

He’s a Georgia lawyer named Carlos Mucha.
#Buying us mint coins with credit card professional
Each registered objections, but neither would rule it out.Īs it turns out, Beowulf is not an economist or a professional policy wonk. “Any court challenge is likely to be quickly dismissed.” In 2020, Representative Rashida Tlaib sponsored a plan to mint two coins to fund pandemic aid, and this year both Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell have faced questions about using the coin to end the standoff. “In principle, there is nothing new,” he has said. His response? “Yes, absolutely.” Phillip Diehl, a former director of the Mint and Treasury chief of staff who co-wrote the 1997 law, allowed that a coin with a specific denomination of $1 trillion was “an unintended consequence” but maintained that the possibility was always conceivable. In 2013, Representative Jerry Nadler said that the idea “sounds silly, but it’s absolutely legal.” Shortly after, Paul Krugman asked himself in the New York Times if the president should be willing to mint the coin to avoid default. In the time since, the idea has gained an unexpected acceptance among policymakers and economists. “Ditto the balls of any president who tried this.” “The catch is, it’s gotta be made of platinum,” Beowulf wrote. Ultimately, the coin’s deposit would result in $1 trillion in government revenue or, with a coin of a different denomination, however much was needed to continue to pay its bills and avoid a default. By passing the law, it had given the president the authority to direct the secretary of the Treasury to mint a coin of any value - say, $1 trillion - and deposit it in the Federal Reserve, which would be legally obligated to accept it. (Collectors had complained that even coins available at the time with the smallest face values were still too expensive to afford.) The law started as a way to make collectible coins cheaper, but unlike every other law regulating new coins, this one did not establish a specific face value or limit the number of coins produced. Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer Photos from GettyĪbout a dozen years ago, a pseudonymous commenter on a financial website, writing under the name Beowulf, presented an unusual solution for a debt-ceiling standoff: If the federal government was at risk of default, and Congress couldn’t agree to either cut spending or raise the borrowing limit cleanly, couldn’t it simply mint a trillion-dollar coin?īeowulf had come across a 1997 law that, in response to requests from coin collectors, gave the Treasury the power to mint platinum coins of any denomination. No, Joe Biden didn’t invent the trillion dollar coin.
