Skip to content

A Trillion Dollar Coin?

Sat, 5 Jan 2013, 05:39 PM (-06:00) Creative Commons License

Are you kidding me? A one trillion dollar platinum coin? There are pundits seriously talking this thru!?

At least I’m not the only one shaking his head:

The fancy of a $1 trillion platinum coin is so tantalising in part because it puts a monetary option in play. The larger attraction, though, is that it does so in a way that honours democracy by sticking to the letter of democratic legislation, yet also flirts with the heady unilateral decisiveness of fascism. This is, I’m afraid, a combination powerfully intoxicating to the pundit id. We’d be better served, however, if the commentariat would rein in its id, stop its idle chatter about exotic, coin-based, presidential monetary policy, and begin seriously to consider the more probable but less glittering eventuality of a Greek-style default. [emph. added]

The Economist/Democracy In America blog/The Platinum Distraction.

© jumpingfish by David Hasan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License