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Art Cashin On The Trillion Dollar Coin Alchemy
It would appear that even the venerable Art Cashin had to rub his eyes in incredulity at the recircling of the idea of the Treasury minting a "Trillion Dollar Platinum Coin" to solve the debt-ceiling 'problem'. His brief discussion on the idea is summed up perfectly in his final six words "anybody got an ebook on alchemy?"
Via Art Cashin: The Mayans Weren't The Only Ones With Strange Ideas
With a debt ceiling battle about to resume, a rather bizarre idea from last year's debate has resurfaced. It appeared on a couple of blogs and concerned the minting of a "trillion dollar platinum coin". Under section K of Federal law, the Treasury Secretary appears to have carte blanche on the design and issuance of platinum coins.
The Treasury normally writes checks against the taxes it collects. When the tax receipts run out, they borrow money (bonds) to write checks against. That borrowing can run up into the debt ceiling, resulting in the looming confrontation.
The thesis claims that Geithner should authorize the coin, deposit it at the New York Fed and write checks against it, rather than selling more bonds.
Anybody got an eBook on alchemy?
Only those who have no clue about the money creation process in a fractional reserve economy could be vacuous enough to suggest that an idiotic "fix" such as this has any hope of working. All the proposal does, in effect, is suggest a devaluation of the currency relative to an absolute precious metal asset, which in itself is nothing new, and most recently was conducted, with great "success" by FDR in the 1930s.
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if one had a trillion dollar coin why on earth would you give it to the criminal fed?
Because "Treasury" is to "Fed" as "Bonnie" is to "Clyde".
Uhhhhhh, it's six words Tyler...........did you go out with Art last night and have as many as he did at the fermentation committee meeting?????
Seigniorage raised to the absurd.
Indeed -- I'll wager that these desperadoes try it.
for friday humor - here is an ebook on alchemy http://www.thebookofaquarius.com/
it suggests peeing into a jar, and roasting it slowly for several years, and then you get powder which you can eat to stay young forever, or you can create GOLD with it
i shit you not
and ppl think ZHers are crazy
Now hold on just a minute!
Doesn’t every dollar created out of thin air by the FED add to the debt and has to be paid back?
Now treasury on the other hand, can mint coin with whatever face value and have no debt!
So let me think,,,,,,,,,,,,,, OK I got it! That’s the way it’s supposed to be by the constitution!
The FUCKING BANKS will never let that happen!
well said.
Thanks,
1913-2013 isn’t that 101 years? The FED charter should be expired, BUT NO they don’t play by the rules!
Fucking banks!
The fed doesn't have a charter. That is a myth. The only way the fed can be disolved is by an act of congress, or by breaking the law (of course the bankers make thw laws but that's another story). :
Sec. 4 ... the said Federal reserve bank shall become a body corporate and as such ... shall have power: ... Second. To have succession for a period of twenty years from its organization unless it is sooner dissolved by an Act of Congress, or unless its franchise becomes forfeited by some violation of law. Federal Reserve Act of 1913 (P.L. 63-43, 38 STAT. 251, 12 USC 221).
However, this 20-year corporate life was changed to perpetual in 1927 by Act of Feb. 25, 1927 (44 Stat. 1234) as follows:
Second. To have succession after February 25, 1927, until dissolved by Act of Congress or until forfeiture of franchise for violation of law.
This is codified in the United States Code, 12 U.S.C. § 341. See
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/ht...1----000-.html
If they mint the $Trillion coin, who's picture should be on it? Obama? Keynes? Krugman? Bernanke?
How about honoring Gideon Gono - Zimbabwe's master of Trillions - hell... they put out 10, 20, 50 and 100 Trillion dollar banknotes.... (AFTER lopping a few zeros off in the previous two issuances of currency).
What if,,, creating gold has been achieved already and they are flooding the world with gold coins?
What then? Uranium
I say wild buffalo is the answer. Ted Turner has been ahead of the herd. Pun intended
That would mean the moneythey are debasing would actually mean something as a claim on labor and materials. With no other way to let off steam, every member of the Fed would be executed.
"What if,,, creating gold has been achieved already and they are flooding the world with gold coins?"
Those bastards might have hidden a supernova in the basement of the Fed. Feed it paper and BOOM.....gold.
The beauty of this is that it's Federal Debt. That means it doesn't have to ever be repaid. And if you don't like it, there's a Federally Funded drone headed for your wedding party.
I'm not sure I get the point of this. When the Treasury creates a coin or a bill, that currency is a liability on the Fed's balance sheet and an obligation of the United States. How can checks be cut against a liability? The Fed can't pay government expenses, so how does this allow for the Treasury to cut checks against the coin?
OK let’s pretend that the FED never existed like pre 1913.
Do you get it now?
My mistake, a coin is a liability at the Treasury. The reasoning goes that Timmay could mint a $1 trillion dollar coin and deposit it at the Fed. The Fed would hold the coin as an asset and credit the Treasury $1 trillion. (liability) Then the Treasury would use their credit with the Fed to buy back $1 trillion worth of bonds, thus retiring $1 trillion of its debt.
...so the Treasury would be purchasing and retiring $1 trillion worth of bonds with credit backed by a coin with a metal content that's worth a couple thousand dollars. What could go wrong?
well at least there's SOME inherent tangible value to a platinum coin..... paper money and T-Bills aren't even good as toilet paper.
" retiring $1 trillion worth of bonds with credit backed by a coin with a metal content that's worth a couple thousand dollars. What could go wrong?"
Or the dollar is simply devalued so that one ounce of platnium equals $1T USD. The price of Oil will be a mere $58 Billion USD per barrel. Problem solved!
Close.
The Treasury mints a coin which the Fed overpays for, and credits the Treasury for $1 trillion. The coin shows up as an asset on the Fed's balance sheet, and the Treasury's deposit at the Fed is a Fed liability. The Treasury now has $1 trillion to spend without having to increase the debt by issuing more bonds.
The original idea was to buy back and retire debt, thus keeping the Treasury under the debt limit so it could continue to pay expenses.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/07/scott-fullwiller-qe3-treasury-sty...
You say that, but over in Beijing the cops busted into a wedding that my mother in law was attending just a couple weeks ago. The pastor was from one of the non-state-approved religions (which is most of them), and while permitted to carry on the wedding the cops were basically waiting for him to say something so they could have grounds for arrest.
So the police busting weddings held by their own people has happened elsewhere, and over here we do it to foreigners, so it really could happen here one day. What you said is NO JOKE to me.
No, every Treasury bond or bill issued by the gov't adds to the debt. When the Fed creates $ out of nothing to buy Treasuries, those bonds are effectively retired until such time as the purchase is reversed, if ever.
if you think printing 20 of these, deposited by the Treasury to the Fed, will solve our problems, you really haven't been paying attention
Timmah is just trying to get a step ahead of the Zimbabwe coinage face value problem. At the rate we're going, exactly how long before a 1 ounce Trillion Dollar platinum coin is really worth a trillion US$?
Or maybe more like the $50. face value of the 1 oz American Eagle gold coin which is now worth 33 times face value.
'The FUCKING BANKS will never let that happen!
So if I mint a $1 trillion dollar coin, deposit it at the Fed . . . won't they fractionally reserve that sucker into oblivion? How much debt money would that support? A quadrillion? A sextillion? Do we have to make gazillion a real word? I think any 'modern bank' would be behind that.
'Free gamblin' money, Mortimer! TURN THOSE MACHINES BACK ON! TURN THOSE MACHINES BACK ON!'
"All the proposal does, in effect, is suggest a devaluation of the currency relative to an absolute precious metal asset."
Not really. The nominal value of the coin is that declared by the power-that-be Treasury provision and not that of metal price itself. It's somewhat similar to saying that $100 banknote automatically promotes the value of paper it's printed on. Only that specific platinum coin would be worth of the nominal value; platinum plate, dust or investment bars are different things. Or, is there any provision preventing the Treasury from minting coins with nominal value exceeding the market price of the metal? If not, the coin can be made much as well of copper or aluminium :-)) And yes, the Treasury normally writes checks against the taxes, but I think it still can issue coins at its own discretion, can't it?
And yes, it's an idiotic fix... but a shocking one. It would certainly deserve a bit more explanation on possible consequences.
Indeed! They could've just minted a trillion dollar coin of silver.
I wonder if they had just said "we'll just mint 64,000,0000,000,000 quarters, and deposit them, and we will have no debt at all!" if it would have been taken seriously.
The number of quarters you're mentioning would consume 3,628,800,000 metric tons of metal. Any metal chosen for the mintage would immediately fall in the PM group.
Joe Wiesenthal endorsed the damned coin. I don't think I have EVER agreed with his analyses.
Why use platinum? Why not something less expensive like aluminum, or, ....plastic?
"Under section K of Federal law, the Treasury Secretary appears to have carte blanche on the design and issuance of platinum coins."
Forget about platinum standard:
~~~
- We couldn't maintain a gold standard
- We couldn't maintain a silver standard
- We can't maintain a copper standard
- We're having trouble even maintaning a zinc standard
- But 'paper'... oh yeah, we're good at that... The old saying is TRUE... Money REALLY DOES grow on trees... [as long as they're 'kosher' trees ~ for the rest of you, there's Mastercard]...
what about an unobtainium standard??
Yeah, it's past the unicorn ranch next to the Federal Bank omsbudsman. Flew by yesterday with my jet pack and pet Jackalope.
'- We're having trouble even maintaning a zinc standard
- But 'paper'... oh yeah, we're good at that...'
Um, give it time. Even paper becomes 'expensive' if you devalue enough. Ask Zimbabwe. Eventually everyone will have to use 'cloud coins' from an Apple iAccount because we can't afford anything else.
Bingo....until electricity gets to expensive/oil runs out/coal runs out to keep the coins in a large 650 watt powered alumium/steel hybrid box made of gold, silver, platnium and pressed silica.
It all looks good on paper until it doesn't.
Actually we can't even maintain a paper standard. That's why they only print a couple percent of outstanding money into currency. The rest are digital 0's and 1's.
But even beyond that there's roughly 1.4 quadrillion in derivatives, which of course, are 0's and 1's and completely worthless. But while the scam is still running we are supposed to pretend that it isn't. So add all that up and the couple of percent of money is paper becomes a few hundredths, maybe thousandths of a percent is paper.
So no, we don't do a paper standard good either. We have 0's and 1's in a computer, and the banksters decide what worthless crap is worth.
"Under section K of Federal law, the Treasury Secretary appears to have carte blanche on the design and issuance of platinum coins."
Up to and including making them out of paper?
If he did indeed make them out of platinum, he could order them to be engraved "One Trillion (that's with a T) Fucking Dollerz, BITCHEZ!!" and "Kiss the debt goodbye". He'd only have to make 17 of them. (Today.)
Then again, what does "fiat" (as in fiat currency) stand for? That's right - fix it again tomorrow. In which case currency fixing is like fixing your cat. But the cat only needs to be fixed once. Currency fixing, that's a lifetime's occupation.
Somehow ~ they'll scramble up the idea of 'PLATINUM' credit cards, with this idea... The coin will end up being PLASTIC & come with a 29.99% interest rate [+ late charges]...
I am not an expert but wouldn't this actually fix everything ?! It would simply repudiate the debt "legally"
That's all I'm asking for. 17 little TRILLION DOLLAR platinum coins can do a hard reboot to the economy.
Go ahead, do it.
I DOUBLE DOG DARE YOU.
'I DOUBLE DOG DARE YOU.'
I TRIPLE DOG DARE YA, TIMES A TRILLION!
it's a form of inflation of the money base. doesn't hurt anybody. keep repeating it
oh, and keep it secret from all foreign holders of dollars
I am not an expert but wouldn't this actually fix everything ?! It would simply repudiate the debt "legally"
Yes it would BUT,only if it was paid to the Fed, and Congress took over the job over our valutation of money.
This would KILL the Fed,and pay them off, and be done with them.The the Treasury would print/coin what Congress allowed.
Afterall all this debt is just making them(FED)incredibly wealthy.
'Why use platinum? Why not something less expensive like aluminum, or, ....plastic?'
How about using a steaming pile of dog shit?
Addiction is the whole reason City-Statism (Civilization) began.
How Beer Created Civilization
http://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2010/11/09/how-beer-created-c...
Know how drunks piss their pants? Just like they piss on the earth's once clean air and clean water?
Civilization (City-Statism) is ADDICTION CULTURE
Piss is underrated... Pee all over your tomato garden all winter long & have a great tomato crop next year... [fuck Monsanto]...
As a recovering addict, blaming something like your environment proves the mental illness from within. Life is tough. Man up and get a helmet and TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR FUCKING ACTIONS. Quit acting like a bitchass blaming others for your personal issues.
FUCK and i sold my only plat coin. plat too da moon.
I think you meant "micro-biology" not addiction. Beer means your liquid is clean of nasty beasties, as the yeast / heating has removed them all. Which is why Russians don't consider (or didn't until recently) anything under 4%ish actually alcoholic.
Not getting the flux = the reason beer (fermentation) is so important. This is not a new insight either.
Lead a horse to water; doesn't mean it doesn't prefer a decent pint.
Concentration of wealth is a primary characteristic of Civilization (City-Statism) observed by anthropologists and archeologists the world-over since City-Statism (Civilization) began it's brutal rule 8,000 years ago.
Problem?
"...the continuous consolidation of money and power into higher, tighter and righter hands." ~George H.W. Bush
If you're a serious Primitivist, I'll go a few rounds with you as a sympathetic mind. I'll still trounce you, but I'll be more gentle than most around here.
My first salvo - please tell me you're not unaware of Çatalhöyük [Communist biased source]? Or the idea that the first city-states were fairly egalitarian? You can find the wiki here if you need to brush up on it.
I think I've met this guy somewhere, he seems familiar http://www.businessinsider.com/daniel-suelos-currency-free-lifestyle-2012-4
it has nothing to do with "City-Statism" or "stateless societies", wrong categories
it has everything to do with allowing or not private individuals to accumulate capital (yes capitalism)
most stateless societies are primitive-communistic, but for example (since you don't provide any) big-boat fishing stateless societies from Norway to the Pacific typically had this custom of the captain-owner being entitled to half of the income - be it from fishing or piracy - and the other half for the working crew
and this leads usually to the "normal" Pareto Wealth distribution (which is a power law curve) - particularly if the captain's wife & family stores/trades the gathered resources, as it was usual
the consolidation of money and power in a few American hands has nothing to do with it, btw, this is a Pareto Effect of Globalization
like goldfishes, wealth grows in this Power Law curve according to the pond's size - but some don't swim in local waters, they swim in global waters - stupid examples: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs
Try to sell communism instead of capitalism to the ZH crowd outright, I'm already laughing
Isn't the Fed a good example of Privation Enterprise?
Privation and Private mean the same thing etymologically.
Deprivation - Private - privation - privilege - privity - privy
The University of Hull
http://slb-ltsu.hull.ac.uk/awe/index.php?title=Deprivation_-_Private_-_p...
just by touching a trillion dollar coin would wipe off at least 100.000$ worth of atoms!
Because a trillion dollars and two quarters don't add up to a cup of coffee?
wonder what kind of bubble gum you could buy with this coin??
Yeah, where do you spend a trillion dollar coin? "Hey brother, got change for a Bernanke?"
Too late Art. I wrote about this WaPo idiocy a while ago.
http://confoundedinterest.wordpress.com/2012/12/09/strange-days-print-tw...
Maybe Art read it, and decided to provide his 'value added' version?
Or maybe it wasn't officially sanctioned/vetted by the WSJ? I heard that sometimes "it's not what you know, but who you know".
I just came back and noticed all the Down arrows on Snakeeyes, who seems to have published it first. Any particular reason to "dis" the author who claims plagiarism, that one of the 'Downers' would care to explain? Or is it just stealth-mobbing? Just saying.
One up for the fermentation committee
"His brief discussion on the idea is summed up perfectly in his final five words "anybody got an ebook on alchemy?"
The funny (troubling?) thing is that Art is so thoroughly conditioned within the money meme that he thinks that what he deals with on a daily basis, money, is 'real'. And that any other way other than the 'established' way to 'create' money is alchemy.
The entire money meme IS alchemy.
Actually, that is 6 words, not 5.
Tyler Rehypothicated one.
See? Inflation is already at work.
Yep.
How is this more/less legitimate than allowing congress to saddle millions with debts they didn't agree to?
My new bumper sticker. (actually I could not afford the sticker so I wrote it in the dust of my cars rear window)
Google Odious Debt
Done (2 years ago)
http://acrossthestreetnet.wordpress.com/2011/01/26/new-vocabulary-phrase...
Sadly it is inherited debt, something our young adult children are learning about right now.
Nice to see you haunting the threads Mark. :)
"The funny (troubling?) thing is that Art is so thoroughly conditioned within the money meme that he thinks that what he deals with on a daily basis, money, is 'real'."
The idea that this entire "economy" which has been built on this fake money is been real or sustainable for the past 10-30 years is also questionable. When I hear people talk about getting this economy "back" I always wonder back to what? It's been a distorted scam for years now and we have no clue what a real economy would look like at this point.
"It's been a distorted scam for years now and we have no clue what a real economy would look like at this point."
Agreed.
False hope chains us to impossible conditions and "getting back on track economy wise" is a false hope and has been for decades. But broken doesn't mean it can't or won't lurch and careen down the road for many more years until finally it is abandoned in a ditch on the side of the now crumbling road.
The real economy?
"The story of Hasan bin Sabbah is a tale of sex, drugs, myth, and murder. A secluded mountain fortress, a paradisial garden, poison dipped daggers, and covert political maneuverings are the ingredients of this alchemical mixture, which is undoubtedly one of the most intriguing true stories ever told."
Now being channeled by a bearded lookalike who regards 'money' as 'tradition' and paper as wealth.Sex, drugs, myth and murder. The Real Economy.
Welcome to Amerika, where everything old is new again. Tradition like.
Alchemy explained
it's all about"transmogrifing" lead to gold (or gold to lead, or gold to gold) in six fairly easy steps
1: gather gold
2: use it to back paper
3: use paper to finance war (that's the gold to lead part)
4: win war
5: profit from war (that's the lead to gold part)
6: keep the gold (that's the gold to gold part)
The last refuge of scoundrels...how pathetic.
It's a great idea actually as long as you outlaw fractional reserve banking and the federal reserve at the same time.
How about we deposit the Stuxnet virus we developed for Iran in a FED computer?
pods
Too funny. Be careful what you wish for my friend.
Actually you want the computers to remain operational after the fall of the Fed. You just want to disable the 'fractional' portion of the programming. However, we do need some actual "reserves" in our lives.
Oh.....and destroy the <Print> button (algo) as well.
There is nothing going on over there that couldn't be solved via the liberal application a sufficient quantity of gun powder.
Remember remember the 5th of November ...
Perhaps, if Mr Cashin had bothered to read some Jung, he would realise that alchemy is but a metaphorical system for transforming the self............................. another option for Obama falls by the wayside.
(no, not really)
Mrs. Cog informs me that Jung actually used the term "poo". After all, he was a gentleman. :)
A huge US dollar devaluation on it's way.
The Chinese will be most displeased.
Timmy better mint at least two coins; he will need to send the Chinese one as a consolation.
how about a trillion dollar silver coin, I mean with all the above ground silver that they say we have we would be out of debt plus have a surplus! sarc on or off you make the call.
The federal government would have to hire a crane company to move that silver coin.....the moving cost would put them over the debt limit.......
Does intrade have odds on when the deputy editor of Business Insider will be replaced or sent to rehab?
he should be sent back to Israel
The Hopium folks at Business Insider actually believe this coin would solve the problem.
Wizards I tell ya, nothing but wizards over there.
When the future is hopeless, the weaker-minded turn to magical solutions.
Personally I favor magic beanstalks over magic coins. More green, ya know.
hey Tyler -heard anything about Wegelin- Switzerland's oldest private bank closing beacause of all the heat from the US to cough up names? the old USofA is getting desperate and they are forcing people into the US's shitty banking system. capital controls are next-"THIS MACHINE IS CURRENTLY UNABLE TO DISPENSE MONEY"
Sh*t yes, its gone...!!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financial-crime/9779615/Switzerlands-...
Bad news for Switzerland as all the others were probably following the same business model.
Thanks FATCA.
Depardieu won't be the last to head to Russia...
there's always been something cooly sinister about discrete swiss private banks. but thanks to Uncle Sam-that's all been fucked up also.
Agreed, but with all the AML and KYC crap that banks are being shackled with these days, you had to wonder how much longer they could keep their distance.
Spain has been after its rich expats too: offered a one-off single payment to HNW individuals if they brought their cash back onshore. Once they are back in the system, I can only imagine its open season though...
I'm interested to see if we ever get to know who these people are, ie: if its well-known's off the Forbes Rich List or if its criminals and other shady types... if its the latter, I can't say I'm too sorry for them.
What I don't get is this: It appears that Wegelin's operations were entirely outside the jurisdiction of US law. So why did they cave? Did they somehow violate Swiss banking laws? Or did someone "get to" Wegelin's executives?
Anything to make a buck!
Just mint a few million of those and hand them to democrat voters!
That will have to be one big ass platinum coin..It might be a little cumbersome to carry around in your pocket.
Does it have to be a coin? Can't they create a 1 trillion dollar bill to keep the whole faith in paper thing going?
happy zh birthday fonz.....one year old!!!!!!
Thanks Kito. Funny thing is my name used to be fonzanooon. I got booted off here a little over a year ago and had to add a "N" to my name to get back on.
Really you got booted? You rebel you....it must have been bad to get the boot back then.
The funny thing is I did not think it was that bad. But yes I got booted. I will admit I went into sheer panic. It was being forced to go cold turkey. I would not have handled it well.
LOL....I know what you mean. Those nights when I am too busy to read what's going on at the Hedge I find myself in a cold sweat.
Thats funny...i also got booted, but rather than start a new account, I sucked it up, promised to behave, and then demanded my account be reactivated..........
Wow! What did you do that got you booted? I've seen some pretty strange stuff that didn't get a person booted.
Why Stop at 1 Trillion?
Just mint a few Gazillion coins and spread them around.
I say mint 5 'Gazillion' coins....place them in chocolate bars, the five winners are then entitled to a visit to uncle barry's crazy factory @ 1600 Pennsylvania St.
A Gazillion dollars? Now you're talking real money.
Why even bother to mint it, just claim it exists, or just let the FED write checks without any backing, same thing.
Let the MMT true believers get their skulls trepanned.
After removal, those little discs of skull make nifty 'ivory' bone coins ... while the hole in your head serves as a third eye.
Ommmmm ...
Nay, nay, I say. Many among us need the level of belief that only something as absurd as a platinum coin worth a trillion dollars can achieve.
It's all about show biz. Add a little glitter, a little glitz, some razmatazz and a few lovingly told lies. Voila, a real trillion dollar coin that's really, truly worth a trillion dollars. If it wasn't it wouldn't be made of platinum now would it?
Allegedly, there's only about 15 years of Platinum left, so they'd better not waste it.
Why does it need to be platinum?
Why can't it be recycled plastic? or just cut a piece of a coke can and stamp 1 trillion on it.
Or print the bills one side only to save ink.
Urk, you caught me mid edit; 42 years is if global consumption / capita equalled US consumption / capita, and 160 years is if no new uses are found, and consumption remains totally static.
That figure is if fuel cells take off: Armin Reller, a materials chemist at the University of Augsburg in Germany, and his colleagues are among the few groups who have been investigating the problem. He estimates that we have, at best, 10 years before we run out of indium. Its impending scarcity could already be reflected in its price: in January 2003 the metal sold for around $60 per kilogram; by August 2006 the price had shot up to over $1000 per kilogram [source]; I refer you to:
In a review of world platinum deposits Råde (28) found 66.5 Gg of identified platinum resources. Our independent assessment has yielded 97.1 Gg of platinum-group metals as the total resource of which 67.3 Gg containing 37 Gg of platinum remains unmined. Råde reported 90% recovery in mining and 88% efficiency in milling and smelting, which indicates that a total of 29 Gg of platinum-group metals is available for future use. Platinum is prized as a jewelry metal, but it is also a superb catalyst. It is widely used in automobile exhaust systems (1–5 g per vehicle) and in a variety of industrial applications. Suppose that the 500 million vehicles estimated to be in use worldwide in 2000 were converted to fuel cell operation operating on pure hydrogen (i.e., no reforming of fuel needed), that the platinum requirement was 0.4 g?kW, that the average vehicle power was 75 kW, that the fuel cell life was 10 years with a 90% recycling rate, and that recycling achieved 50% recovery of the platinum content. The platinum stock-in-use for these vehicles would be 15 Gg. Maintaining this stock would require a flow of new metalinto use of ?1 Gg per year. If all of the remaining lithospheric stock of platinum were devoted to operating a fleet of 500 million vehicles with fuel cells, the platinum resource in the lithospherewould sustain this fleet for ~15 years. There would be competition for this platinum for use in jewelry, stationary power fuel cells, industrial catalysts, and catalytic converters for motor vehicles still using petroleum fuel.
"Metal Stocks and Sustainability" R.B Gordon, M Bertram and T.E. Graedel. [Warning: PDF]
Because that's the law. They're only allowed to make an unlimited denomination with platinum coins.
A stupid law, but even stupid laws are laws.
Your claim doesn't jive with the figure...
FWIW, R/P projections are disingenuous at best....
See the post above where I amended the claim, I got ninja-responded to as I was typing an amendment [with no pork attached].
Also note that my source is from 2005.
Sounds BARBARIC!
It is just the same as printing our way out any other way--Which we are going to do. I am not against the reality this is what we are going to end up doing anyway. I am just against wasting platinum.
Now THAT is awesome. You should publish that in a newspaper, if there was such a thing any more.
The eagle has big balls!
too much Freemason imagery first thing in the morning
Love the old style "S's", nice touch.
I thought this story was a joke, can't believe it was even floated; "Fiat Fornicatio" indeed!
Sounds crazy now, but give yourself a year or two to warm up to it.
Remember how crazy QE1 sounded when you first heard it (then just called 'QE' because we didn't know there were going to be 15 more itterations)? One government entity buying the debt of another government entity? That's crazy! That would mean they're just monetizing the debt!
Yeah, give it time. Give it time. You'll get used to it, just like you're supposed to.
Bring back the $500 bills. That's a start.
They're coming. I personally look forward to my first trillion dollar FRN.
The trillion dollars isn't important; it's the piping hot cup of coffee it will buy.
Hey Orly old paper boy, you out there? If so, please educate me on how this would factor into your 4X trading strategy. Us metal mowrons eeegerly await your wisdom.
"All the proposal does, in effect, is suggest a devaluation of the currency relative to an absolute precious metal asset,"
Before I finished the article, I was actually going to say (though, somewhat cynically): "Ok, so take $1T and divide it by the weight of platinum in the coin, and you now have the new higher price per unit weight of platinum."
Or you have a $1T coin the size of Rhode Island
Yeah but you can't eat Rhode Island.
Didn't Mothra try?
Maybe it was a different place. It was a long time back.
What is the big deal? Creating a trillion dollar coin is the same thing as creating all of the electronic money that they're already constantly creating. All this would offer is a loophole around the "debt ceiling" to go into the already agreed upon amount of debt.
Platinum is shiny. It's all about how things look.
"devaluation of the currency relative to an absolute precious metal asset"
Actually, this is the function of gold. But the main point of the debate is that the Treasury can assign any value to any material; it could be wooden coins; but it would be backed up with assets of value. You can do it do but you better be able to make it stick.
Why platinum? why not paper? Why not just make a trillion dollar bill? No ones ever tried that before...
The coinage act only gives the Administration discretion with regard to platinum. Mintage and denomination of all other currency and coin is strictly controlled by Congress.
I want to see Obama to do the Trillion Dollar Coin (TDC) with his own face on the coin. We will call them Obamacoins, and everyone will sing the praises of Obama. If he brings 3 of those orbs over to Bernanke to fund the deficit for the next 2 years, Bernanke might be forced to actually sell some of the Fed's Treasury holdings, and interest rates would still fall sharply. We could see mortgage rates go below 1%.
The design for the 2013 $ 100 looks nice, HuffPo readers could start planning the trillion dollar one: "To promote the general welfare"
http://news.coinupdate.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/AEP-R-02.jpg
Huffpo readers overwhelmingly prefer the Eva Peron hundred:
http://www.pulsamerica.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/NUEVO-BILLETE-DE...
If we adopted these as the U.S. currency, house prices would go up in a hurry!
Someone please tell me there is no real chance of a 1 trillion dollar coin and that this is all for a good laugh. I though qe4eva was a buy signal like no other for pms, but trillion dollar coins? That would take the cake.
Benny needs to be minted for his work... maybe like jabba did solo
put Benny in the trillion dollar coin
No coin. The plan is to issue paper platinum certificates.