The Trillion-Dollar Question: Could a Coin Save the Day?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> The trillion-dollar-coin concept first emerged in 2010 before the first big Obama-era debt ceiling fight. A musing in the comments of a popular blog on economics and finance about the viability of minting such a coin to create money out of thin air and avoid default spurred a debate about creative ways to avoid an economic catastrophe.
Right! Unlike the money that the Fed creates from their vast storehouse of mysterious if undoubtedly far less ephemeral stuff!
;)
(Except that, being paper, it would scream that it is just a quick-fix solution to the problem. There is no way a coin, even if made of a rare metal like radium, could ever be worth a trillion dollars.)
Once the country's financial situation is stuffed, it is stuffed. Period. And all the hand-waving in the world will never fix that.
It has nothing to do with the value of the metal. All coins are worth more than their metal content. It's about complying with the letter of the law rather than anything specific to coins. It's a letter-of-the-law fix to a letter-of-the-law problem, where Congress won't authorize the government to spend the money that it allocated in its budget.
That does not appear to be the case:
Penny Costs 2.1 Cents to Make in 2021, Nickel Costs 8.52 Cents https://www.coinnews.net/2022/01/18/penny-costs-2-1-cents-to...
Pennies and nickels cost more to make than they're worth https://money.cnn.com/2016/01/11/news/economy/u-s-coins/
Plus, the belligerent nihilist faction in Congress would be really pissed off over you ruining their high-drama sh*t-show.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. But the make belief fairy "lalala I can't hear you" faction in Congress would be really pissed off if somebody made them understand this obvious truth.
PS: Not mobile friendly, I'm sorry :(