Tag Archives: chris cook

Rationalization and Obligation, Part II: Coins, the 14th, and Consols

By Joe Firestone

This six-part series is a reply to the President’s glossing over the options open to him apart from playing “chicken” with the Republicans over the debt ceiling. Part I, presented the President’s explanation, a summary of the kinds of difficulties characterizing it, and discussed two of seven options, selective default, and the exploding option, the President has to deal with it, apart from the way he seems to have chosen. Part II will discuss his platinum coin, 14th amendment, and consols.

Platinum Coins, the 14th amendment, and Consols

3. Using the authority of a 1996 law to mint proof platinum coins with arbitrary face values in the trillions of dollars to fill the Treasury General Account (TGA) with enough money to cease issuing debt instruments, and even enough to pay off the existing debt. This option, originating with beowulf (Carlos Mucha)in its Trillion Dollar Coin (TDC) form has gotten a lot of attention. But a variation of it in its High Value Platinum Coin Seigniorage (HVPCS) form, requiring a coin with face value of $60 Trillion for example, has received much less attention, except in my own writing.

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THE MYTH OF DEBT

By Chris Cook
(Cross posted from www.heraldscotland.com)

FROM the latest cuts to the economic forecasts to the Italian elections to the gathering debate about how George Osborne should play this year’s Budget, all discussions about the financial system now lead swiftly back to the world’s sovereign debt problem. It towers over every effort to get back to prosperity, threatening to take decades at best before it can be resolved, very possibly with an almighty crash along the way.
But maybe that is because we are looking at a 21st-century problem in a 20th-century light. My research at University College London indicates that the answers might lie in modern versions of legal structures and instruments which pre-date the modern financial system and even the incorporating Union of England and Scotland in 1707. But before I explain this “back to the future” proposal for recovery, a warning: we’ll need to turn much of the received wisdom that underlies modern economics and politics upside down as we proceed.

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