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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.

New York Times economist Paul Krugman is rehashing a batty idea that former Daily Show host and comedian Jon Stewart mocked him for over eight years ago. In a new blog headlined “Wonking Out: Biden Should Ignore the Debt Limit and Mint a $1 Trillion Coin,” Krugman dusted off an old neo-Keynesian idea of his that he peddled in 2013. He suggested Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen “mint a platinum coin with a face value of $1 trillion — no, it needn’t include $1 trillion worth of platinum — deposit it at the Federal Reserve and draw on that account to...

Fans of economic policy may recall that during one of the many recent debt ceiling showdowns, the idea to mint a trillion-dollar platinum coin came to the fore. It turns out that the Obama administration took the idea seriously enough to have the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel draft memos pertaining to its legality, a fact belied by the White House’s out-of-hand dismissal of the option in January. In response to the Huffington Post’s Freedom of Information Act request, the OLC confirmed that memos about the legality of minting a high-value platinum coin had been written since Obama took...

At long last, a stupid, as well as illegal idea dies on the vine. Bloomberg reports

The Treasury Department will not mint a trillion-dollar platinum coin to get around the debt ceiling. If they did, the Federal Reserve would not accept it. That’s the bottom line of the statement that Anthony Coley, a spokesman for the Treasury Department, gave me today. “Neither the Treasury Department nor the Federal Reserve believes that the law can or should be used to facilitate the production of platinum coins for the purpose of avoiding an increase in the debt limit,” he said. The inclusion of the Federal Reserve is significant. For the platinum coin idea to work, the Federal Reserve...

Treasury Department spokesman Anthony Coley said Saturday that neither his department nor the Federal Reserve believes the law can or should be used to produce such a coin to avoid a coming battle with Congress over government borrowing.

you don't think this trillion dollar coin is the answer. that is an urban legend. yeah. okay. what we need to do i think, first ofall, is to speak clearly about this problem we this, this debt problem. for example, secretary of the treasury is not the secretary of the treasury. secretary of the debt. there are being no net treasurer in the treasury so we must be clear about that. we use the word trillion. 1 trillion is a million million. 1 trillion is an incomprehensible number we throw around and it numbs us, and we must speak of...

Much of the last 4 years has been a nightmare for conservatives. But there is a crazy, stupid, absurd idea being seriously discussed in Washington that makes previous nightmares from the White House pale in comparison. The idea is for the Treasury Department to mint a platinum coin and declare it to be worth $1 trillion. If Congress won't raise the debt ceiling, the coin would be deposited at the Federal Reserve and Obama could continue to spend money. Congress passed a bill allowing for the minting of platinum coins several years ago. But it was a bill designed to...

NOBEL PRIZE WINNER PAUL KRUGMAN: Obama Must Be Ready To Mint The Trillion Dollar Platinum Coin Joe WeisenthalJanuary 7, 2013 The movement to mint a trillion dollar platinum coin gets its biggest backer yet: Paul Krugman. In a new post up titled Be Ready To Mint The Coin he writes: It’s easy to make sententious remarks to the effect that we shouldn’t look for gimmicks, we should sit down like serious people and deal with our problems realistically. That may sound reasonable — if you’ve been living in a cave for the past four years.Given the realities of our political...

With President Obama having kicked off debt ceiling negotiations by vowing not to negotiate over the debt ceiling, a new option for paying off the nation's considerable tab is gaining momentum with cheeky fiscal and monetary wonks. It goes like this: Should Congress fail to extend the U.S. debt limit - reached again on Dec. 31 - the president could ask the Treasury to begin printing trillion dollar coins (in a process explained mostly seriously by Jim Pethokoukis on his American Enterprise Institute blog), a number of which could then be put toward fulfilling debt obligations in the event...

What if the threat of a voluntary default by the United States could be erased by simply turning one tiny scrap of platinum into a coin? That's right. No debt ceiling problem. No bickering in Congress. No market jitters. The only thing needed is for the Treasury Department to mint a platinum coin with a face value of $1 trillion. ---- If Congress does not act to raise the debt ceiling, the U.S. will default on its debts. Not good. But this is where the platinum coin comes in. Normally, the Federal Reserve is charged with issuing currency. But U.S....