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In Brief: It's a Debt Trap (with Justin Wolfers)

Stay Tuned with Preet

CHAPTER

Is It Legal to Mint a Twelfth of a Dollar?

Some people have suggested that all Janet Yellen has to do is mint a platinum coin whose value would be a trillion or more dollars and that would solve the problem. Congress has said it's up to us when you do or don't borrow, but it's previously said it'sup to the Treasury to mint coins. So this idea was like, well, why don't we just mint a trillion dollars and use that to pay our debt? And so it's an end run. Would it solve the problem of getting this idiotic law out of the way and prevent Congress from arbitrarily on some weird date defaulting on the debt? Yes. Will it necessarily work? There's some risk around

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