To Coin or not to Coin
January 12, 2013 1 Comment
Well, despite the many, many assurances and analyses you’ve read on blogs, it appears they’re not going to mint The Coin after all. I have mixed feelings about this.
On the one hand, it seems to leave the field clear for Split The Difference. I will get credit & accolades for my Solomon-like savvy, certainly a Nobel Prize, possibly the Congressional Medal of Honor. So, I’ve got that to look forward to.
On the other hand, maybe not. After all, will or can this announcement of Treasury’s even stand? I don’t see how it can. Surely, Legal Scholar Matthew Yglesias is preparing the legal briefs as we speak to go before the Supreme Court and detail why, according to his legal expertise, the Treasury is Legally Required to mint a $1 trillion platinum coin under the present circumstances – legally required to do the thing they’ve just announced they’re not going to do. That’s breaking the law!, surely Yglesias will remind us all. So anti-Coin celebration seems premature, and stay tuned.
I’m strongly in favor of minting the coin. It’s the option that announces the nakedness of the emperor to the entire world in plain language.
The Fed and Treasury bureaucrats are strongly against the idea because it formalizes the idea that they are buffoons of historically-ill repute.
Their mistake is that they are escaping history’s judgement by failing to formalize the current inflationary spending policies.