jumbo coin seigniorage

[Cross-posted under a different title at Naked Capitalism -- lambert]

(Author's Note; Many thanks to lambert strether, beowulf, and Yves Smith for their reviews of this post) Read below the fold...

I've written a lot about jumbo coin seigniorage as a way of getting around the debt ceiling problem over the past 7 months, and others here, Read below the fold...

By

Scott Fullwiler

(Editor's Note: This post is being re-published with the permission of the author, Scott Fullwiler)

Cullen Roche’s excellent post at Pragmatic Capitalism explains—via comments from frequent MMT commentator Beowulf and several previous posts by fellow MMT blogger Joe Firestone (see the links at the end of Cullen’s post and also here)—that the debt ceiling debate could be ended right now given that the US Constitution bestows upon the US Treasury the authority to mint coins. Further, this simple change would lift the veil on how current monetary operations work and thereby demonstrate clearly that a currency-issuing government under flexible exchange rates cannot be forced into default against its will and is not beholden to “vigilante” bond markets. As Beowulf explains in a later comment, “The anomaly it addresses is that the US Govt has a debt limit yet an agency of the US Govt (the Federal Reserve) does not have a debt limit. Clearly this is a structural defect.”

The following is a description of how the process would work and the implications for monetary operations: Read below the fold...

Today, the MSM noticed that there's an issue of constitutionality related to the debt ceiling. Ryan Grim and Samuel Haass report that some Democratic Senators, including Chris Coons and Patty Murray, have begun to discuss. Read below the fold...