Free Republic

For almost 20 years now, the physical act of making some of our money has weirdly been a money-loser for the United States Mint. Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are apparently looking to undo that paradox. Stop making cents In one of the first DOGE posts on X after the department was established, it highlighted the well-known oddity that each individual penny costs more than 3 cents to make and distribute. It also wrongly claimed that producing the coin set US taxpayers back more than $179 million in FY23. (That figure was the loss of minting...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Some politicians think they’ve found a silver bullet for the impasse over the debt limit, except the bullet is made of platinum: Mint a $1 trillion coin, token of all tokens, and use it to flood the treasury with cash and drive Republicans crazy. Even its serious proponents — who are not that many — call it a gimmick. They say it is an oddball way out of an oddball accounting problem that will have severe consequences to average people’s pocketbooks and the economy if it is not worked out in coming days.

The euro may well be on the road to a chaotic collapse, taking some of the world’s biggest banks with it. A currency war may break out between Japan, the U.S. and Europe. Printing money has run out of steam, but there is still little sign of the global economy returning to the kind of growth rates it saw before the credit crunch. But in the long term what they should perhaps be most worried about is losing their monopoly on issuing money. A new breed of virtual currencies are starting to emerge — and some of the giants of...