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.
The difference in the TDC and HVPCS variations in their political implications are great. The TDC looks like a temporary expedient to get around debt ceiling problems, whose use can be repeated when needed. But, it doesn’t quickly remove the political problem of “the national debt” from consciousness as one of our most serious political problems. On the other hand, minting a $60 T coin would change the background of politics by providing for relatively rapid payoff of the debt subject to the limit without balanced budget-creating recessions.
There’s been much analysis about the legality of using platinum coins with high face values for seigniorage revenue. There’s no overwhelming consensus on the matter; but most commentators with a legal background including some prominent law school professors and a former Director of the U.S. Mint, who was co-author of the 1996 law seen as providing the authority for PCS believe that its perfectly legal; but there are also law school professors, and the other co-author of the law, on the other side who argue that PCS violates the intent of the law.
My view is that the consequences of applying both laws and constitutional amendments often go way beyond any reasonable construal of intent; and that the Courts usually weight the plain language of laws more heavily than arguments about intent in determining their legality. In the case of PCS, with one co-author of the enabling law (Philip Diehl) currently writing about his view that PCS is consistent with the intent of the law, and the other co-author (Mike Castle) taking the opposite view, I think the Courts will be disposed to rely on the plain language of the law rather than trying to divine the intent of both Houses of Congress in passing it.
I also think that, with Government fiscal default at issue if the Courts overturn PCS, and with precedents in place denying standing to individual members of the House and Senate to sue to overturn laws, that it’s very unlikely the Courts would even grant standing to only one House of Congress to sue to overturn the President’s use of PCS. In short, the Supreme Court would not touch this at all if the President used PCS. But, even if they did grant standing to the House, then the explicit language of the law, the bloc of four Democratic justices on the Court, and the threat of default and its probable consequences for the financial system and the world economy, all weigh against overturning any use use of PCS by the President.
Indeed, since I can’t see either Anthony Kennedy or John Roberts doing anything to rock the boat of the financial system, I think any Supreme Court action, if it gets by the standing problem would likely result in a 6-3 vote in favor of PCS. But there’s even a possibility that Alito would align with Roberts, due to his strong corporatist orientation, and that Scalia would also support PCS, due to his love for the Unitary Executive Doctrine, producing a low likelihood, but not completely surprising, final outcome of 8 -1 in favor of PCS.
4. Using the authority of the 14th Amendment to keep issuing conventional debt instruments subject to the debt limit in defiance of the debt ceiling, while declaring that the debt limit legislation was unconstitutional, because it violated the 14th Amendment in the context of Congressional appropriations passed after the debt ceiling mandating deficit spending. While the President mentioned the practical consequences of uncertainty over whether use of the 14th amendment would be declared unconstitutional he didn’t mention the most important point about this option.
That is, the President can’t validly claim that there’s a conflict between his duty to spend mandated appropriations, his duty to prevent default on US debts, and his duty to uphold the debt limit law, when he has what appear to be several legal options to enable him to spend those appropriations, but is refusing to implement any of them, and use his constitutional authority under the 14th amendment to avoid default, because he’s speculating that the Supreme Court might overturn one or more of the options he can use, if there’s a legal challenge to them. On the contrary, the President is obligated by the 14th amendment to exhaust those options, before he takes action on the basis that the debt ceiling law is preventing him from fulfilling his spending mandates. As long as those options exist and are untried by him; it is not.
So, the relationship of the 14th amendment option to the others is that it stands behind them in sequence priority, and cannot be invoked with validity unless and until they are exhausted. In addition, the 14th amendment binds the President to try these other options to comply with both his mandated spending obligations and his obligation to obey the debt ceiling law, before he tries to overturn it. So, the President has no free choice among all the options, but, from a legal point of view, must view the 14th amendment/debt ceiling nullification option as a last resort only after all other known options that have not been excluded by the Court have been tried.
5. Beowulf has offered yet a fifth option for getting around the debt ceiling by issuing consols. Consols are debt instruments that pay a fixed rate on interest in perpetuity, but never promise principal repayment at a maturity date. The debt ceiling law is written in such a way that what counts against the ceiling is the principal repayment guaranteed by the instrument. Since consols provide no principal repayment, one can have unlimited consol issuance without increasing the debt-subject-to-the-limit.
Consols seem to be a very clean alternative from a legal point of view. The Treasury is not explicitly restricted by law to issuing any particular type of debt instrument. Debt instruments with fixed maturity dates are the US instrument of choice. But, other debt instruments are not excluded from Congress’s grant of borrowing authority to Treasury. Of course, members of Congress can suit the Administration if it chooses to use consols. But, they would, once again, have a standing problem, and since the debt ceiling law is not an issue with consols it is hard to see what kind of argument would be used to challenge them. While consols do have face values, these values don’t constitute an obligation of the Government to ever repay. On the other hand, consols are callable by the issuing authority. So, if the Treasury wanted to buy them back at face value to avoid paying interest on them in perpetuity it could do so.
Update: At the European Tribune, my friend Chris Cook offers the following comment on my post:
Joe,
Credit to Beowulf for suggesting Consols recently, but the use of Consols to create a National Equity is something I’ve been publicly advocating for over 4 years in the UK (where of course they began, and still exist as an anachronism)
Debt Free or Date Free? What can we do with our National Debt?
Sovereign Equity can revolutionise financing of UK Assets
More recently in the context of solving Cyprus’s € problems
The Case for Cypriot National Equity
I advocate Obama’s Conversion, analogous to Goschen’s Conversion of 1888 when UK Chancellor George Joachim Goschen converted and consolidated existing fragmented classes of stock into a single class of perpetual Consolidated Stock (“Consols”).
A single class of US Consols could be issued and exchanged at a suitable price reflecting the tenor (date of redemption) and nominal rate of interest of all existing classes of US dated credit (mis-named as ‘debt’).
There would be a single market for a single instrument, and the question of default would disappear. The rate of return would literally depend upon the rate at which of taxation is collected by the US government. The market price would depend upon supply and demand.
Obama’s Conversion would literally be a debt/equity swap on a national scale, since undated ‘stock’ was the original form of funding which pre-dated a 300 year aberration into interest-bearing debt (Loan Stock) and distinctly inequitable equity (Common Stock).
The ethical dimension of such a 21st century debt jubilee, could also be thought of as a conversion in more than one way.
Pingback: Rationalization and Obligation, Part VI: What He Ought to Do, What He Probably Will Do | New Economic Perspectives
Pingback: Obama Finally Fights GOP, Affirms a Role for Government, but Renews Threat to Shrink the US Economy | New Economic Perspectives