Thursday, October 03, 2013

Rogue Agency

I think this is all just arglebargle from the Treasury, but they don't seem to think it's arglebargle.
The coin is a clever, nifty idea but it has problems. The one that gets overlooked the most is it wouldn’t actually make everything normal after it was invoked. It would be subjected to all kinds of challenges and litigation. As a straightforward matter the Federal Reserve wouldn’t give Treasury a trillion dollars for that coin. We looked carefully at it, but for both practical and legal reasons, the legal reason being the law obviously wasn’t meant for anything like this and the practical reason being that the Federal Reserve would need to cooperate and wouldn’t, it wouldn’t work.

I'm glad the Fed can choose to cooperate or not.

The platinum coin statutory language is not ambiguous. It's completely clear. Intent doesn't matter.