint director Philip Diehl gave it further legitimacy.
But others, including myself, worried that the coin would be seen as an unprecedented power grab by the president, leading to a far more bitter standoff over the debt ceiling, a possible panic in the financial markets and a showdown in the courts. There was also the simple fact that it would, indeed, represent an admission that the government’s executive and legislative branches could no longer be trusted to come together and effectively manage the country’s finances.
Nevertheless, many top Democrats believed that the White House needed some kind of fallback option. Former president Bill Clinton said that if he were in office, he would invoke the 14th Amendment to call the debt ceiling unconstitutional “without hesitation, and force the courts to stop me.”
On Friday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and his leadership team sent President Obama a letter urging him to “to take any lawful steps to ensure that America does not break its promises and trigger a global crisis — without congressional approval, if necessary.”
In response, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell released a statement saying that to avoid the debt ceiling, “Democrats are looking at everything from the ridiculous (printing a trillion-dollar coin) to outright abdication of Congressional responsibility. But avoiding this problem will only make it worse.”
The White House seems to agree. This is, in fact, the second time that the Obama administration has ruled out a possible end run on the debt ceiling. In December, Press Secretary Jay Carney said, “This administration does not believe the 14th Amendment gives the president the power to ignore the debt ceiling — period.”
The administration’s position is that raising the debt limit is Congress’s responsibility until the day that Congress votes to make it the White House’s responsibility, which is a resolution the Obama administration would happily accept. Until then, White House officials say, they will not negotiate over the debt ceiling, and if congressional Republicans attempt to use it as leverage, then the consequences will be theirs to bear."
The GOP can have intent or it can have literal, not both.
The President has not spoken.
The language of the law is plain.I agree that cell phones and their contracts are overpriced.
I will get the best deal I can find.
My cell number has not changed. I do not always carry my phone.
Age signs come with age.
I find they make little difference to me.
Please yourself.
I am wearing an inch + of facial hair. It can stay or go at your whim.
You have fought the fat battle for decades.
Follow the truckers habit, stand up hungry.
There is much less tendency to sleep unpredictably.
I am carrying no debt. I have nothing to refinance
Refinancing is probably a good way to restructure a debt if one is very careful of the terms of the contract.
There is no one I want to notify that I cannot reach with an email.
Most can be told after the fact.
Sooner is better. As soon as you can is best.
It took most of the day to figure out how XP was broken.
.
