How the Proof Platinum Coin Concept was propagated

Corporatism [88]

Tags:

MMT [12]

platinum coin seignorage [14]

PPCS [15]

proof platinum coin seigniorage [16]

Department of Bust Out Profit Models and Vampiric Capitalism [86]

The Trillion Dollar Coin proposal for solving the debt ceiling problem is again experiencing a blogosphere explosion this past week. [89] The precipitating factor may be that people are starting to believe that the Republicans will come to a “fiscal cliff” settlement with the Democrats including very little in entitlement spending; but will then come back, in 2013 with a very tough position on the price they want to agree to raise the debt ceiling to give the Executive operating room for any length of time. Bruce Bartlett had this to say [90] on the issue:

In my opinion, the fiscal cliff is akin to the so-called Y2K problem [91] in late 1999, when many people worried that computers would freeze, elevators would stop running and planes would fall from the sky. Of course, nothing of the kind happened.

So if the fiscal cliff is a faux problem, why do we hear that industry and financial markets are deeply fearful [92] of it? The answer is that there is a very real fiscal problem that will occur almost simultaneously – expiration of the debt limit. Much of what passes for fiscal-cliff concern is actually anxiety about whether Republicans in Congress will force a default on the nation’s debt in pursuit of their radical agenda.

I think Bartlett is right about attention shifting to the debt ceiling now, and that's why we have a sudden explosion interest in high value platinum coin seigniorage having face values mostly in the low trillions, once again. Since the Trillion Dollar Coin (#TDC) is being vetted again, I wanted to make a brief point about it that is not well understood by the mainstream bloggers who have been stampeding to blog about the Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS) solution this week. Let's lay out the context.

Most people who've thought about how the Government creates money know that Congress delegated the primary power to create currency to The Federal Reserve Banks, the system of which combined with the Board of Governors and the Federal Open Market Committee, form the central bank of the United States. In modern times, currency means not only printed money, but also electronically created credits, reserves held in Federal Reserve accounts.

The reserves that have been created by the Fed at any point, are many multiples of the amount of paper currency in existence produced by the Mint on orders from the Fed. So, most of the currency created by the Fed is in the form of reserves rather than paper currency. Also it's well-known that when the Fed creates reserves, it does so “out of thin air.”

In our fiat currency system there is no “backing” for either the reserves or the paper currency. In exactly that sense, all of our currency is now “printed,” and has been since we went off the gold standard in 1971. There is no distinction between existing currency, whether paper, or reserves, and newly created currency in that respect.

The Fed however, doesn't make all our money. The Treasury too, has its role. Congress delegated the US Mint the authority to coin fiat money, [48] the value of whose metal content, with respect to certain types of coins, need have no relation to its face value, which can be as high [93] or low as the Mint wants to make it. However, this has created a problem.

If the Mint coins money in denominations appropriate for commonplace retail transactions than the coins involved can be exchanged among parties as needed. But what happens if the Mint coins platinum money with face values in the trillions of dollars? Then that money can't be used for exchange as a practical matter, because there are no buyers who will accept the trillion dollar coins in exchange. So, if the Treasury wants to use such coins to fill the public purse with money it can later spend on debt repayment or Congressional deficit appropriations, it must transform high face value coins into divisible money; i.e. reserves in its Fed spending account.

Fortunately, since high value coins are legal tender, the Mint, and the Treasury, can force the Federal Reserve to transform high value coins into reserves, by just depositing them into the US Mint's Public Enterprise Fund (PEF) account, which the Fed must credit with reserves in return for the high value coins.

For example, if the Mint deposits a $One Trillion coin in the PEF, then the Fed must accept the coin and credit the PEF with an equivalent value of electronic credits in reserves. Then, the Treasury has the authority to “sweep” the PEF of all seigniorage, i.e. profits resulting from the Mint/Fed transaction.

In the case of $One Trillion proof platinum coin, the profits are its face value minus a few thousand dollars. So that amount would be “swept” into the Treasury General Account (TGA), which is the account used by Treasury to perform Government spending.

A very good way to look at high value platinum coins is that they are legal instruments for the Treasury to use the unlimited “out of thin air” reserve creation authority of the Fed to fill the public spending purse, the TGA, for public purposes. In effect, platinum coin seigniorage involves the Treasury commandeering the power of the Fed to create reserves and place them in the TGA, perhaps, depending on what the Treasury chooses to do, in the many Trillions of dollars. Functionally, it produces the same result as if the Fed were subordinate to the Treasury within the Executive Branch, and the Treasury had unlimited authority to create both currency and coins by fiat. Is this good?

I think it is. The vaunted independence of the Fed has not served us well over the years. What it has amounted to is that the Fed has not been accountable to the public. Its independence has meant independence from the Treasury and, largely, from Congress. But it has not meant independence from the big banks and Wall Street, which the Fed fails to regulate to any visible extent to protect the economy and the public, and whose interests the Fed has served ahead of the interests of the public at large.

In short, I am all for the President ordering high value platinum coin seigniorage, because I think the constraints imposed by that upon the Fed, and also the filling of the public purse to such an extent that it will be clear to people that the US can never run out of the currency it alone can issue, will make the Congress, the Fed, and the Executive Branch all much more accountable to the wishes of the American people.

The Congress and the Executive won't be able to hide behind "we're running out of money" anymore, when they refuse to enact that majority support among the people. And the Fed won't be able to hide behind its "independence" to justify its doing the bidding the big private banks. Using proof platinum coin seigniorage, will be better for supporting a progressive democracy; and ultimately, that is why I favor it!

(Cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives [83].)

Average: 5 (1 vote)

The Trillion Dollar Coin Is A Conservative Meme

letsgetitdone's blog [3]
Log in [94] or register [95] to post comments

Departments:

Thread:

Tags:

#TDC #PCS #60Tcoin [96]

MMT [12]

Department of Bust Out Profit Models and Vampiric Capitalism [86]

The Trillion Dollar Coin (TDC) is, first, an oversimplified meme, because there's not one TDC solution, but lots of Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS) variations on that idea with differing implications for politics. Some just kick the can down the road, until the next debt ceiling crisis, or set up another trade between the Administration of something relatively valuable for something less valuable. Others would really change the political game.

Progressives should want that game changed and the conservative, FIRE sector, neoliberal bias of American politics shifted to a progressive problem solving bias. Conservatives, even if they favor using a TDC to avoid a debt ceiling crisis, will want to retain the political game they are now playing and use it only for getting around the debt ceiling. Otherwise they will want to retain the present system of funding deficits through debt issuance, so they can continue to talk about the US “not being able to afford x, y, or z, because we're running out of money.” Or being subject to the “bond vigilantes, if our national debt grows too much.” Or having to worry about leaving huge debts to our grandchildren.

Let's now look at some variations on the PCS meme, other than the $1 T coin, and their political implications.

First, mint a $1.6 Trillion coin and have Treasury use the profits from it to buy all the outstanding debt instruments held by the Fed [103]. This would retire a substantial part of the national debt and immediately create $1.6 T in “headroom” relative to the debt ceiling. This alternative involves the least amount of change in current procedures. The coin, once deposited at the Fed, would remain in a Fed vault, and would not go into circulation.

The Government would then go right back to issuing debt in order to meet its debt obligations and spend previous Congressional appropriations. Of course, this proposal is a solution to the debt ceiling problem alone. It would prevent a default crisis caused by anti-government tea party Republicans. But, it wouldn't do very much to defeat the austerity/deficit hawk mind set in fiscal policy.

A second proposal is to mint a $6.7 T coin to pay back all debt held by the Fed, and all Intra-governmental debt [104], including that owed to Social Security, Medicare, and a host of other other agencies. That would create $6.7 T in headroom relative to the debt ceiling, that's more than enough to carry us through the 2016 elections without breaching the ceiling. Again, this wouldn't result in any “money” immediately going into circulation, but over time SS and Medicare payments to individuals and organizations would be adding to bank reserves without any reserves being withdrawn from the private sector due to debt issuance.

This alternative would render the debt ceiling problem a dead letter for some time to come, and it also might take some of the austerity pressure off. But it probably wouldn't end the austerity drive, because the deficit hawks would still point to long-term problems in entitlements that would be projected as running up the public debt in future years.

A third proposal for applying coin seigniorage is to mint a coin with face value large enough to cover the $6.7 T intra-governmental and Fed debt repayment, plus all debt to the non-government sector coming to maturity during the next four years, and all Congressional Appropriations expected to require deficit spending through the 2016 elections. I'll estimate, roughly, that a $20 T coin is enough for that, including about $6.2 T to more than close the expected gap between tax revenues and Government spending through the 2016 elections, and the rest for paying down the national debt. Issuing a coin that large, using the profits from seigniorage, and assuming that Congressional appropriations continue the pattern of the past 2 years or so, that would result in a remaining public debt outstanding of roughly a few trillion dollars in long term debt, which would please the bond markets except for the fact that the US wasn't issuing any more debt instruments, which would probably make the bond vigilantes scream for those safe harbor debt instruments again.

A more important aspect of a coin this large is that it takes the deficit/debt issue very much off the table, since there would be no new debt issuance needed until after 2016, and because most of the seigniorage would be used to pay down debt the US would then have only about 15% of its current debt subject to the limit. In other words, it would take the austerity meme off the table completely over the next four years and even after that there would be a lot of room between the outstanding level of debt and the debt ceiling.

Much of the pressure now being applied to entitlement programs would also be gone. So, progressives could be much more expansive in supporting full employment programs, education, infrastructure, higher entitlement benefits, Medicare for All and other things the country needs.

If, also, Congress does the right kind of spending to bring full employment inside a year, then tax revenues will come back as they did during the Clinton Administration, and then there will be no need for all the profits from the platinum coin to be used completely for deficit spending between now and 2016. In fact, if the right jobs creating program is immediately enacted, as much as $3 T could be left, by the end of 2016. So, this is a much more progressive alternative than the first two. But in itself, it doesn't provide a continuing ability for the Treasury to create reserves directly to support deficit spending. The nation could still slip back into the regressive money creation practices after 4 or 5 years, and the conservative, neoliberal bias of fiscal politics could be restored.

So far, I've discussed three alternative coin seigniorage proposals ranging in scale from a minimal proposal to handle the current crisis to one that would provide enough funds to both pay down debt, and support a gap between spending and taxes that might be sufficient to enable full employment. Now here's a fourth, enough to handle even generous Congressional appropriations and deficit spending for at least 15 - 20 years, until 2032 and beyond.

Why not mint a $60 T coin? [93]

I favor this fourth alternative above all, because it institutionalizes the idea that there is a distinction between appropriations, the Congressional mandate to spend particular amounts on particular goods and services, and the capability to spend the mandated accounts by having the funds (electronic credits) in the public purse (the TGA). In a fiat currency system, the capability always exists if the legislature provides for it under the Constitution, as it has under current platinum coin seigniorage legislation.

But the value of the $60 T coin, and the profits derived from it, is that it is a concrete reminder of the Government's continuing ability to buy whatever it needs to meet public purposes, and its continuing ability to harness the authority of the Central Bank to create reserves to support the needs of fiscal policy. It demonstrates very clearly that the Government cannot run out of money, and that the claim that it can is not a valid reason for rejecting spending that is in accordance with public purpose.

So, please keep in mind the distinction between the capability to spend more than government collects in taxes, and the appropriations that mandate such spending. The capability is what's in the public purse, and it is unlimited as long as the Government doesn't constrain itself from creating credits in its own accounts. With coin seigniorage its capability could be and should be publicly demonstrated by minting the $60 T coin, and getting the profits from depositing it at the Fed transferred to the Treasury General Account (TGA).

On the other hand, Congressional appropriations, not the size or contents of the purse, but whether the purse strings are open or not, determines what will be spent, and what will simply sit in the purse for use at a later time. So there is a very important distinction between the purse and the purse strings. The President can legally use coin seigniorage to fill the purse, but only Congress can open the purse strings through its appropriations.

This fourth alternative is the one that best solves both the debt ceiling problem and the problem of taking austerity, justified by “we're running out of money,” off the table. The debt ceiling would no longer be an issue if the Treasury immediately paid off $6.7 T in Fed and intra-governmental debt, and was poised, with the money in its account, to pay off the rest of the debt subject to the limit as it falls due. Nor would there be any justification for austerity policies if the Treasury had a public purse with $44 T of unearmarked funds in it to cover future deficit spending. So, this is the progressive alternative, the one that changes the political context of fiscal policy debates for the foreseeable future. It also gives progressive enough time to fight a major political battle that ought to and must occur. The battle to free the Fed from control by Wall Street and banking interests and to make it accountable to the people by placing it under the authority of the Treasury Department, and our nationally elected executive, the President.

In my next post, I'll blog about the likely expected relationship between the different PCS options and inflation using the framework laid out by Scott Fullwiler! [80]

(Cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives [83].)

Average: 5 (1 vote)

New MSM Trillion Dollar Coin Wave Misses the Big Story: Pethokoukis and Wiesenthal

letsgetitdone's blog [3]
Log in [105] or register [106] to post comments

Departments:

Thread:

Republican Looting [107]

Tags:

$60 T coin [108]

James Pethokoukis [109]

Joe Wiesenthal [110]

MMT [12]

PCS [111]

TDC [112]

Department of Bust Out Profit Models and Vampiric Capitalism [86]

In this post I said I would blog about the likely expected relationship between the different Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS) options and inflation using the framework laid out by Scott Fullwiler! [80] But, after reconsidering, I thought I'd hold off until later, and, instead, first provide a discussion of the "new wave" of MSM-based blog posts on the Trillion Dollar Coin (TDC) “solution” to the upcoming debt ceiling conflict. As it turns out that will take a number of posts in itself

This new wave may have started with a post by Bruce Bartlett [90] (h/t Lambert Strether) in the New York Times saying that the real fiscal cliff behind the anxiety many people are feeling is the debt ceiling crisis. Bartlett didn't write about the coin. But, I think he got mainstreamers off the fiscal cliff, and focusing on the debt ceiling as “the real crisis,” where a bipartisan compromise could result in serious damage to the social safety net most Americans want to see maintained and even extended.

So, on 12/05 at 10:04 AM, the platinum coin, or at least the TDC became mainstream News again, James Pethokoukis at AEI posted [113] “How could Washington avoid a debt ceiling default? Mint a few trillion dollar platinum coins. Seriously.” His was quickly followed by posts from Joe Wiesenthal at Business Insider [19] (12/05 at 10:24 AM); Chris Hayes at MSNBC [114] substituting as host on the Rachel Maddow show (12/05 at 9:20 PM); John Carney at CNBC [20] (12/06 at 11:54 AM); Kevin Drum at Mother Jones [115] (12/06 at 3:01 PM); Matthew Yglesias at Slate [116] (12/06 at 4:15 PM); Matthew Yglesias at Slate [117] (12/07 at 11:07 AM); Harry Bradford at The Huffington Post [118] (11:15 AM); and Brad Plumer at the Washington Post [119] (12/07 at 12:37 PM) Let's review Pethokoukis and Wiesenthal in this post, and hold reviews of the others for future ones.

Pethokoukis

This post raises the issue of the debt ceiling and how to cope with a lack of settlement. Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS) as a possible solution to the likely upcoming “crisis” is presented in the form of a long quote from Chris Krueger an analyst at Guggenheim Securities’s Washington Research Group. Krueger postulates that a handful of trillion dollar coins would be minted and would result in augmenting the Treasury's account at the Fed by the amount of the handful. Krueger then opines that the Treasury would pay its bills removing the threat of default, and he adds:

”. . . The effects on the currency market and inflation are unclear, to say the least. You would also likely trigger a wave of lawsuits similar to the Constitutional Option and create two tranches of treasuries. Both this option and the Constitutional Option are VERY low probability options.”

Actually, if the Treasury uses the handful of trillions to repay its intra-governmental debt, then the effects on inflation are very clear. The money repaid will not be spent; but held in “Trust” accounts at the Fed. Since they will not enter the economy, they can't possibly increase demand, because there is no plausible mechanism which they could work through to cause inflation. This should be clear with a moment's thought and it indicates that Krueger's speculation about inflation and the currency is irresponsible, and the product of lack of thought about how the money is likely to be used.

Next, it's true law suits might occur, if someone could be found who would plausibly have standing to sue. But, since the money produced by the Fed in return for the coins won't be used for anything except repayment of intra-governmental debt, who would be damaged by such a course of action?

Not the Government agencies that had the Treasury debt repaid, who operate under the authority of the President in any case. And they're the only parties involved in this, other than the Fed.

And even if the Fed had doubts about the validity of the law providing for PCS, it can't sue because the law governing the Federal Reserve states that in cases of disagreement between the Treasury Secretary and the Fed Chairman, the view of the Secretary will prevail. So, it seems that no one would have standing to sue if Treasury used PCS.

Krueger says that both PCS and constitutional options are “low probability options.” Well, it goes without saying that they ARE low probability options, since out of all the times the debt ceiling has been extended there has never been a President who used either option. Even if the President were to use one of them; it would still be a low probability option the next time a ned to raise the debt ceiling arose.

However, low probability options are not necessarily low likelihood options. [120] The question is whether the hypothesis that the President will use PCS to avoid the debt ceiling has a higher or lower likelihood of being true than competing hypotheses about what the President will do about the debt ceiling problem. It is not whether it has a higher or lower probability than they do.

That likelihood will depend on the circumstances of the negotiation with the Republicans and the outcomes of the crisis that the President and members of Congress find acceptable. We don't know those circumstances right now. But we do know that the Republicans are likely to demand a high price for lifting the ceiling, and that the President has said he won't play debt ceiling games. So, if the Republicans insist on a very high price how will he avoid doing that?

There are only four options if he can't deal with them on acceptable terms both to himself and Democrats in Congress: first, he can shut down the Government, [121] prioritize debt repayment, and spending, and bring public pressure to bear on the Republicans to give in. I agree with those who say that this course would be very effective eventually in forcing the Republicans to lift the ceiling; but also less or more damaging to the economy, and to many, many people, depending on how long it takes to force the Republicans to deal on acceptable terms. So, this option is very costly in real terms.

Second, he can use PCS. And this isn't a single option, it's a family of options, [93] ranging from $500 Billion to as much as $1 quadrillion. [122]

Third, he can use the constitutional option asserting that the debt ceiling legislation is unconstitutional because it conflicts with Section 4 of the 14th Amendment.

And fourth, he can use a little known debt instrument called a consol. [123] Consols pay interest forever, but the Government never has to repay the principal on them. For this reason, they would not count against the debt subject to the limit, which is what counts for violating the debt ceiling law. [124]

Among the above, the most harmful choice for the economy and people is to shut the Government down for more than a few days. Of the three other options, the constitutional option is a worse choice than PCS or consols, because, the President has the choice of using one or the other, or a combination of both, to comply with the law and not breach the debt ceiling, so, he can't very well say that the debt ceiling prevents him from complying with the dictates of the 14th amendment. He will lose that one in Court, if it gets there. It might not get there, however, because of the standing question. You'd need both Houses of Congress to contest the issue, and the Democratic Senate is very unlikely to go along.

The choices that are least painful to the economy, and also least likely to get challenged in Court with any likelihood of success, because they are consistent with the wording of legislation, are the PCS and consol options. So, even though those options have never been used before, the hypothesis that either one or both may be used is not low likelihood, compared to the other reasonable possibilities. Since these are good options from the viewpoint of legality, if the President is really unwilling to play debt ceiling games, is pushed too far, and doesn't want to take the substantial risk of damaging the economy at all through a government shutdown, then they are also likely ones.

After quoting Krueger, Pethokoukis ends his post by saying that he agrees with Krueger about the possible effects of using PCS on the currency market and inflation. In other words, he's afraid of the possible effects, but has no specifiable reasons for his fear. So, this fear is just speculation, irrational and without foundation. It's not something we ought to take seriously.

Joe Wiesenthal

Joe Wiesenthal's main point seems to be that it's amazing that we're talking about the constitutional and PCS options. On the PCS option he quotes Krueger approvingly in the same way Pethokoukis did. About PCS specifically he says:

The other possibility that was probably even more mind-bending was the Trillion Dollar Coin Idea, which originated with a reader of Cullen Roche's blog. The gist is that the Treasury is allowed to unilaterally mint platinum coins. It could create a $1 trillion coin, and deposit it at its account at The Federal Reserve.

It sounds completely crazy, but ... it's even crazier to think that the U.S. would default arbitrarily just because of a dumb law.

So if the choice is between default and a trillion dollar platinum coin, we endorse the coin all the way.

So, Wiesenthal seems to like the coin option; but doesn't tell us why he likes it better than the constitutional option. Also, he focuses only on the TDC platinum coin option, and mentions no other variations on PCS. He even says that if the choice is between the TDC, and default then he prefers the coin. In addition, he doesn't point out that the coin option conflicts with the constitutional option, in the sense that as long as it and consols are options, the constitutional option doesn't work from a legal point of view.

Finally, Wiesenthal says that the Trillion Dollar coin originated with a reader of Cullen Roche's blog. This is certainly true. But the “reader,” beowulf (Carlos Mucha), 1) was a reader and commmenter on many blogs at the time (July 7, 2011) apart from Cullen Roche's and 2) originated the platinum coin idea in a comment at New Deal 2.0, 8 months before Cullen Roche's post on PCS that beowulf commented on, and then blogged about it at FireDogLake and Correntewire on January 3, 2011, more than 6 months before Cullen Roche blogged on the subject. So, though Wiesenthal's statement on the origin of the PCS idea is strictly true, it is a misleading distortion of the actual provenance and development of the idea, which you'll find here. [125]

Let's wind this first Big Story Missing post up! There are two points that stand out for me from the first two blog posts in the new wave on PCS. First, the story they focus on is the debt ceiling and the TDC, or low trillions variations on PCS, And second, they don't treat interactions among the options the President has for getting past the debt ceiling crisis. In particular, they don't assess the legal impact of some of the other options on the constitutional option. So, have they focused on something other than the big story here? That's the question I'd like readers to keep in mind as we review other new wave commentaries in future posts.

(Cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives [83].)

No votes yet

New MSM Trillion Dollar Coin Wave Misses the Big Story: Hayes and Carney

letsgetitdone's blog [3]
Log in [126] or register [127] to post comments

Departments:

Tags:

$60 T coin [108]

Chris Hayes [128]

John Carney [129]

MMT [12]

PCS [111]

TDC [112]

Department of Bust Out Profit Models and Vampiric Capitalism [86]

Did the MSM's new wave of commentaries on platinum coin seigniorage (PCS) miss the really big story about it? Of course, I think it did, and I'll continue my review of the MSM commentaries with the efforts of Chris Hayes at MSNBC, [114] substituting as host on the Rachel Maddow show (12/05 at 9:20 PM); and John Carney at CNBC [20] (12/06 at 11:54 AM). This is my second review post on this subject.

Chris Hayes

Chris Hayes's coverage of PCS was an MSNBC "breakthrough" cable segment on the subject, since it was the first, not a blog post per se. But I'm covering it here, because it, arguably, fueled the new wave of PCS blogs. Chris gave a creditable brief summary of the idea behind PCS, with a reference to US code Section 5112k, [130] then he went on to focus on the Trillion Dollar Coin (TDC) proposal as an example, and transitioned to bringing up the debt ceiling problem. During that discussion he emphasizes the damage that could be caused by another debt ceiling crisis, including the damage to the US credit rating, while also making the point very clearly that Congress has already approved the spending that is creating the crisis and that refusing to raise the debt ceiling is equivalent to not paying your credit card bill.

Up to this point I found Chris's presentation very clear and was happy to see the coverage of PCS. But, a couple of comments are worth noting. Due to the debt ceiling context which he assumes is the problem, Chris focuses on the TDC solution and talks about that PCS solution, only. No other PCS possibilities see the light of day in his coverage. Is it possible he hasn't thought about them?

Also when he talks about damage to our credit rating as a serious consequence of our debt ceiling crisis, he fails to mention that previous ratings agency actions against nations like the US that have non-convertible fiat currencies with floating exchange rates and no debts in currencies not their own haven't resulted in increasing rates on their debt; but in decreasing interest rates, indicating that the credit agencies and their ratings aren't in a position to cause any economic damage to the United States.

Chris then continues:

. . . The odds are pretty close to zero that we mint a $1 trillion coin in order to pay off some of the debt. but there's striking movement in the direction of changing the rules so we don't ever have to fight over this completely unnecessary issue ever again. Remember, this is important. The debt ceiling isn't about incurring future debt. It's about the money congress has already duly authorized and appropriated and voted to spend. It's not a fight about whether or not to spend money; it's a fight about whether or not to pay your credit card bill. Today. The President basically said, no more. I'm done having this dumb fight. I am not going to do it again.

And then, after playing a video clip of the President saying he's done, Chris continues with:

. . . okay. so the McConnell rule isn't exactly the super awesome trillion- dollar coin idea that I kind of love, but it's not half bad. The president has the power to raise the debt ceiling in order to pay for the things that congress has already agreed to pay for, and if congress wants to stop it, they need a two-thirds majority to do it. I am generally pretty wary of increases in Executive authority and decreases in Congressional oversight, but in the case of the debt ceiling, there's just no argument for it. The money has already been spent. Congress has already spent it. It's just a matter of whether or not you pay the bills. And if all else fails, President Bbama and Tim Geithner should start deciding whose face that is they want to put on the new $1 trillion coin. I vote for John Boehner!

Nice touch, that!

So, how does Chris know that the odds are pretty close to zero that the President won't use some variation of the PCS option? Whether he does or not is his decision. Is it even proper to talk about “odds” in the case of an individual decision? Shouldn't he be talking about “likelihood” [120] and doesn't likelihood depend on the circumstances surrounding the decision and the President's psychological makeup?

Also, was the main point of Chris's piece to let John Boehner and the Republicans, and maybe the President, know that there is an alternative to compromising with the Republicans for the President, other than shutting down the Government: the TDC? If so, then isn't Chris, usually one of the “progressive” voices in the mainstream, just adopting a conservative solution, supported by a conservative meme; [131] which only seems, on the surface to be progressive, because PCS is a new idea?

After all, what does the TDC solution do? It kicks the can down the road by about a year, and maybe a little more depending on events. But it doesn't solve the debt ceiling problem; or the even larger problem that the Treasury must incur debt when it wants to deficit spend.

Not that the size of the debt in any way deceases the fiscal sustainability of Government deficit spending, [132] as the austerians claim; but the politics of the debt issue is usually toxic for progressives and their solutions. So, for us, the best PCS solution to the debt ceiling crisis would be one that provides for paying down the debt out of seigniorage profits until it's gone; since that would take the debt issue off the table, and be a game-changer, [133] when we are debating full employment, Medicare for All, increased Social Security benefits, and other things we need done.

John Carney

Carney starts out his post with references to Pethokoukis's post [113] and Krueger's report, and with the quote from Krueger on the PCS option we've seen already. He then says:

As Joe Weisenthal points out, [113] this idea originated last July with a commenter called "Beowulf" at Cullen Roche's Pragmatic Capitalism blog. [82] Beowulf pointed out that although there are statutory limits that prevent the Treasury from printing paper currency to fund its operations, there's a quirk in the law that allows the Treasury to print platinum coins of any denomination.

So, Carney takes Wiesenthal's distortion even further, saying that the PCS idea originated on July 7, 2011 (the date of Cullen Roche's post), and, as we've seen, beowulf originated the idea, but this date is off by at least 8 months. [125] Carney probably picked this up from Wiesenthal, because he neither bothered to check it by searching the web, nor even re-read Cullen Roche's post; where the updates indicate prior posts on PCS to that one.

Carney goes on to point out that he's changed his mind about the inflationary impact of the trillion dollar coin saying:

This concern now seems to me to be seriously misplaced. There would really not be any additional inflationary pressures caused by a trillion coin

The key point here is that the government would not be throwing an extra trillion dollars into the economy. It would, rather, be spending exactly how much it planned to spend anyway. It would not be issuing bonds to cover some of that spending but bond issuance by the Treasury does not do very much (probably nothing at all) to combat inflation anyway. The amount of government issued financial assets remains the same, even though the composition of dollars and Treasury bonds changes.

This is exactly the position of Modern Money Theory [80] (MMT), as articulated by Scott Fullwiler. And Carney adds:

There could a long-term inflationary problem, I suppose, if the government fell in love with the idea and used platinum coins to finance ever larger deficits. But that seems unlikely. And, in any case, the Fed could step in and use its monetary policy tools to counteract the spendthrift coiners.

That's not quite the MMT position, which is that deficits wouldn't cause inflation unless the government continued deficit spending past the point of full employment. In any event, Carney provides no reason for thinking that there might be a long-term inflationary problem absent Fed intervention.

Carney's post is an improvement on the first two. It identifies beowulf by name (or handle, anyway). And it indicates that there would be no inflation if the option were used because it doesn't involve any more spending than before. On the other hand, his provenance of the idea is false, and he's not clear about why long-term inflation may be a prospect.

Neither Chris Hayes's post, nor Carney's considers PCS solutions other than TDC ones. They both see PCS as essentially a band-aid we can put on the debt ceiling problem. They don't see it as something that could introduce a profound change in the background of fiscal policy. My next post will cover the efforts of Matthew Yglesias and Kevin Drum.

(Cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives [83].)

No votes yet

New MSM Trillion Dollar Coin Wave Misses the Big Story: Drum and Yglesias

letsgetitdone's blog [3]
Log in [134] or register [135] to post comments

Departments:

Thread:

Tags:

MMT [12]

Department of Bust Out Profit Models and Vampiric Capitalism [86]

TDC [112]

PCS [111]

$60 T coin [108]

Matthew Yglesias [137]

Kevin Drum [138]

In my last two posts [139] I've been reviewing the new wave of mainstream posts and commentary on Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS) by way of providing background for making the case that the MSM are missing “the big story” about PCS. Thus far I've reviewed recent posts by Pethokoukis, [113] Wiesenthal, [19] and Carney, [20] and an MSNBC cable segment by Chris Hayes. [114] All four have looked at PCS in terms of the Trillion Dollar Coin (TDC) and its possible impact on the impending debt ceiling shakedown. None have viewed it from a broader point of view. Let's now look at the commentaries by Kevin Drum [115] and two from Matthew Yglesias here [116] and here. [117]

Kevin Drum

Drum presents his view of the theories that “. . . have been floating around. . . “ since last year's debt ceiling crisis including: the constitutional 14th amendment option; the platinum coin, the priority of legislation (that Congress has approved deficit spending since passing the latest debt ceiling implying approval of an increase in the ceiling); and the “you and whose army” theory that even if the President breaches the debt ceiling, no one could do anything about it because they would have no standing to sue. Here's what he says about the coin:

There's an obscure statute that authorizes the Treasury to mint platinum coins "in accordance with such specifications, designs, varieties, quantities, denominations, and inscriptions as the Secretary, in the Secretary’s discretion, may prescribe from time to time." Jack Balkin [61] suggests that the secretary of the Treasury could simply mint a $1 trillion platinum coin, deposit it at the Federal Reserve, and then write checks on it. I don't buy this one either. It's just too outré. It's the kind of thing that sounds cute to a blogger tapping away on his laptop, but there's no way an actual president would ever try anything so obviously childish.

A bit unfair, I'd say. Labeling using “outré,” followed an ad hominem using “a blogger” to discredit a serious proposal without arguing against it. Apart from the fact that being "a blogger" says nothing about the quality of one's argument in the first place, as long as Drum wants to appeal to authority rather than to reason, as a good "progressive" from Mother Jones should; Jack Balkin's not just “a blogger tapping away.” He's a Professor at Yale Law School; and the originator of the PCS idea, beowulf (Carlos Mucha), [29] is an Attorney. In addition, the most frequent blogging advocate for the PCS idea, namely me, is a Ph.D. in political science and a former university professor, before pursuing a long career in Washington, primarily as a researcher and consultant. Seems to me all three of us are further away from being just “bloggers” than Kevin Drum himself, who seems to me to be the one just “tapping away on his laptop.”

As for outré, one person's “outré,” is another person's solid new idea, it's not an argument against that idea. Drum got some pushback from readers about his treatment of PCS, and he then posted an update on it:

Several people have pushed back on my dismissal of the platinum coin ploy. I'm not a lawyer, but my sense is that this is so wildly contrary to the intent of the law, which was to allow the Treasury to issue commemorative and bullion coins, that a court probably would intervene if the president tried to pull this off. The other ploys are at at least minimally plausible, but this one is banana republic territory.

Drum can't resist the labeling without justification, can he? The Banana Republic Law is the debt ceiling law, and its use to extort concessions from a safety net that more than 2/3 of the American people want proves it. On the other hand, according to a Yale Law professor and many others who have looked at it, PCS is authorized by legislation passed late in 1995. [130] Any challenge to it on grounds of intent is highly dubious for two reasons.

First, the Courts generally don't try to interpret laws based on theories about Congressional intent. The Justices aren't collective psychologists who are expert at divining the intent of the Congress. They are expert, however, at interpreting what the text of a law says, and so that is what they stick to almost all the time. A challenge to PCS based on intent isn't something any Court is likely to take up.

Second, Drum gives the “you and whose army” theory with a fair amount of conviction, saying it is the strongest theory of all. But that theory applies in spades to PCS, if we consider that the possibility of using it is written into the law, and the only one with standing to challenge it is the Congress itself, which won't, because the Democrats have a majority in the Senate, and won't challenge the President. Again, the PCS option is stronger than the constitutional option from this point of view; because as long as the PCS and consol options are legal, the debt ceiling legislation isn't unconstitutional.

In another update, Kevin Drum agrees with the idea that the best option is to shut the Government down in chunks because the Republicans “would cave before long.” I suspect they would, but I think this option would still result in real damage to real people; while the PCS option avoid that damage. Perhaps Kevin, doesn't see this because he thinks a TDC wouldn't make any difference in the political situation in the longer run. However, if he thinks that, it may be because he, like the other mainstream bloggers, hasn't given any thought to variations of PCS that might change the political situation and move it in a new direction entirely. Drum is another MSM blogger who's supposed to be “progressive.” If that's true then why isn't he discussing how the PCS authority can be used to further broader progressive aims, rather than simply solve the debt ceiling crisis?

Matthew Yglesias

In his post on 12/06 Yglesias just refers to the TDC idea and to one his posts on it in 2011.

But resetting into a no concessions mindset, the White House has a lot of tools. Not only can he argue that the 14th Amendment obviates the debt ceiling [140] (which I would if I were him) or have the Mint create a couple of $1 trillion platinum coins [65] (which is weird, but on a sounder legal basis) he can use his control over the executive branch to make the lapse of borrowing authority as painful to Republicans as possible.

He says he prefers a 14th Amendment challenge to it; but then calls it both “weird” and on a sounder legal basis, which makes one wonder why it's “weird”? Why do many MSM bloggers seem to feel obligated to characterize PCS in negative terms, even as they grant that it is a legal option? Do they need to do this to keep their credentials as among the Very Serious People (VSP)?

In his post on 12/07, he says:

Why did Congress draft a statute that doesn't specify what denominations the platinum coin may be? I have no idea. But it's a gaping loophole in the basic monetary framework of the United States, and pretty clearly allows Secretary Geithner to at least temporarily evade the debt ceiling by financing the government through seigniorage. The administration officials to whom I've raised this point generally respond by chuckling. Kevin Drum offers what amounts to an incredulous stare argument [115] that this is undoable, "no way an actual president would ever try anything so obviously childish . . . so wildly contrary to the intent of the law . . . banana republic territory."

Maybe so. But such is the stuff of which great leaders are made. And there is precedent for it. In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt essentially broke the back of the Great Depression by taking the United States off the gold standard. As a matter of substantive policy that was much more radical than evading the debt ceiling. And as a procedural matter it was tricky. Did Roosevelt have the authority to do that?

Sort of! He issued Executive Order 6102 [141] under the terms of the World War I Trading With the Enemy Act. Is that what congress intended? Clearly not. FDR's Depression-era gold policy had nothing whatsoever to do with World War I or any other war. But it was on the books.

So Yglesias's attitude toward PCS is different from the other bloggers. He recognizes that it's legal and that a great President will use any law on the books that will help him do what's necessary at a particular time. And about PCS specifically, he says later:

I don't think it would be a good idea for the government to be routinely financed by coin gimmicks, but it's a much better option than the alternative of default or endless debt ceiling crises. Putting the platinum coin on the table is a good way of clarifying that whatever House Republicans say or do, default is not an option and no concessions will be made so they ought to save face and embrace the McConnell Principle. [142]

So, Matthew Yglesias wants to have the President tell Congress that whatever the Republicans do, he has the coin alternative to use to avoid the debt ceiling, and then rather than use it, negotiate something like the McConnell principle to avoid debt ceiling controversies in the future. But, why does he propose this? There are so many other alternatives, and this is such a trivial think to get in return for the PCS power, which is after all, the Ace of Trumps in this game.

-- The President could tell Congress that he has the coin alternative and insist that they repeal the debt ceiling legislation entirely or he will use it.

-- Or he could tell them nothing, and just use the coin power to mint a coin sufficiently large to buy all the Fed debt and to redeem all the Intra-governmental debts creating accounts at the Fed for the Trust funds. That would lower the debt subject to the limit to something like $9.5 T, making the debt ceiling issue a dead letter for at least a few years.

-- Or he could do something really radical like mint a $60 T coin, [93] and immediately start repaying the intra-governmental and Fed debts and all the other debt instruments, while leaving nearly $44 T still available to cover future deficit spending for 15 – 20 years.

Why wouldn't real progressives such as Matthew Yglesias claims to be, favor an alternative like that, since it changes the political context by removing the memes of “we're running out of money,” “SS and Medicare are fiscally unsustainable,” and “our grandchildren will bear the horrible burden of our enormous national debt,” from the political debate?

It's a puzzle isn't it?

Looking at the posts of Pethokoukis, Wiesenthal, Carney, Drum, and Yglesias, we're seeing certain common elements. None goes beyond discussion of PCS in the low trillions, and generally there's a focus on the TDC meme and its relationship to the debt ceiling.

Also, none is concerned with how the existence of PCS is related to the option of challenging the debt ceiling legislation by using the 14th Amendment. Chris Hayes's cable segment follows the same pattern.

An emerging recommendation from some of these posts is for the President to use the TDC option as a threat in the background of his negotiations with the Republicans and then settle with them on some arrangement that makes it much more difficult for debt ceiling crises to occur in the future. This is a very conservative and unimaginative approach to the present situation, and there's not a lot of difference of opinion among the MSM commentators. TDC is "weird" or "outre." It's probably legal. But it's bizarre. Use it as a threat to defuse the present situation. But, once there's a deal with the Republicans then put it back on the shelf, and go on with politics as before. Is that all we want to get out of the legislative authority for the Treasury to create seigniorage revenues by using the Fed's authority to create reserves in unlimited quantity?

The next one will discuss the Bradford and Plumer posts!

(Cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives [83].)

No votes yet

New MSM Trillion Dollar Coin Wave Misses the Big Story: Bradford and Plumer

letsgetitdone's blog [3]
Log in [143] or register [144] to post comments

Departments:

Thread:

Tags:

MMT [12]

Department of Bust Out Profit Models and Vampiric Capitalism [86]

TDC [112]

PCS [111]

$60 T coin [108]

Bradford [145]

Plumer [146]

In my last three posts, [139] I've critiqued the new wave of mainstream posts and commentary on Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS) on my way to making the case that the MSM are missing "the big story" about PCS. These include posts by Pethokoukis, [113] Wiesenthal, [19] Carney, [20] Drum, [115] Yglesias, [116] Yglesias, [117] and an MSNBC cable segment by Chris Hayes. [114] All of these have looked at PCS in terms of the Trillion Dollar Coin (TDC) and its possible impact on the impending debt ceiling shakedown. None have viewed it from a broader point of view. Let's now look at commentaries by Harry Bradford, [118] and Brad Plumer. [119]

Harry Bradford

Harry Bradford posted on the possibility of minting two $1 T platinum coins. He does the journo thing of citing a bunch of people saying this or that about aspects of the TDC proposal while doing very little evaluation and analysis. More or less, his post is just a "he said, she said" treatment.

Bradford begins by citing Chris Krueger's Guggenheim report, and cites Krueger's opinion that using the coin option might be inflationary, and might trigger a wave of law suits, Of course, I've already indicated above that neither of these things are likely to happen and that Krueger offers no reason for thinking these two effects would come to pass. But Bradford takes Krueger's view at face value.

He then quotes one economist as telling the Washington Post that "A government shutdown is much more straightforward" than using PCS. In reply to which one might ask: more straightforward for who? The journalists who have to write about it and won't have to research PCS beyond the TDC meme, or the millions of people who will suffer economic hardship for at least some period of time because the President decided to engage in that kind of brinksmanship, rather than just mint a platinum coin with a high enough face value to take the debt ceiling off the table as a negotiating tactic supporting the strategy of "shock doctrine" designed to emasculate the social safety net?

Bradford then cites Pethokoukis [113] as saying that using the coin might cause inflation, a point I examined here, [147] indicating that Pethokoukis was following Krueger's opinion and that Krueger's opinion, was just that, a statement supported by no argument at all.

Then Bradford points out that others incuding WaPo's Brad Plumer, [148] don't believe it would cause inflation since the money from the coin would not be directly spent into the economy. And he ends by indicating that in July 2011 Felix Salmon wrote [149] that if the coin were used, then investor confidence in the US might be damaged; but that I debated that view in a post at Naked Capitalism. [150]

Bradford neither tells us why Salmon thought investor confidence might be lost, nor why I disagreed with him. As it happens, Salmon thought that using the platinum coin would cause the US to lose reserve currency status. I argued against that point by questioning why that would happen as long as we were paying our debts with the seigniorage. I also pointed out that it would be very difficult to find a substitute for USD, and went over the difficulties, on a case-by-case basis, involved in shifting the reserve currency to another nation.

Brad Plumer

Brad Plumer's post [119] "Could two platinum coins solve the debt-ceiling crisis?" touches the various bases already reviewed above, including calling the coin and other options for getting around the Congressional prohibition, "wacky," while quoting the Peterson Institute for International Economics's Joseph Gagnon to the effect that using the the two coins would not be inflationary, because the Government would just be using the proceeds to spend at existing levels. This part is correct, of course.

Then Plumer adds something new to the discussion:

This strategy is hardly risk-free. Opponents could plausibly argue that the original law [151] was intended to set rules around commemorative coins, not to finance the operations of the government. And, of course, the political blowback would be fierce.

Indeed, even Balkin now says that he thinks the platinum-coin option is too risky. If Congress can't or won't lift the debt ceiling, then most likely the Obama administration would have to start shutting down parts of government so that it doesn't default on its debt. That, in theory, would prod Congress to act.

"All those other ideas [like the platinum coin option] are very uncertain, and they could lead to complicated litigation," says Balkin. "A government shutdown is much more straightforward."

Plumer is right that the political blowback would be fierce if the President used the PCS option. That's why I think it's best for the President to use it in a way that introduces definitive changes in the Treasury's authority to spend Congressional appropriations without borrowing, and in the political context of fiscal politics by creating the wherewithal to pay off the current debt. I favor minting a $60 T proof platinum coin to do that, to which the political blowback would be still more fierce. But, if one is going to get fierce political blowback in the first place then one may as well get it for changing something fundamental, rather than for using a band-aid over a short-term problem (the debt ceiling). For reasons I've outlined in this post [93] and this one, [133] I think minting a $60 T coin, would be a political game-changer for progressives and can build enough popular support for the President to survive any political blowback.

But as Plumer says, Jack Balkin now thinks [152] that the platinum coin option is too risky to use, not only for political reasons; but also because he thinks it would spawn complicated litigation. It may spawn litigation challenging the President's action based on the intent of the law. But as I argued above, suing and winning based on the question of Congressional intent is very difficult and tests the expertise of justices who like to stick to the text of legislation, and also there is the question of standing.

Balkin thinks [121] that it's more "straightforward" for the President, in case of Republican intransigence, to end the debt ceiling crisis by prioritizing spending with bond holders first on the priority list, and with gradual shut downs of portions of the Government as revenue shortages require. I agree with Balkin that this way of handling the situation will eventually work for the President politically and the Republicans will be blamed as they were in 1995 for the shutdown.

However, many people will suffer the effects of the shutdown; so for them this is not a "straightforward" course; but one that introduces many more complications into their lives than the President minting a $60 T platinum coin and then braving political blowback and litigation, and perhaps attempts at impeachment by the House.

It's worth noting that Jack Balkin has just posted an excellent argument [121] at the Atlantic for his preferred strategy of pursuing the government shutdown course, and a version at his own blog [152] that refers to PCS.

In the one on his blog he says:

Still others have begun discussing alternatives like trillion dollar platinum coins and the sale of exploding options, which I discussed during the 2011 debt ceiling crisis. These two ideas are quite interesting theoretically, but they are practically irrelevant.

Why? He doesn't make that clear except to go on to explain why the government shut down strategy will work. And later on in the post he says:

In fact, if the president ignored the debt ceiling and issued his own bonds, or if he publicly announced that he would mint trillion dollar coins or sell an exploding option to the Federal Reserve, he might lose the high ground in the standoff and actually be politically weakened. First, Republicans would feel no obligation to raise the debt ceiling because Obama would have taken all the pressure off them, and government functions would continue normally. Second, any of these strategies would give Republicans the opportunity to go on the attack. They would insist that Obama was acting illegally, go to court to stop him, and possibly even try to impeach him.

I agree with this, but only if Obama were to chose one of the low trillion dollar platinum coin options. Those are no good, because they leave the fundamental fantasy of fiscal scarcity intact. We can see that it is this kind of option Balkin is thinking about because even when PCS is used he still sees raising the debt ceiling as an issue that needs to be settled. But if a $60 T coin option were used, then the debt subject to the limit would be paid off and the debt ceiling would never be an issue, at least for the foreseeable future. In my next post, I'll get to the Big Story about PCS, the MSM commentators missed.

(Cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives [83].)

No votes yet

New MSM Trillion Dollar Coin Wave: Here's The Big Story

letsgetitdone's blog [3]
Log in [153] or register [154] to post comments

Departments:

Thread:

Tags:

MMT [12]

Department of Bust Out Profit Models and Vampiric Capitalism [86]

TDC [112]

PCS [111]

$60 T coin [108]

The one thing that jumps out at you when reading the mainstream posts of the past week-and-a-half bringing Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS) [48] into the forefront of attention again, for the first time since last year's debt ceiling crisis, is that every mainstream blogger or commentator is telling a story about minting a Trillion Dollar Coin (TDC), or a few trillion dollar coins as an option the President can either use or not to get around the debt ceiling. But no one is telling us the much bigger story of the enormously increased authority to cause the creation of fiat money, delegated to the Executive Branch by the Congress in the 1996 legislation enabling PCS. And no one is telling us what the possible implications of this change are for our political and economic systems.

I've reviewed these posts, as well as a cable segment, in the four earlier installments of this series. The installments, beginning with this one, [155] are here. [139] The posts and the cable segment are by: Pethokoukis, [113] Wiesenthal, [19] Carney, [20] Drum, [115] Yglesias, [116] Yglesias, [117] Harry Bradford, [118] Brad Plumer. [119] and Chris Hayes. [114]

Background: Moving off the Gold Standard

This is reminiscent of the situation with the system of fiat currency itself in 1971, when President Nixon, took us off the gold standard for purposes of international trade. After Nixon's action there were no good treatments in the Press, or by economists, about how the move to a non-convertible fiat currency with a floating exchange rate ,and no international debts denominated in any other currency, had changed the financial system by removing the possibility that the Government could become involuntarily insolvent (“run out of money” except through its own choice not to create more).

Before Nixon's big change, the amount of US currency and reserves was limited by the amount of our gold reserves, because it was possible for other nations to demand payment in gold in return for the dollars they held in their accounts at the Federal Reserve. In fact, Nixon closed the gold convertibility window, because France had started what looked like might be a multinational run on the gold reserves of the United States, jeopardizing the stability of the dollar in international trade, and threatening its role as the reserve currency in the middle of the Vietnam War.

After the window was closed however, other nations followed the United States in leaving the gold standard, with the result that now we have a world of nations with fiat currencies, though many nations aren't “sovereign” in their own currencies because they've incurred debts in other currencies, or have pegged their currencies to the dollar, or, in the case of the Eurozone nations have, like the American States, given up their power to issue currency, and become currency users of the Euro (or the dollar, as the case may be).

Nixon's ending of the gold standard was enormously significant because it removed the gold supply solvency constraint on the United States. And it restored the powers of the Government given it by the Constitution to issue money as needed to provide for the common defense and the general welfare (today we might say fulfill the public purpose).

The Gold Standard Hangover and Progressive Fiscal Policy

But the full significance of this event wasn't understood by most government officials or the public, both here and in other nations. Constraints on spending that were appropriate for a gold standard-based financial system were never repealed. They persist to this very day in our institutions, in our minds, in our economic systems, and in our politics.

These included: 1) Congress dividing the financial functions of the Government between the Federal Reserve and the Treasury; 2) Congress prohibiting the Fed from directly buying Treasury-issued debt; 3) Congress's ceiling on debt subject to the limit; 4) Congress's prohibiting the Fed from issuing credits directly to the Treasury to implement deficit spending, forcing it to issue debt and making the terms deficit and debt close to synonymous in the public's mind; 5) Congress's delegating its currency power primarily to the Fed; while leaving its delegation of the power to coin money with the Treasury; and 6) Congress leaving the Fed, the Central Bank, independent of the Executive Branch and the Treasury, but, at the same time closely associated with the Banking and Wall Street interests that own the regional banks, and sit on the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC).

These constraints have divided the sovereign currency power of the Government and weakened the President's power to implement spending appropriated by Congress, when that spending involves deficits, even though that deficit spending was previously approved by Congress in its appropriations process. They have also perpetuated the previous gold standard-based understanding of deficit spending as closely associated with the national debt and the further understanding of the debt as a threat to government solvency, the international credit of the United States, “our grandchildren,” our standing with “the bond vigilantes,” fiscal sustainability, and fiscal responsibility.

So, these constraints have mired us down in the deficit/debt cluster of issues, self-imposed chains that prevent us from using Federal fiscal policy to meet our many problems. They have been the worst enemy of economic progressivism over the past 40 or so years, and have prevented us from responding strongly enough to the crash of 2008 to create a robust, full employment economy.

And, perhaps worse, the thinking that arises out of them now rationalizes the policies of austerity and deficit reduction that threaten to destroy the social safety net and bring our economy down again into recession or depression, or at least into a decade or more of future stagnation. These austerity policies will ruin the economic lives and prospects of a generation of Americans, and will place increasing burdens driving more and more older people into poverty, for the sake of false gold-standard based theories about how to run fiscal policy in what has become a sovereign fiat currency-based financial system.

PCS Creates a Great Crack in Gold Standard Constraints and Austerity Justifications

The big story about Platinum Coin Seigniorage is not the Trillion Dollar Coin and its possible implications for solving the debt ceiling crisis, as the mainstream has been telling us. Instead it is the great crack it creates in the wall of gold standard-based constraints still hanging over our politics and economics, and the increased fiscal and policy space this gives us to use to solve our various national problems. It is the authority the Executive Branch of Government now has to break through these constraints, and begin to unify the financial functions of government behind the public purpose. Let's look at those constraints again, and see what PCS, if used vigorously by the President, can do to weaken them or make them irrelevant.

-- Congress dividing the financial functions of the Government between the Federal Reserve and the Treasury:

PCS helps to bring these functions closer together by enabling the Treasury to commandeer the power of the Fed [156] to create unlimited reserves to fill the Treasury General Account (TGA); the public spending purse, to cover debt repayment and deficit spending for years to come. The Treasury can use this power to demonstrate to the public that there is no Federal solvency problem, and no need for austerity or deficit reduction, because many trillions of dollars fill the public purse.

Another implication of this power is that it would add greatly to the amount of reserves in the banking system as the Treasury adds reserves through debt repayment and deficit spending without destroying them through a corresponding amount of debt issuance. To compensate for Treasury's reserve adds, the Fed, if it wants to keep the Federal Funds Rate at a target level above zero, would have to pay interest on reserves (IOR) shifting the interest paying function from the Treasury to the Fed.

-- Congress prohibiting the Fed from directly buying Treasury-issued debt:

PCS, if used to produce coins with face values high enough to repay the debt subject to the limit, and also pay for future deficit spending appropriations for some years, enables the Treasury to get along without issuing debt. So, it would need no one, including the Fed, to buy Treasury debt.

-- Congress's ceiling on debt subject to the limit:

PCS, if used to produce coins with face values high enough to repay the debt subject to the limit and also pay for future deficit spending appropriations for some years, would make the debt ceiling a dead letter for some time to come, even if the PCS authority were repealed. The debt ceiling law would be still be there; but it would have no effect on politics or fiscal policy, because there would be no, or at least very little, debt. And there would also be no political issue due to the presence of public debt.

-- Congress's prohibiting the Fed from issuing credits directly to the Treasury to implement deficit spending, forcing it to issue debt and making the terms deficit and debt close to synonymous in the public's mind:

This constraint arises from the prohibition against the Fed granting credit to the Treasury. PCS however, involves the Fed exchanging reserves for a legal tender coin produced by the Treasury. Technically this isn't granting credit to Treasury; but just the Fed accepting a deposit of legal tender into the Mint's account, crediting that deposit as reserves, and then transferring most of the reserves created into the TGA as seigniorage. So, PCS produces revenue for the Treasury without violating this constraint, and also renders the constraint unimportant.

-- Congress's delegating its currency power primarily to the Fed; while leaving its delegation of the power to coin money with the Treasury:

This constraint still remains with PCS. But the 1996 legislation, for the first time, makes the coining power of the Mint the near equivalent of the reserve creating power of the Fed, by allowing the Treasury to create coins with arbitrarily high face values.

With that power, the Treasury can require the Fed to fill the public purse to any level that Treasury thinks is necessary for its purposes. So, the Treasury's lack of currency and reserve-creating authority would be far less important than before, if PCS is used to its full potential.

Let's be clear, however, filling the public purse [157] to any level, however high it may be, doesn't open the purse strings for free spending by the President. Congress still has to appropriate spending in excess of tax revenues for Treasury to spend that money. So, Congress still has control of the public purse; even after delegating its authority to fill it to the Treasury and the Fed in combination.

-- Congress leaving the Fed, the Central Bank, independent of the Executive Branch and the Treasury, but, at the same time closely associated with the Banking and Wall Street interests that own the regional banks, and sit on the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) which sets the monetary policy of the United States:

PCS, again, if high enough coin face values are involved, reduces the independence of the Fed relative to the Treasury, by influencing its actions in setting its target interest rate.

As I've explained above, when and if coin seigniorage is spent by Treasury, reserves are added to the banking system in the trillions of dollars. But, these reserves would not be drained by debt issuance, so their existence in the system will drive the Federal Funds Rate (FFR) down to zero. If the Fed has a positive interest rate target, then it will need to pay IOR to depositors, and this will shift the bill for Federal interest over to the Fed, rather than the Treasury, taking it off budget.

Variations in PCS Options

The mainstream bloggers and commentators told the PCS story solely in terms of the theoretical availability of coins with face values in the low trillions and their potential impact on the debt ceiling conflict. But they never considered or examined a more aggressive use of PCS to change the US financial system substantially, by freeing the Treasury from its gold standard chains and the political system from fiscal policy alternatives focused first and last on their fiscal impact on deficits, debts, and misplaced solvency fears, rather than on full employment, price stability, and other public purposes. They never considered a range of PCS options and their possible wide range of impacts on economics, politics, and the federal financial system, as well as on the debt ceiling conflict.

Not even Brad Plumer. [119] quoting the acute Jack Balkin, [158] is thinking, for example, about very high value PCS, in the $60 T or greater range, as options that might liquidate the debt completely, and change the whole structure of how fiscal policy could be implemented. In addition, no one was thinking about the relationship between the general PCS authority and the broader government context including the Congress and the Fed.

As I've said in another place, [93] a $60 T solution would allow Treasury to harness the authority of the Fed to fill the TGA (the public purse), so that Treasury need never issue debt again for the next 15 – 20 years, ample time to reconsider the unwise and damaging decision made by Congress in gold standard days to make the Fed independent of the Executive Branch and unaccountable to the public. That solution would also make the debt ceiling issue a dead letter, to the point where that legislation could easily be repealed over the next few years, since no one would expect to use it again.

When one proposes a very high value PCS solution, almost the first objection, after getting over the shock of hearing or seeing the proposal, is that either repayment of the debt, or deficit spending using seigniorage rather than debt issuance would be inflationary. That consideration made it into the mainstream posts. I'll consider the inflation objection at length in my next post. However it's also already been considered and evaluated in past writings by myself, [93] and also by Scott Fullwiler. [80] The bottom line, however, is that debt repayment won't be inflationary; and that deficit spending using seigniorage, also won't be inflationary in itself.

Any inflation effect will result from unwise and excessive Congressional deficit spending past the point of full employment. It will have nothing to do with using seigniorage credits rather than credits accumulated through bond sales for deficit spending.

If the mainstream had considered a wide range of PCS options, then one among them would have caught the broader PCS story, not that PCS could help the President over his current hump with the Republicans; but that it can remove many of the Treasury's gold standard-based constraints and, in the process, free up progressive advocates to push for solutions to most of our acute policy problems without always having to fight the “we can't afford it, because we're running out of money and what will we do about the burden on our grandchildren,” battle. If used properly, PCS can end all current justifications for austerity, debt, and deficit reduction in public spending. It can free progressives to build the Green New Deal and with it a bright future for America. The mainstream bloggers have missed all that by their narrow focus on the Trillion Dollar Coin and the debt ceiling rather than on PCS and its more general implications and potential significance if used.

Why?

One important question, is why the mainstream bloggers who are interested in the PCS idea haven't explored options other than the band-aid option of a few trillions in coin seigniorage to get by the debt ceiling for a little while. Why couldn't they see PCS more broadly than they do and explore the idea to begin to understand the likely impact of it generally as well as alternative PCS options. What's holding them back? Is it the impact of busy lives and hectic days? Is it the time they spend on the telephone or in email communications with other mainstream bloggers and insiders in the Washington/New York village? Is it that they consciously or unconsciously shy away from ideas that might lead them to advocate policies that would actually change the system of political economy we have now?

I cannot say. But what I do know is that their examination of platinum coin seigniorage in the context of the debt ceiling crisis, and otherwise, is too narrow and superficial too serve us well. We need deeper thinking and more detailed exploration of this relatively new idea, and its implications.

But the sudden waves of blogging by the mainstream when debt ceiling crises approach, aren't giving us any of that. What they're giving us instead, is an echo chamber treatment of the TDC, not the daring explorations of a new idea, very high face value platinum coin seigniorage, that we have a right to expect from a free press.

(Cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives [83].)

No votes yet

Platinum Coin Seigniorage, Issuing Debt, Keystroking Deficit Spending, and Inflation

letsgetitdone's blog [3]
Log in [159] or register [160] to post comments

Departments:

Thread:

Tags:

$60 T coin [108]

hyperinflation [161]

inflation [162]

MMT [12]

PCS [111]

Department of Now It All Makes Sense [6]

The most frequent objections to proposals that we use Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS) [125] to create reserves for debt repayment and deficit spending, frequently come back to inflation. Perhaps people can't get over the association they learned in high school Social Studies, or perhaps in American History, or Economics 101, that when Governments create money and then just spend it without any compensating deflationary action, inflation or hyperinflation happens. Maybe they can't forget those cartoons about people in Weimar Republic days pushing wheelbarrows full of money to the market to buy some bread. So, I've been promising for about a week now, to blog about the likely expected relationship between the different PCS options and inflation using the framework laid out by Scott Fullwiler! [80]

Types of Spending, Methods of Filling the Public Purse and Inflation/Deflation

That framework is reflected in the first column of the table where all but the top row names the categories in Scott's framework. The table also expands the framework a bit, however. Scott's post compares using PCS to using debt instruments to add reserves to the Treasury General Account (TGA), the Treasury's spending account, to make the case that PCS, in, and of itself, won't add to inflation. I want to expand the perspective a bit by adding a comparison of both these alternatives with the alternative of allowing Treasury to close any gap between the tax credits it receives and the spending appropriated by Congress by creating in its own reserves in the TGA, either directly, or by sending an instruction to the Fed to credit the TGA with the particular amount of reserves necessary to do the deficit spending. So, here's the table.

Table – Likely Inflationary or Deflationary Impact of Debt Repayment and Government Deficit Spending By Type of Method Used To Credit the Treasury's Spending Account

The conclusions in this table are based on very few ideas:

1. There's no way reserves paid by the Treasury to redeem old debt can be inflationary unless it is spent into the economy, because there's no channel for causal impact at all.

2. So, debt repaid to other Government agencies and to the Federal Reserve Banks cannot be inflationary beyond inflation tendencies already built into the regularly scheduled spending into the economy of the agencies involved.

At the end of the 2012 fiscal year the total of Federal Reserve and Federal Agency held debt including Trust Funds was $6.4 Trillion (p. 51). [163] So immediate redemption of that debt would reduce the debt subject to the limit by just under 40%.

3. Debt instruments in the private sector are a form of financial asset that is more inflationary than reserves in checking or savings accounts.

The classical Quantity Theory of Money (QTM) says that increasing the amount of money in circulation is inflationary. [164] But, much empirical evidence shows that this is wrong, and that the expansionary factor in modern economies is increasing Net Financial Assets [165] leading to increased demand beyond the productive capacity of the economy to absorb. NFAs can include income in the form money; but when money is exchanged for an asset of equal value as happens when a security is redeemed, then that's not inflationary, and may even be deflationary because of the ending of interest payments and securities leveraging that follows if no compensating debt issuance happens.

Here's Scott Fullwiler's reasoning on why this is so:

As I previously explained [166], this is the operational equivalent of quantitative easing (QE). The purchase of Treasury securities by the Treasury would retire the securities and leave banks holding reserve balances. But, as I explained in the previous post, “Banks can’t ‘do’ anything with all the extra reserve balances. Loans create deposits—reserve balances don’t finance lending or add any ‘fuel’ to the economy. Banks don’t lend reserve balances except in the federal funds market, and in that case the Fed always provides sufficient quantities to keep the federal funds rate at its target—that’s what it means to set an interest rate target.

And on the subject of the deposits created by the debt redemptions he goes on to quote his previous post on QE3: linked just above:

“First, sellers of bonds were always able to sell their securities for deposits with or without the Treasury’s intervention given that there are around 20 dealers posting bids at all times. Anyone holding a Treasury Security and desiring to sell it in order to spend more out of current income can do so easily; holders of Treasury Securities are never constrained in spending by the fact that they hold the security instead of a deposit. Further, dealers finance purchases of securities from both the private sector and the Treasury by borrowing in the repo market—that is, via credit creation using securities as collateral. This means there is no ‘taking money from one person to give it to another’ zero sum game when bonds are issued (banks can similarly purchase securities by taking an overdraft in reserve accounts and clearing it at the end of the day in the federal funds market), as what in fact happens is that the existence of the security actually enables more credit creation and is known to regularly facilitate credit creation in money markets that are a multiple of face value. Removing the security from circulation eliminates the ability for it to be leveraged many times over in money markets.

“Second, the seller of the security now holding a deposit is earning less interest and can convert the deposit to an interest earning balance. Just as one holding a Treasury can easily sell, one holding a deposit can easily find interest earning alternatives. Some make the argument that the security can decline in value and so this is not the same as holding a deposit, but this unwittingly supports my point that holders of deposits aren’t necessarily doing so to spend. Deposits don’t spend themselves, after all.

“Third, these operations by the Treasury create no new net financial assets [165] for the non-government sector (and can in fact reduce its net saving by reducing interest paid on the national debt as bonds are replaced by reserve balances earning 0.25%). Any increase in aggregate spending would thereby require the private sector to spend more out of existing income, or to dis-save, as opposed to doing additional spending out of additional income. The commonly held view that ‘more money’ necessarily creates spending confuses ‘more money’ with ‘more income.’ QE [167]—whether ‘Fed style’ or ‘Treasury style’—creates the former via an asset swap; on the other hand, a true helicopter drop [168] would create the latter as it raises the net financial assets of the private sector. Again, ‘money’ doesn’t spend itself. . . .

4. Demand-pull inflation cannot be caused by Government deficit spending, unless Congress appropriates and the Treasury spends, past the point of full employment. Whether inflation or hyperinflation happens generally has nothing to do with the method used to add electronic reserves to the TGA; but as one approaches full employment Federal interest payments and private leveraging of Federal securities resulting from debt instruments are more likely to initiate inflation than using either of the other two methods.

5. Using PCS to fill the TGA with reserves is very similar to the third method of giving the Treasury the authority to mandate the Fed to add reserves to the TGA upon instruction from the Treasury. In fact, functionally, depositing a high value platinum coin into the US Mint's Public Enterprise Fund Account, and then “sweeping” the seigniorage into the TGA is virtually equivalent to instructing the Fed to add reserves to the TGA. The “big coins” are just a different form of message than a Treasury instruction would be. But the functional financial content of the different kinds of messages is virtually the same. They both mandate the Fed to create the amount reserves specified in the message.

At Bottom A Political Choice

Some readers may look at this argument and agree with everything I've said and still prefer to deficit spend only after issuing and selling debt, rather than using either PCS or direct Treasury instructions. They might argue that even if it is true that the other methods are less inflationary, the method of debt issuance 1) is not so inflationary as to create a problem and 2) creates a political climate among the public and in Congress, that restricts government deficit spending, and keeps it sufficiently in check, that we almost always have a good deal less than full employment, and therefore never risk serious demand-pull inflation. And that's just the way they like it!

That, of course, is a political choice, and the people who make it, knowing that the Administration can use PCS to fill the public purse now, and also that Congress can authorize the third method of direct Treasury instruction if it wants to, are saying that they choose inflation control through using a method that fools most Americans into thinking that we are running out of nominal financial resources, even at the expense of having 28.5 million Americans who want full-time jobs not being able to get them, [169] and even at the expense of having more than 50,000 fatalities per year due to lack of health insurance, and even at the expense of blighted futures for a generation of American young people, and the prospect of increasing poverty for many old people, and even at the expense of : and on and on.

Then I have an answer for them. And I'll begin by quoting Bruce Springsteen and Randy Wray. [170]

We take care of our own
We take care of our own
Wherever this flag’s flown
We take care of our own

That's Springsteen; and here's Wray:

. . . We don’t let old folks sleep on the street. We take care of our own. We don’t let children go hungry. We take care of our own. We don’t exclude the 47%. We take care of our own.

We’re all stakeholders in this great nation. We take care of our own. White, black, brown, yellow and red, we take care of our own. Young or old, healthy or sick, we take care of our own. . . .

We need a good government to help us take care of our own. We need good public services and infrastructure to keep our country strong so that we can take care of our own. Our government spends to keep our country strong so that we can take care of our own. . . .

Sovereign government cannot be forced into involuntary insolvency. It can always afford to make all payments as they come due. It can always afford to buy anything that is for sale for its own currency. It can always financially afford any spending that is in the public interest. It can always afford to take care of its own.

Anything that is technologically feasible is financially affordable for the sovereign issuer of the currency. It comes down to technology, resources, and political will. We’ve got the technology to take care of our own. We’ve got the resources to take care of our own. All that is missing is the political will.

And then I'd go on to say this.

Your method of filling the public purse through selling debt to accumulate credits in the TGA, may provide an extra hedge against inflation by fooling people into thinking we are running out of money and that unemployment and austerity are just the price we have to pay for insuring ourselves against inflation, but that method is anathema to me because it creates a political barrier to taking care of own, and undermines our political will to take care of our own and one another.

The 28.5 million who want full-time jobs at a living wage are our own, as much as you. And they have a right to a Federal Government that will use its full power to see to it that they have full time job offers at a living wage that they can be proud of. And that, in the final analysis is why PCS, and direct Treasury instruction of the Fed, are better methods of filling the public purse than your method of using debt instruments.

The method of direct Treasury instruction of the Fed, isn't open to us without legislation. But PCS is available now to fill the public purse. We ought to fill it, the TGA, using PCS, with $60 T in electronic credits immediately, [93] so no one can be fooled again by people saying that we can't afford something for sale in our own currency.

We don't need to have any public debt subject to the limit if we don't want it. And we always can have enough money in the public purse to afford to take care of our own, if Congress will only represent most Americans and legislate the necessary programs, while appropriating the necessary funds to open the purse strings of that full purse the Treasury will have! At bottom, it's a political choice; and, if we want to be real Americans, then we must choose to take care of our own!

(Cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives [83].)

No votes yet

Beyond the MSM: the New Wave of Brief Blog Posts on Platinum Coin Seigniorage

letsgetitdone's blog [3]
Log in [171] or register [172] to post comments

Departments:

Thread:

Tags:

MMT [12]

Department of Bust Out Profit Models and Vampiric Capitalism [86]

PCS [111]

$60 T coin [108]

inflation [162]

hyperinflation [161]

Introduction

MSM bloggers and cable hosts weren't alone in creating the new wave of posts and video segments [155] on Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS) at the beginning of December. The blogosphere also produced brief posts from a number of bloggers, as well as a few more substantial ones. I'll review the brief ones in this post, and the more substantial ones in future posts, but won't include my own recent posts on PCS during December.

Reviewing the Posts

First off the mark on December 3, was David Dayen at FireDogLake [173] who mentioned the “trillion dollar coin” as something thee President could do to strengthen his hand in dealing with the Republicans. His mentioned was quickly followed by Atrios, later in the morning, who wrote a very short post [174] saying:

I really don't know why the administration doesn't take the "mint the trillion dollar platinum coin" [173] option seriously. It is, as far as I can tell, perfectly legal.

This triggered a post [175] by Michael Sankowski at Monetary Realism announcing that the “Trillion Dollar Coin Goes Mainstream” which says that if Atrios knows about the coin that everyone on “the smart left” knows about it!

Mike Sankowski then blogged again [176] on December 6, wondering out loud where Zerohedge's rant on the Trillion Dollar Coin (TDC) was? In that one Mike refers to the mainstream blogs by Yglesias, Drum, and Carney all on the TDC and then makes fun of Zerohedge for not picking up on the subject.

Cullen Roche at Pragmatic Capitalism, then blogged on the TDC on December 7, in a piece [177] called “Platinum Coin Easing,” which draws its title from some views of JKH's [178] I'll be reviewing in a future post. Cullen railed against the debt ceiling conflict calling it “stupid,” and also says that while PCS may look “Zimbabwean” it does solve the debt ceiling problem. Cullen points to JKH's post and says:

“The coin would replace some of the bonds that the Fed currently holds solving three issues:
1) A non-inflationary way for the US Government to spend.
2) It circumvents the debt ceiling by effectively reducing the debt balance by $1T.
3) It’s a completely legal workaround.”

Donald McClarey at The American Catholic blog also posted [179] on December 7, on “Of Trillion Dollar Coins and Fiscal Lunacy.” calls it a lunatic nostrum, quotes the WaPo article [119] by Plumer, and refers to the “wacked out left.” That's right, he offers no reasoning at all. Just name-calling and this:

“The country is in debt sixteen trillion dollars. By the time Obama finally leaves office we will probably be at least 20 trillion in debt. Of course this does not take into account dozens of trillions of debt in entitlement obligations coming due over the next few decades. We are rapidly reaching the point where it is mathematically impossible to ever pay off this debt without currency depreciation and/or hyper inflation. This scheme is basically currency depreciation as the US currency swells by two trillion dollars in a year’s time. If attempted I think it would lead ultimately to hyperinflation. The left are not all loons. Something like this will eventually be done by people who realize it is economic poison, but who are willing to do it anyway to get out of dealing with an unpayable debt. The impact on our economy would be likely catastrophic.“

Of course, McClarey, was in too much of a hurry ranting against the coin to notice that the first nearly $6.5 trillion of debt paid off using PCS couldn't cause currency depreciation because it would not enter the economy at all, since it would be used to pay interagency debt and Fed-held debt. Nor does any other seigniorage spending need to be happen except when debt instruments fall due, and Congress appropriates deficit spending. So, to back his hyperinflation currency depreciation rant, McClarey has to show that PCS-based spending would be more inflationary than normal spending after debt issuance, along with normal scheduled repayment of debt. Of course, he does not, and, I think, cannot show this.

Next, brief mention needs to be made of a post [180] at “Twitchy – Tweet on the Platinum coin.” This post also happened on December 7. The tweets are entertaining but contribute little, if anything to the debate. On the other hand, they do make more sense than McClarey's post on PCS.

On December 8, James Hamilton at Econobrowser offered a post [181] objecting to using the coin “from an institutional perspective.”

It basically amounts to the assertion that the Treasury Secretary has the unilateral power at any time to monetize completely the entire U.S. debt. The Treasury could issue a dozen or so of these coins and then pay off the Treasury's debtors at maturity just by writing a check written on its resulting ginormous account with the Fed. The creation of this power is I suspect something that Joe and every other sensible economist would view with abhorrence.

It's good that Hamilton sees the implications of the coin so clearly, but he fails to explain why Joe Gagnon of the Peterson Institute, and “sensible” economists would object so strongly to the Treasury being able to fill the public purse so that the debt could be paid off without throwing the economy into a decade of recession, depression, or stagnation due to running continuous surpluses to “fix the debt.” If there are any economists who prefer this way of “fixing the debt” to PCS, then I think the proper label for them is “insane” rather than “sensible.”

Hamilton goes on:

The plan requires the Fed and courts to play along. The Fed would need to agree to credit the Treasury's account for the deposit of the coins. I doubt the Fed would voluntarily hand over complete control of the nation's money supply to the Treasury in this manner. And the courts would be asked to confirm that legislation originally intended to satisfy a small group of numismatists in fact ceded authority to the President to monetize the entire outstanding debt of the U.S. Government.

This is, unfortunately, a highly questionable argument. Its first problem is that the Fed would have no choice because 1) the coin is legal tender; and also 2) the law says [182] that in case any power of the Fed appears to conflict with the powers of the Secretary of the Treasury, then the Fed powers shall be subject to the supervision and control of the Secretary. So, the Fed couldn't even take this Court over the objections of the Secretary. See also beowulf's more detailed comment. [183]

More generally, any law suit by anyone objecting to the use of the coin, on grounds of the intent of the law, would require the Court to grant standing to the plaintiff. But what would be the grounds for such standing? We already know that for Congress to have standing to sue, it's not enough to have a member of each House bring a suit to the Supreme Count because during the 1970s two progressives Sen. Phil Hart (D-MI), and Rep. Henry Reuss (D-WI), brought a case to the Supreme Court challenging the Constitutionality of the Fed, and were denied standing by the Supreme Court. So, both Houses would have to agree on an action. That won't happen.

So, both Congress and the Fed are out as plaintiffs, and anyone else would have to show that they were damaged by the use of PCS to acquire standing. No holders of intra-governmental debt could show that, or would be allowed by the President to pursue such a case. And no non-government holders could claim they were damaged by the Treasury's payoff of the debt they hold on schedule. So, again, who would have standing?

The next brief posts appeared on December 10. Louis Golino at CoinWeek posted on [184] “Trillion Dollar Coins?” Golino follows the main line of mainstream bloggers saying that PCS is legal, but other alternatives would be tried first including the 14th Amendment and shutting down the Government gradually.

However, I've never thought that this is a sensible opening position, even though it's not an unusual one. First, because I don't think a 14th Amendment challenge to the debt ceiling law is viable as long as other alternatives exist for spending appropriations mandated by Congress, and one of these is Platinum Coin Seigniorage. And second, shutting down the Government without using an alternative that would avoid such a shutdown by allowing the President to spend Congressional Appropriations would leave him in violation of his oath of office, and potentially open to an impeachment action in the House.

Golino, and others, seem to think that all the options open to the President in a debt ceiling crisis are on all fours, so to to speak, and that he is free to select whichever option makes the most sense to him politically. But legally, if he can continue to spend Congressional appropriations without violating both the debt ceiling, and his obligations under the 14th amendment, then he's legally obligated to use an option that allows him to do that. PCS is the best of those options.

Jim McCraigh, of Precious Metals Digest, in “Trillion Dollar Platinum Coins and Other Dumb Ideas” [185] is another blogger who worries about Zimbabwe and hyperinflation. He thinks the idea would be laughable if the “illiterate”people advancing it weren't “held out as so-called experts.”

… simply failing to understand one of the most basic economic truths… that a critical attribute of real money is as a store of value that remains stable over time. These ersatz coins would not be real money, but a super-sized fiat monetary fiasco sure to lead to political and financial chaos. Our national debt must be paid back the old fashioned way… by earning it through the creation of real wealth and not through the creation of more funny money.”

Unfortunately, for McCraigh, he has yet to adjust to the fact, that all our money these days, is fiat money, and that we can only pay back the national debt by using fiat money because it's the only kind, just as he must pay taxes using that same fiat money. The creation of real wealth is important and necessary for keeping the economy strong and for ensuring price stability; but our national debt can't be repaid with real wealth. It can be only be paid using fiat money. And from the viewpoint of its being paid when it falls due; it doesn't matter whether it's paid by fiat money acquired through taxing, borrowing, or seigniorage.

Dorothy Kosich at Mineweb also wrote a post [186] on December 10: “Can trillion dollar platinum coins solve the US Debt Ceiling Problem?” This one was a “he said, she said” post linking to and citing Chris Krueger, myself, Jack Balkin, Pethokoukis of AEI, Joe Gagnon of Peterson Institute, Brad Plumer, and John Carney. It offers no new interpretations, but just the author's selection of the most important points from previous authors without using specific links to the posts or other documents cited.

In December 11, The MomCat at docudharma offered “The Debt Ceiling Myth and the Platinum Coin.” [187] She reviews PCS and what it does with a focus on some posts of mine. She mentions my $60 T coin post [93] and the distinction between the contents of the public purse and the purse strings. She also notes the difficulty of impeaching the President if he uses PCS, and quotes Jack Balkin [61] on the possible use of the14th amendment and the likelihood of a conviction of the President in case of impeachment.

The platinum coin made The Daily Beast on December 11, with a post [188] by Matthew Zeitlin called: “How a Platinum Coin Could Solve the Debt-ceiling Problem!” Zeitlin reviews the usual background on the TDC and then asks whether “. . . isn’t this what banana republics do, print money to fund the government when they can’t collect enough in taxes or sell their debt at a reasonable rate?”

And he answers the question yes, but also thinks it only becomes a problem when “printing money” is used regularly to cover the gap between tax revenues and spending. And he ends by saying that the platinum coin option really shows how odd the debt ceiling legislation is in applying a constraint to the Government spending on what has already been approved, and on interest payments it is already obligated to pay. He says that's a legal limit on spending and not an economic one, and that that is “the real joke,” rather than the platinum coin itself. In short, Zeitlin says nothing very different from other commentators and contributes very little to the earlier MSM discussion.

After December 11, brief replies to the PCS MSM posts seem to quiet down somewhat. But on December 17, two more appeared. One was by Fred E. Foldvary [189] at Foldvary calls the TDC a joke, and says it would be inflationary; but he fails to specify any kind of causal mechanism for showing that this would be the case. Instead, he basically repeats the increasing the money supply leads to money inflation which leads to real inflation, Quantity Theory of Money (QTM) meme. In doing this, he ignores discussions [164] about why QTM isn't applicable to economies like ours experiencing output gaps. He also ignores specific posts [80] analyzing the relationship of PCS to inflation which focus on types of PCS spending, and show that these would not be any more inflationary than spending accompanied by sale of debt instruments.

A second brief reply [190] to the MSM new wave on December 17 is from John Slater at Seeking Alpha and is called: “Balanced Budgets, Seigniorage And The Strange Case Of The Trillion Dollar Coin.”

“It appears that there is serious discussion afoot aimed at pressuring President Obama to engineer a transfer of power to the federal executive branch comparable in scope to the historical shifts engineered by Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt during previous times of great crisis in America. This topic has gotten little coverage to date in the serious economic and political press.

“Don't doubt for a minute that we will begin to see such suggestions in spades should the Republicans stand firm when the debt ceiling issue again comes to the fore in early 2013. There will be tremendous pressure to give the President unfettered authority to spend all budgeted funds. Since the Congress seems incapable of adopting a budget, does this mean that all de facto spending authority will soon be transferred to the executive branch? The implications for the debt (TNX), foreign exchange (DXY) and equity markets (SPX) of such a transfer of power are more significant than any single factor currently driving the markets.”

I find Slater's reasoning here, a bit slippery. Congress may be avoiding doing formal budgets, but it's still appropriating money for deficit spending under continuing resolutions. So, Congress still has the purse strings in its hands, and the President won't be able to deficit spend any seigniorage profits without Congressional approval, which it can refuse to give whenever a CR comes up. In addition, of course, it could decide to do its job and arrive at a budget. Insofar, as PCS facilitates that, which it would if a $60 T coin showing that the US isn't running out of money were minted, then this is an advantage and not a disadvantage of that PCS option.

Conclusion

The brief posts on PCS don't add very much to the picture, Many of them just reflect stereotypical fears about inflation. Others review previous literature just spreading the news as it were. Still others attack the idea as silly, pretty much based on a psychological reaction rather than on any reasoned critique of the PCS idea.

The best understanding of the idea is in Cullen Roche's post. The best review of PCS posts is probably MomCat's. The posts by Hamilton and Slater bring forth legitimate institutional concerns. But to take Hamilton's seriously; you have to be supportive of the Fed's independence, which some, like myself, do not support because we view that “independence” as, in practice, subordination to Wall Street. Slater's post, voices the different concern that more de facto power still, will be shifted over to the presidency and away from Congress by PCS.

About that, I can only say that PCS gives to the presidency the power to prevent an abuse of power by the Congress, namely the debt ceiling legislation itself, and also gives the President the power to avoid interest bearing debt instrument-based financing of Congressional deficit spending appropriations if he/she desires. I think both of these are very good things, especially since the key power of controlling the purse strings still remains with the Congress, and not with the President. It seems to me that any greater leverage that falls to the President as a result of using PCS is leverage that can always seized back by Congress anytime it wants to do its collective job and represent the majority of the American people. On the other hand, if it wants to continue to represent narrow and plutocratic interests seeking to block any Federal spending that doesn't directly benefit them, then PCS profits may be viewed as a check on such an abuse of power by the Congress, and a reminder to Congress that the "how are we gonna pay for it" excuse for not legislating Federal programs people desperately need won't work anymore!

(Cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives [83].)

No votes yet

Beowulf and Diehl Embrace Trillion Dollar Coin Incrementalism!

letsgetitdone's blog [3]
Log in [191] or register [192] to post comments

Departments:

Thread:

Corporatism [88]

Tags:

MMT [12]

Department of Bust Out Profit Models and Vampiric Capitalism [86]

HVPCS [193]

$60 T coin [108]

austerity [194]

incrementalism [195]

HVCS [196]

Philip Diehl [197]

beowulf [8]

Carlos Mucha [198]

A wonderful discussion thread has been going on at Monetary Realism (MR) after a very good new post [199] by beowulf (Carlos Mucha), who first brought forward the proposal for the Executive Branch to use the authority provided in the 1996 Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS) legislation to fill the public purse, on whether the Fed had a legal basis for turning down PCS in the form of the Trillion Dollar Coin (TDC). I'll leave the legal discussion for another blog post, since I agree with beo on these, and also need to review some legal arguments [200] against the TDC by some George Washington University Professors. Here I want to write about some of the MR discussion relating to High Value Platinum Coin Seigniorage (HVPCS) vs. incremental PCS options. I'll show that incrementalism won't work; and that HVPCS will kill austerity politics, which is its most important purpose.

Why the $60 T Coin Is Needed

Beowulf addresses himself to my call for HVPCS using a $60 T coin in this way:

Once you blow past the size of the public debt is there a reason to go right to $60T? You need to ease into something that’s such a break from current practices. Even a trillion dollar coin is too big to be practical (of course, like Mike said, once you think it, you can’t un-think). IIRC it was Philip who suggested minting $25B coins would be a good place to start.

“Philip” is Philip N. Diehl, former Director of the US Mint in the Clinton Administration and Co-author with Mike Castle, (Rep. DE) of the PCS legislation. In comments of the post, Philip joined beo in advocating for an incremental process of PCS introduction.

An important reason for using a $60 T coin, isn't because we need all that money right away. In fact, we can spend very little of it because the spending hasn't been appropriated by Congress, and most of the outstanding debt subject to the limit, will have to be paid as it falls due rather than immediately.

Still we need the $60 T coin to be minted because:

-- a) the coin legislation may be repealed at any time by people who don't want seigniorage to be an alternative to taxing or borrowing; but once the $60 T coin is minted, the cow would be out of the barn, and the proceeds would last 15-25 years, by which time we’d have a chance to get political acceptance for reorganizing the Fed under Treasury and ending its existence as a politically unaccountable agency dominated by private banks and Wall Street;

-- b) the seigniorage from a $60 T coin would serve as a potent symbol of the truth that the Federal Government can never involuntarily run out of money. This is one of the central ideas of MMT [31] that the public needs to accept routinely to understand that the Government's budget isn't like their household budget;

-- c) the mere presence of the $60 T in the public purse makes clear that the claim of those favoring austerity that we can't afford to enable full employment; or to pass Medicare for All, or to rebuild our infrastructure or do 101 other things that need doing are false, and to oppose them the austerians would then have to argue on the merits of the policy proposals and not almost solely on grounds that we just can't afford it because of all the debt we're going to leave to our grandchildren; and

d) the presence of the $60 T in the public purse would be a positive enabler of progressive legislation creating benefits that people want now but austerians say we can't pass because "we can't afford it.".

Easing Into PCS and Being Practical

Beo also says we have to ease into something that is such a break with current practices. But, I ask, why?

Are current practices so beneficial to us that we want to preserve them as much as possible? Haven't they been a critical part of a public financing system that's been failing us for a long time now in enabling us to do what must be done to create full employment and various other elements of public purpose that would create a better life for Americans? Haven't they failed us in a very critical way by creating such complexity in public financing that the public can't see that Federal “debt is not debt,” and instead are easily fooled into believing that we can “run out of money,” and can't afford to pass progressive economic legislation?

Beo knows what the answers to these questions are. And he must also know that our current procedures for financing deficit spending are poison to progressives, to the need to fulfill public purpose and to the American people. The only people who really like them are people who directly benefit from the system of issuing debt instruments. These procedures are not something we should want to conserve for another moment; because they do not benefit the 99%.

Beo. also says that the TDC is 'too big to be practical . . . ” But what's “impractical” about it? Assuming it's legal, which he and Philip both believe, it strikes me that in its $60 T version it's both efficient and effective in ridding us of austerity politics. Beo goes on to talk about the fear of inflation:

Considering that the fear of inflation is the biggest political hurdle to “printing money” (and needs to be addressed when it comes up), a shock and awe $60 megaton coin strategy will lose more political support than it gains. Besides, there’s no point to creating a Strategic Petroleum Reserve-like buffer stock of something the govt has the ability to create at will, especially if its just going to scare the hell out of people (and that it certainly would).

I can't see how beo can possibly know that, due to inflation fears, a $60 T coin strategy will lose more political support than it gains. Maybe, he'll oblige me by doing a political analysis showing the transmission mechanisms involved. Here's mine.

The $60 T in seigniorage would allow the President to pay off all the debt instruments held by the regional Federal Reserve banks and by Federal Agencies. Since the reserves used to redeem these instruments would not be spent into the economy, they can't possibly cause inflation without a causal transmission mechanism. That's a pay off of nearly 40% of the debt subject to the limit. If the Treasury pays that off in the week following minting and depositing of the coin, the most likely reaction on the part of the public will be very strong approval of this action.

When the Treasury then pays off $1.7 T in Treasury Bills over the next year, and the Administration points out that debt subject to the limit has been reduced by 50% overall, people will be even happier. When, next, people see that no more debt subject to the limit is issued over the first year to cover deficit spending, I think they will be happier still.

When, finally, they see that there is no inflationary impact from paying off half of the national debt, they will be ecstatic and conclude that Obama is a genius for coming up with this great new platinum coin trick that has stopped both spending cuts and further tax increases, and yet still allows the debt that their grandchildren might have inherited, to be paid off as it falls due, with NO NEW DEBT ISSUANCE needed!

The proof of the pudding is always in the eating. We, including beo, and maybe Philip too, know now that paying off that first $8.2 T in debt will not cause demand-pull inflation during the first year after minting the coin. The public will know that too when they experience it.

During that first year, inflation fears will gradually recede from the first day the money is used to pay off debt. By the end of the year those fears will be largely gone among most people, except for those for whom that fear is part of a “religious belief,” leaving inflation hysteria to “the gold bugs,” and Austrian school economists.

I would have done the $60 T coin in May of 2011; or most recently the day after the election. And, then I would have given a speech like the one in this post [201] followed by a mobilization of Organizing For America (OFA) behind the initiative.

The Senate, then, never would pass a House bill to repeal PCS, because everything would have become so visible that sticking with the coin would be a litmus test for any Democratic candidate want to run with Party support. Then, if Obama got a high percentage of the debt paid by November 2014, I doubt there’d be any trouble in the mid-terms in either keeping control of the Senate or winning back the House. After all, what’s not to like: 1) debt rapidly disappearing; 2) the end of any need for austerity and no entitlement cuts; 3) no battles with Congress over debt ceilings or fiscal cliffs or austerity budgets; 4) Congress still controls the purse strings; and 5) attention turned to real issues about how to create good times here in America.

So, the brouhaha over the $60 T coin would pass. The Rs wouldn’t be able to repeal the coin capability until they got hold of both Houses of Congress, and if Obama played his cards right, actually doing things for people rather than the banks, and Wall Street, I don’t think we’d see Republican control of both Houses again for some time; in spite of wholesale gerrymandering. Their earliest opportunity to get the Senate again might not be until 2018, when there will probably be many more D Senate seats than R Senate seats at risk. As for the House, if the Democrats win in 2014, and don't screw up (a big assumption I know), then they'll win in 2016, and again the Republicans will have to wait until 2018, provided their party doesn't split apart before then.

On beo's buffer stock of reserves in the public purse point, of course there would be no point in creating one if the Treasury always had the power to create Trillions to pay off that national debt; or to deficit spend Congressional Appropriations; but the authority to do that is dependent on a Congress that has little understanding of fiat currency, and that may repeal that authority at any time. So, the “buffer stock” of reserves in the public purse is needed for that reason and the other three reasons I gave earlier.

Philip Diehl, and beo joined together in an exchange advocating an incremental approach to introducing PCS which would feature a step-by-step approach to gradually increasing the amount of PCS annually. Beo suggested starting out with a $25 B coin, and said this:

On first day of fiscal year, Tsy deposits coinage equal to net interest paid the previous year. I like plays that end in the first act. . .

If you’re looking for a more incremental strategy, perhaps the way to ride the TDC wave while also defusing opposition is to propose a “responsible alternative.” Say, Tsy and the Fed should cooperate on a pilot program using $25 billion coins to see what effects positive or negative the use of debt-free money would have on our financial system, which is swimming in debt. If it's negative, that should quiet critics who are pushing for a trillion dollar coin. If it's positive, then it will be worthwhile to slowly expand the program, to gauge its impact in larger amounts. The only time we should ever mint a trillion dollar coin is sometime after the evidence is clear to everyone the $500 billion coin, the $100 billion coin and the $25 billion coin worked just fine ( a red herring of course, the Mint can strike 40 $25 billion coins almost as easily as a single $1 trillion).

I guess it’d be worth stressing that it's not a transfer of power from Tsy to the Fed since it is the Fed who orders coins from the Mint. You could call the article, "Beating trillion dollar coins into plowshares: Can a political weapon be converted into a useful monetary policy tool?"

I think beo meant to say a transfer of power from the Fed to the Treasury, just above.

Philip Diehl added this to the case for the incremental approach:

Beo, I like the step by step approach but I’d go faster and with a specific target in mind–like increments of at least $50 billion a year to reach the goal of covering the annual carrying cost of the debt. I figure that with the debt continuing to rise and interest rates also rising, it would take, say, ten years before HVCS is covering the full annual interest on the debt. Let’s say that’s $500 billion a year. At that point, we’d be minting a half trillion dollar coin every year to continue covering the annual interest on the debt, is that correct?

A slow ramp up like this would not only alleviate fears over the inflationary effect of HVCS (assuming we’re right that there won’t be any), it would also make plain its significance as a way of relieving the zero sum game of budgetary politics. A constituency will form inside and outside Congress to continue or even accelerate the pace HVCS is ramped up in order to ease the squeeze on the rest of the budget as entitlement and other spending increases.

Also, wouldn’t we expect interest rates to fall from what they would otherwise have been if Treasury was no longer longer competing in credit markets? And wouldn’t we expect tax revenue to rise if there were fewer tax free bonds in the marketplace? If I’m correct on this, it seems like HVCS would develop a powerful public constituency for the lower interest rates it would bring.

What’s wrong with this picture? It seems to good to be true. Where’s the downside, the tradeoffs?

The HVCS acronym means High Value Coin Seigniorage, and is intended to refer to all coins with face values in the millions, billions, or trillions. Here's another contribution from beo, supporting the incremental approach in the context of a comparison with HVPCS (which refers to platinum coins with face values of $30 Trillion or more), using this scenario:

. . . Philip was once Chief of Staff to Tsy Sec. Lloyd Bentsen, imagine if Philip presented him as policy options:

1. a trillion dollar coin (against the Fed’s wishes)

2. a $60 trillion coin (against the Fed’s wishes)

3. a joint Tsy-Fed pilot program beginning with a $25 billion coin ( or whatever face value the Secretary was comfortable with, maybe it starts with a $1 billion coin).

Does anyone really think Lloyd Bentsen (or any Tsy Secretary) would take a “screw the flight simulator, lets see us try this in a real plane” attitude?”

So, that's the case for the incremental approach, which I've tried to present fairly, and in its strongest possible light. So, now we can get to answering Philip's question about the downside.

The Downside of the Incremental Approach

First, if an upside of the $60 T option is that its implementation through a “lightening strike,” to quote Philip, eliminates the chance for its opponents to mobilize against it until after it's a fait accompli, and also removes the efficacy of any move towards repeal, before repeal no longer matters; then the opposite is true of the incremental option. Beo and Philip envision years, perhaps a decade, of ramping up until coin seigniorage is making an appreciable impact on the conditions underlying the drive towards austerity.

During that time, surely a very well-funded and powerful opposition to deficit spending and debt instrument payoff will form and do everything it can to repeal the platinum coin. And they will be able to mobilize and work against the coin before it has had a chance to solve any problems, or do any good; before, in other words, the coin can get enough love from the broader public, to ensure that the capability won't be repealed.

Philip points out, correctly I think, that during the PCS rampup, the coin, if left in place as a capability, would develop a powerful constituency of its own, both in an out of Congress. This is true. But at $25 or $50 B per year in PCS value, can enough people grow to love its impact to counter-balance an all-out propaganda and political campaign by Wall Street, the Fed, and right-wing austerians like the Koch brothers? I seriously doubt it.

They will see the threat from the coin, probably have already seen it, judging from the reaction to it at AEI. [113] And they will try to get rid of it soon; at the very first opportunity. I'm sorry to say that I think an incremental strategy is not just impractical, but even feckless, given that they are now, or shortly will, come after the coin with everything they have, in much the same way that the health insurance has come after any serious health care reform. So, incrementalism in applying coin seigniorage, will only lead to its repeal before its own constituency is powerful enough to protect it.

And what do beo and Philip hope to accomplish by this incrementalism? They hope a) their proposal will be viewed as “reasonable,” compared to HVPCS options like the $60 T or even the TDC; b) to calm inflation fears by minting coins with values low enough that they cannot possibly trigger inflation, and then increase face values gradually until over a period of years the fear of inflation is calmed and people are ready to consider really serious uses of PCS; and 3) to show people more and more positive impacts of the coin, so that they build a more and more powerful constituency as time goes on.

So, when it comes down to it, they want incrementalism to mollify people against the coin enough that they will be allowed “a seat at the table” and taken seriously by their opponents. They also want it because they care a lot about calming inflation fears, and they also care about having a general consensus about using it, before they “go big” with the coin.

The problem with this approach is that people who want the FIRE sector defended from the coin, and its lessons about fiat money, will never give them a seat at the table, have no incentive to do anything but discredit and ridicule them, and won't be convinced about the low likelihood of inflation from PCS because they have a vested interest in continuing to claim and/or believe that the coin is inflationary. Even those among them who come to believe it isn't inflationary will still oppose it on grounds that it is, because they won't consider the advantages and disadvantages of the coin in good faith.

But in addition to these problems, there is the still more serious problem that an incremental approach taking a decade to implement has very serious likely costs. Apart from the possibility of losing the capability for PCS, there are also unemployed, partly employed, uninsured sick people, ill-educated young people, and people whose careers and social mobility are heavily impacted by the refusal to use the full power and potential of HVPCS when it is available for use.

Beo and Philip are, in effect, suggesting that the underlying condition supporting austerity politics remain out there for perhaps a decade or more, when the President has the power to eliminate it now, because they want to calm fears, get a seat at the table, and have consensus before they go ahead with PCS in a big way. Is this really a serious proposal when we look at the full political context we face? Is it actually "practical," or does it just avoid facing the most important problem we need PCS to solve for more than a decade?

“First, Do No Harm,” is a great maxim; but when excessive caution and waiting have the very high costs just mentioned; then we have to weigh those already experienced and continuing costs of not minting a $60 T coin, against the potential cost and very low likelihood of inflation resulting from it filling the public purse, and getting used only to pay down debt and cover Congressional deficit appropriations. I've done the inflation analysis, [202] and I've been unable to find any causal transmission mechanism directly from PCS to demand-pull inflation. I invite beo, Philip or anyone else to critique my analysis and show me where I've made a mistake.

Of course, demand-pull inflation [203] can result if Congress appropriates too much deficit spending; but that would happen whether seigniorage, or Treasury Securities or both, are used alongside deficit spending. So, before we so easily propose and decide to follow an incremental PCS strategy, perhaps its proponents ought to make clear the causal mechanisms they see that are at least minimally likely to cause inflation, beyond the inflation from deficit spending accompanied by debt issuance? Until that's done, I don't think the incremental PCS proposal can be considered a serious one.

Second, let’s look at beo's three options in the Lloyd Bentsen type of scenario. I think the President does 1) or 2) if he wants to start a long political struggle that he may very well lose, or if he wants to engage in kabuki. But if he wants to destroy the foundation of austerity politics, then he will select 3) or maybe a $100 T coin (because it’s more powerful as a meme), because those alternatives will actually do the job.

So, what coin seigniorage option should be pursued depends on what the goals of the President are, and his/her perception of the problem. Beo, Philip, and other incrementalists seem to think that the problem is how to get everyone used to fiat money, so it can be introduced on a large scale, fairly non-controversially, and with a good deal of consensus support. They think we can afford to wait for that result for a decade, and that it will be worth waiting for.

I, on the other hand, think the problem is how to destroy the political power of the austerians, now, so we can build a more equal and prosperous economy and society. The incremental approach could well leave us with austerity, a stagnant economy, and growing inequality, for a decade or more.

I don't think we have that much time left, before our society sees its democracy extinguished by a soft, but, nevertheless, totalitarian plutocracy. That is much too high a price to pay for the benefits of the patient, careful, and experimental introduction of platinum coin seigniorage that beowulf, Philip Diehl, and others who like the incremental approach have in mind. Incrementalism is always favored by the Very Serious [204] People (VSP), as the "practical" alternative; but all too often it is "impractical" in the highest sense of the term, because it simply will not work!

(Cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives [139].)

No votes yet

Can the Federal Reserve Really Refuse To Accept and To Credit A Platinum Coin Deposited By the US Mint?

letsgetitdone's blog [3]
Log in [205] or register [206] to post comments

Departments:

Thread:

Corporatism [88]

Tags:

MMT [12]

Department of Bust Out Profit Models and Vampiric Capitalism [86]

Ellen Brown [207]

web of debt [208]

Federal Reserve [209]

Secretary of the Treasury [210]

Philip Diehl [197]

beowulf [8]

The issue of whether the Fed can really refuse to accept and credit a deposit of a platinum coin with its face value, is being raised frequently on blog posts about Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS) [211] and the Trillion Dollar Coin (TDC). [156] In the past, I've argued [212] that the Fed cannot; and the final decision on taking the TDC off the table was actually made by the President, and not by Chairman Bernanke.

Ellen Brown, the well-known author of The Web of Debt, [213] and also of this recent post [214] on fiat money, direct financing of federal spending, and using platinum coin seigniorage made this comment [215] in a discussion thread at Monetary Realism:

Per the Fed’s website (or maybe it was the Treasury’s), a gas station can reject a $100 bill before the gas has been pumped. You only have to accept legal tender after the service has been rendered or good delivered. The Van Nuys Flyaway won’t take dollar bills. Apparently then the Fed can reject a tender before it has rendered the banking services involved. It’s a privately-owned bank, after all!

Here's my reply to this comment.

The coin being presented to the Fed isn’t tendered as payment for services, or for a product. It’s a coin being tendered as a deposit into the Treasury General Account (TGA). Also, note these three considerations.

First, the Treasury Department is mandated to deposit its money into Fed accounts if it wants to enter the banking system. So unlike the gas station; the Treasury can’t find another bank; and it needs a bank to spend and implement Congressional appropriations. A Fed regiional bank, such as the New York Fed, in turning down a coin, would be refusing to perform a duty it contracted for to serve as the depository of the funds of the Treasury Department and the US Mint. I don’t think it can do that and remain a regional Fed bank.

Second, even though the regional Feds are privately owned banks; they cannot behave in ways that contravene the policy of the Board of Governors, a Federal Agency, and they are very tightly regulated by that Board. So, the regional NY Fed, the bank that has the Treasury General Account (TGA) will not be making any such decisions on its own authority. Additionally, in agreeing to house the TGA, the New York Fed has contracted to serve as the sole banking agent of the Treasury Department with respect to its spending account.

Somehow I don’t think the sole banking agent of the United States Treasury Department has the legal right to turn down a deposit of legal tender, and refuse to credit its face value in the Treasury’s own checking account. Imagine what the liability of that “private” bank would be to the US Government, if as a result of any such action, the US would be forced into defaulting on some of its payments and decided to sue the NY Fed for consequential damages. Not a pretty picture, and not a risk that the NY Fed would want to take w/o an explicit and specific instruction from the Board of Governors.

And third, consider the Board of Governors and the Chairperson of the Fed. What would they do? Well, they’ll tell the Secretary that they don’t want to do it. But if they say no; and the Treasury Secretary orders them to accept and credit the coin; then what? Then this:

12 USC § 246 – Powers of Secretary of the Treasury as affected by chapter
Nothing in this chapter contained shall be construed as taking away any powers heretofore vested by law in the Secretary of the Treasury which relate to the supervision, management, and control of the Treasury Department and bureaus under such department, and wherever any power vested by this Act in the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System or the Federal reserve agent appears to conflict with the powers of the Secretary of the Treasury, such powers shall be exercised subject to the supervision and control of the Secretary.”

So, one of the powers vested in the Secretary of the Treasury before creation of the Federal Reserve system was certainly to spend its legal tender into the economy. But to do that under an arrangement where the Fed is its bank, requires that the Fed deposit and credit its legal tender into its spending account, the TGA. So, I think it follows that under 12 USC 246 the Secretary has the authority to order the Federal Reserve to credit that coin so Federal spending can proceed. If the Fed Chair still refuses, then the President can remove the Fed Chair for cause (12 USC 242)

And as beowulf has pointed out, [216] the Fed really doesn’t want to go to Court over this because they risk a Supreme Court finding of unconstitutionality due to the Unitary Executive theory, which, in this case, may well have the support of some of the most conservative justices. My own view here, is that the Fed would not even make it to the Court because they’d be denied standing under 12 USC 246, if the Treasury Secretary also ordered them not to contest his order legally.

If you read through the discussion thread where Ellen Brown left her comment, [217] you’ll see that both Philip Diehl, former Director of the US Mint under President Clinton, and Carlos Mucha (beowulf, or beo), the lawyer who first proposed the use of PCS and the TDC, and the author of the blog post, believe that no Secretary would treat the Fed this way. But what if the Secretary were ordered by the President to do it? And what if the President were somebody like FDR or LBJ? Then I think it could happen; and depending on how tough things get in the next few years who knows what Obama will do?

After all he’s the guy with the drones. And the guy who throws people under the bus when he thinks he has to. So, why wouldn’t he throw Bernanke under the bus too, if he thought he needed to? Just sayin'!

(Cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives [139].)

No votes yet

Disconnect: High Value Platinum Coin Vs. Austerity!

letsgetitdone's blog [3]
Log in [218] or register [219] to post comments

Departments:

Thread:

Corporatism [88]

Tags:

MMT [12]

TDC [112]

HVPCS [193]

$60 T coin [108]

Ezra Klein [220]

austerity [194]

Department of Bust Out Profit Models and Vampiric Capitalism [86]

grand bargain [222]

great betrayal [223]

#mintthehvpcs [224]

greed bargain [225]

A little disconnect: what President Obama, through Treasury and the Federal Reserve, [226] really said last Saturday:

"We're running out of money because the Republican House may not allow us to float any more debt; so I took the Platinum Coin off the table just to ensure that we would!

Next month, I'll give you the gift of austerity, because, naturally, we're now really gonna run out of money!"

Despite Saturday's announcements by the Treasury and the Fed the Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS) [48] legislation is still on the books. For the President not to use it to fill the public purse with enough funds to banish the fiscal conditions that underlie austerity politics -- the national debt, and the ability to cover the deficit for a long time to come -- is inexcusably corrupt, fiscally and economically irresponsible, and completely opposed to the public purpose that the President is supposed to serve.

So, I want to tell the President that for as long as PCS is on the books, and he and others are claiming that we need austerity because we are “running out of money,” he has the duty and the obligation to mint a game-changing High Value Platinum Coin, for example, a $60 T platinum coin. [93] After this legal tender coin is credited by the Fed, the presence of $60 T in the Treasury General Account (TGA), and its immediate use to begin paying off the national debt, will make it very plain that there is no need for austerity; no need to cut SS, Medicare, and Medicaid; no need to cut Head Start, no need to cut anything that's working.

Yesterday, the White House line [227] was that temporary fixes to the debt ceiling problem like the platinum coin would not solve the budgetary and political problems faced by the Government. Our mainstream media people did their thing by failing to call out the President on that – probably because they, themselves, have never dared think about any other PC option [228] apart from the Trillion Dollar Coin. It's easy to see, however, that a $60 T coin wouldn't be a “temporary fix,” spawning crises every few months, even if it wouldn't last forever. The fact that a $1 Trillion Dollar Coin would not solve our debt ceiling problem for very long, isn't an argument for taking High Value PCS (HVPCS) off the table at all.

So, I call on the President to mint that $60 T coin now! [229] I call on him to abandon austerity and to create financial plenty in Federal fiscal policy by using game-changing HVPCS. Austerity and “grand bargains” are “the great betrayal!” We don't need such “greed bargains.” We need a full public purse, and then we need to get Congress to open the purse for programs that fulfill public purpose.

I call on others to join me in beginning again to blog, comment, facebook, and tweet about PCS; but this time to forget about the TDC, which was always the wrong coin, and focus on #minttheHVPC instead.

Up the ante! Make this about ending austerity, and using the right platinum coin to create the political space needed for doing it! Forget about them taking PCS off the table! As long as it's legal it's still on the Table! Mint that HVPC! End Austerity!

Average: 5 (1 vote)

Downsides to the Platinum Coin; or Just Defense of the Status Quo?

letsgetitdone's blog [3]
Log in [230] or register [231] to post comments

Departments:

Thread:

Corporatism [88]

Tags:

MMT [12]

Department of Bust Out Profit Models and Vampiric Capitalism [86]

HVPCS [193]

$60 T coin [108]

austerity [194]

incrementalism [195]

Mike Sankowski [232]

Monetary Realism [233]

As part of a wonderful discussion thread on the legal basis for using Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS), following a post by beowulf (Carlos Mucha), [217] the first to propose the Trillion Dollar Coin (TDC). Michael Sankowski, one of the founders of the Monetary Realism approach to economics offered a very long reply [234] directed at High Value Platinum Coin Seignorage (HVPCS), [235] and the TDC itself. Mike's reply is a good example of the many misgivings people have about using PCS with face values in the trillions. Since Mike is a supporter, rather than opponent of PCS and believes that PCS is legal, I thought it would be worthwhile to deconstruct his long comment and show that his downsides are pretty speculative and don't provide good grounds for supporting incrementalism is using PCS.

Mike begins:

There are huge downsides to printing a high value coin. Like it or not, our current setup requires the buy in of a large number of participants.

I don't think it does. Using PCS requires only a decision by the President and his willingness to command the Treasury Secretary to do his bidding. In turn, the Secretary must command the Director of the Mint, and also the Chair of the Fed, to play their roles in creating the coin and seeing to it that the Fed credits the face value of the coin to the Public Enterprise Fund (PEF) account at the New York Fed. The fact that the President can command the Secretary is well-known. What's not so well-known is:

12 USC § 246 – Powers of Secretary of the Treasury as affected by chapter
Nothing in this chapter contained shall be construed as taking away any powers heretofore vested by law in the Secretary of the Treasury which relate to the supervision, management, and control of the Treasury Department and bureaus under such department, and wherever any power vested by this Act in the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System or the Federal Reserve agent appears to conflict with the powers of the Secretary of the Treasury, such powers shall be exercised subject to the supervision and control of the Secretary.

So, one of the powers vested in the Secretary of the Treasury before creation of the Federal Reserve was certainly to spend its legal tender into the economy. But to do that under an arrangement where the Fed is its bank, requires that the Fed deposit and credit its legal tender into its spending account, the TGA. So, I think it follows that under 12 USC 246 the Secretary has the authority to order the Federal Reserve to credit that coin so Federal spending can proceed.

The coin is new. The coin is weird. Even if the effect of the coin is the same – or similar – to quantitative easing, it’s still new and weird for nearly everyone in the United States.

Well, it's a new use of coinage, sure. That will make it “weird” for some people; not so weird for others. Using the coin forces the Fed to add reserves to the PEF which in turn gives the Treasury the ability to fill the pubic purse with most of the face value a platinum coin. I don't find that “weird.” I think it's the way things ought to be done. What purpose is served by using the term “weird” to describe PCS? Is it to discredit the idea because it's new; or is Mike trying to show that even though he's a supporter of PCS, he's still a Very Serious [204] Person (VSP).

Actually minting a very high value platinum coin could easily disrupt markets, it could easily freak out the larger investment community. This proposal is totally out of left field – heck the mainstream is only now thinking about the coin. We’ve had a few years over here at MR and in the MMT [31] community to think through the pros/cons, and I bet we still haven’t covered many of those pros and cons.

First, I think a good many of the pros and cons were vetted in a single thread at Warren Mosler's site [32] soon after the first blog post by beowulf [29] appeared focused mainly on the coin. And there's been an awful lot of discussion of it since then, [236] including a lot of mainstream discussion in the Summer of 2011 and for the past two months.

Second, labeling the coin as “out of left field” is is strange because beowulf is certainly not “left,” but a long-time Republican. His idea is new, that's all, and it's about Treasury creating fiat money. Looking at the history of the United States, Treasury has created fiat money from time-to-time under strong Executives. So, why is the PCS proposal to do that again “out of left field”?

And third, what exactly does “freaking out the investment markets” mean. I understand that there will be lot of excitement and maybe some hysteria if the President mints a $60 T coin. But if he uses it only to pay down Government and Fed-held debt immediately and to cover deficit spending, then why would people be overly concerned for too long; especially if the Federal Reserve takes care to assure people, that as Treasury Securities get more scarce, it will be compensating by paying Interest On Reserves (IOR), to provide a continuing vehicle for risk-free investment.

Market confidence isn’t something that is easily shaken, but when it is shaken, the results are disaster. The actual flows in the market only shut down for about a month or so in 2008 before they started to recover, but the job losses were horrific. The impact could have been much worse had the fed not reacted like it did.

“Market confidence” is a slogan that the financial community uses to scare the rest of us. Mostly, it's just the "confidence fairy." It was lost in 2008; but there was a concrete reason for its collapse in the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the exposure that created for the rest of the FIRE sector. That is, back in 2008, following on the housing crash, and Lehman's failure, there was reality behind the reaction to hold on tight and panic.

But, if the President mints a $60 T coin and uses it to pay down nearly 40% of the debt subject to the limit; rendering debt ceiling conflicts immediately a thing of the past; then why should that shake market confidence for more than a few days, if at all? I don't see the factors that would reinforce any initial irrational psychological reaction to that event. Also, I think that if the financial system is that fragile that we have to postpone implementing direct issuance of money by the Treasury, when we need to have that done to defuse austerity; then that is just another reason for taking the big banks into resolution and rebuilding the whole system from the ground up.

The world is not ergodic, as Paul Davidson points out. There are random features of the world which cannot be foreseen, cannot be accurately forecast, cannot even be put into a probability distribution. Keynes called this uncertainty, as opposed to risk, and Keynes was right.

Stepping out into the world with something which is in every sense revolutionary for our existing monetary system isn’t something to take lightly. Not only that, there are no boundaries or programs in place to constrain the power to directly issue money. As it stands, we’re just making it up without any constraints at all.

Taleb calls these “Black Swans,” [237] and they certainly do exist. But we can't deal with Black Swans by pursuing all innovations incrementally, or in safe-fail modes. [238] We have to weigh the likely costs of waiting to fully implement an innovation with the explicit costs we're experiencing without taking advantage of it.

Right now we've got 15-16% of the work force wanting full time jobs and unable to get them. We've got millions of home owners underwater. We've got 55,000 fatalities due to lack of health insurance, since the ACA hasn't really gone into effect yet, and even after that, we're likely to still have 35,000 annual fatalities unless we pass Medicare for All. We have a crumbling infrastructure which needs $3 T in new investment and on and on and on. I won't counsel an incremental introduction of PCS over a period of a decade when the minting of a $60 T coin could free up the whole political system to begin to solve these problems in a matter of months; because of the possibility of a Black Swan that escaped my analysis.

And as far as constraints are concerned, the ones that are important here aren't constraints on how much can be put into the public purse. They're constraints on the purse strings. Those constraints are fully in place even with huge PCS face values. Congress still controls appropriations of deficit spending so that no seigniorage can be spent unless Congress appropriates that. The only other spending of seigniorage that would be allowed is repayment of scheduled debt.

Putting together a program where this change is introduced to the market in small increments seems wise to me. I do like the “target” plan you’ve suggested. It’s measurable. We know how much it will be in advance of the program being implemented.

I've already critiqued the “target” plan of beowulf's Mike refers to, in this piece, [239] which is a lengthy evaluation of incrementalism in using PCS. The bottom line is, that incrementalism won't work, because it will end in likely repeal of the PCS authority.

Many people who trade bonds are severely freaked out by the inflation prospects of QE. Yes, they are dead wrong. They are terribly wrong. But this doesn’t mean we should flip them the bird and shove $60T down their throats, just because we can. It’s possible, but is it wise – even if some parts of our financial overlords are directly responsible for criminal activity?

No one's suggesting that $60 T should be shoved down their throats. The $60 T proposal [93] is to end debt issuance accompanying deficit spending and use seigniorage instead, and to repay the $16.4 T debt as it falls due, except for the intragovernmental and Fed debt which would be paid immediately. The other $43.6 T would be spent in accordance with Congressional deficit appropriations over 15 – 25 years. Is this a “wise” proposal? Well, I think it's a lot wiser than one that leaves austerity politics in place for a decade or more, and costs our fellow citizens so much in foregone government financial investment in the public purpose.

Like Bill Black, I am pissed the banksters never got charged with any crimes. They knew. They freakin’ knew. They did bad things. But not everyone did bad things, and I’d argue even most of the finance industry did not do bad things. But this does not excuse the criminals, and there were many criminals.

If you're so pissed at the banksters then why aren't you out there doing something about them. There's an institutional structure out there that nourished the banksters and the fraudsters. At the center of it is the big banks and the Federal Reserve which refuses to regulate them. The Fed needs to be subordinated to the Treasury if this system is going to placed under control. And the first step toward doing that is minting very big coins as part of a process of subordinating monetary policy to fiscal policy.

So we’re here, with a slightly better understanding of how the world of money works. It’s not a perfect understanding, because you see disagreements even among people with a deep level of understanding of the monetary system on our side. But it is better than the current status quo.

So What do we do? First, do no harm.

Pushing the country into another recession because we flip out the repo market by taking away every last safe asset they are using is probably not a good or wise path. Even if this was a good way to strip the bankers of their power – and I don’t agree with it being a good method – it would probably be worse for most people in the United States. There would be many job losses.

Beowulf’s plan to use a series of coins to pay the interest owed at the end of the year is a pretty good one.

The $60 T coin, in itself, does no harm. In fact, it does a lot of good by allowing the political issue of austerity to finally be taken off the table, and allowing the political system to get back to legislating to meet the real issues face. I also don't think that “flipping out the repo market” will be a problem because IOR means the continued existence of a risk-free, interest-earning place for USD reserves.

That place is at the Fed in reserve accounts. What's so bad about that, if IOR interest is comparable to bond interest? Why should there be any job losses as a result of this move; and if there are, then the $60 T in the kitty will allow the Federal Government to quickly respond with MMT policies that would have the economy roaring in 3-6 months, in contrast to the economic stagnation [240] we have now.

Finally, the plan to pay interest on the debt using seigniorage isn't good enough; because it leaves the national debt still in place, even increasing it. So, it leaves austerity politics in place, and fails to create the political background needed for economic legislation that will finally end the Great Recession. That is, it's a big fail; as are so many attempts at incrementalism.

(Cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives [139].)

No votes yet

Ezra Klein Chooses Fear Mongering the Big Coin, I Choose Ending Austerity!

letsgetitdone's blog [3]
Log in [241] or register [242] to post comments

Departments:

Thread:

Corporatism [88]

Tags:

MMT [12]

TDC [112]

PCS [111]

$60 T coin [108]

Ezra Klein [220]

austerity [194]

Department of Bust Out Profit Models and Vampiric Capitalism [86]

small-ball PCS [243]

beowulf [8]

Philip Diehl [197]

Here's a commentary on Ezra Klein's recent diatribe [244] against Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS). [125]

But there’s nothing benign about the platinum coin. It is a breakdown in the American system of governance, a symbol that we have become a banana republic. And perhaps we have. But the platinum coin is not the first cousin of cleanly raising the debt ceiling. It is the first cousin of defaulting on our debts. As with true default, it proves to the financial markets that we can no longer be trusted to manage our economic affairs predictably and rationally. It’s evidence that American politics has transitioned from dysfunctional to broken and that all manner of once-ludicrous outcomes have muscled their way into the realm of possibility. As with default, it will mean our borrowing costs rise and financial markets gradually lose trust in our system, though perhaps not with the disruptive panic that default would bring.

Name calling, labeling, and fear mongering aside, does Ezra understand the first thing about PCS? Does he know that if a $60 T coin were minted, [93] and the Treasury General Account (TGA) filled with $60 T in electronic credits, the US would be able to just say goodbye to the international markets? If we were paying off the national debt as it fell due, we would not only not be defaulting, but would be paying all our creditors on time and in full, and without benefit of further debt instrument issuance. Nor would we care whether the markets trusted us or not; since we would not be borrowing money from them for the foreseeable future. So, how could our borrowing costs rise?

And, as far as predictability is concerned, what would then be predictable is that we would be paying all our obligations to everyone whether Wall Streeters, denizens of the global markets, pensioners, Medicare, and Medicaid recipients, and everyone else we have obligations too without anyone getting the short end of the stick. Now, I'd like to see that kind of predictability from this Government, without any drama, histrionics, deficit terrorism, or whining about how our moral character is too weak to endure the Washington Post's favorite meme, “shared sacrifice.”

The argument against minting the platinum coin is simply this: It makes it harder to solve the actual problem facing our country. That problem is not the debt ceiling, per se, though it manifests itself most dangerously through the debt ceiling. It’s a Republican Party that has grown extreme enough to persuade itself that stratagems like threatening default are reasonable. It’s that our two-party political system breaks down when one of the two parties comes unmoored. Minting the coin doesn’t so much solve that problem as surrender to it.

Well, Ezra, that's your notion of the worst problem we face. My notion of a problem is that our national debt is hopelessly misconstrued by people, and that its existence is being used by radical “free market” extremists who want to sharply cut the social safety net, and who also want to block the passage of other Government programs that would benefit most Americans. So, I want to get rid of “the national debt” as a political issue. The best way to do that is to get rid of that national debt. That can be done by using PCS, [201] and in a way that will not drive the economy into depression, or working people into even deeper poverty.

The platinum coin is an attempt to delay a reckoning that we unfortunately need to have. It takes a debate that will properly focus on the GOP’s reckless threat to force the United States into default and refocuses it on a seemingly absurd power grab by the executive branch. It is of no solace that many of the intuitive arguments against the platinum coin can be calmly rebutted. It’s the wrong debate to be having.

Only your version of the platinum coin. You clearly have in mind the Trillion Dollar Coin (TDC) PCS option. I agree that it would only delay a reckoning, and that a debate over its legality is not the debate to have. But a $60 T coin, would eliminate the debt ceiling as a factor, make the debate about getting rid of austerity irrelevant, and also make it impossible to use any of following to oppose progressive legislation:

-- “The Government is running out of money.” (Not with a $60 T coin in the bank.)

-- “The Government can only raise money to spend by taxing and borrowing” (Not with PCS)

-- “We can't keep adding debt to our national credit card.” (We won't be using any of the money on the credit card.)

-- “We need to cut Government spending and make do with no more money.” (Only if more spending would definitely cause inflation.)

-- “if the Government borrows more money, then the bond markets will raise our interest rates.” (The Government won't be borrowing anymore.)

-- “If we continue to issue more debt, our main creditors: the Chinese, the Japanese, and our oil suppliers, may cease to buy our debt, making it impossible for us to raise money through borrowing which, in turn, would force us into radical austerity, or perhaps even into insolvency, which would then be followed by radical austerity and repudiation of our national obligations." (Again, the Government won't be borrowing anymore, so who cares if they no longer want to buy our debt)

-- "Our grandchildren must have the burden of repaying our national debt." (There won't be any debt or any burden.)

-- “Now, the final step – a critical step – in winning the future is to make sure we aren’t buried under a mountain of debt.” (Again, no debt; either mountain or molehill.)

-- “Our government spends more than it takes in. That is not sustainable. Every day, families sacrifice to live within their means. They deserve a government that does the same.” (But it is sustainable. If we use PCS, then we can have gaps between taxes and spending every year.)

-- “We need to cut entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, because we are running out of money and they are not fiscally sustainable.” (But they are with PCS, because we won't be running out of money!)

-- “If we make the hard choices now to rein in our deficits, we can make the investments we need to win the future.” (Given PCS, what we do now about deficits has nothing to do with our capability to make the investments we will need)

-- “We need to reduce our deficits to be fiscally sustainable.” (Deficits have nothing to do with fiscal sustainability in the sense of continued capability to spend, which will be very plain to people if $60 Trillion is sitting in the TGA.)

-- “We face a crushing burden of debt. The debt will soon eclipse our entire economy, and grow to catastrophic levels in the years ahead.“ (Can't say that if most of the debt is about to be paid off.)

-- “Our debt is out of control. What was a fiscal challenge is now a fiscal crisis. We cannot deny it; instead we must, as Americans, confront it responsibly.” (PCS can confront it responsibly, but the bipartisan horror just enacted can't.)

-- “We believe the days of business as usual must come to an end. We hold to a couple of simple convictions: Endless borrowing is not a strategy; spending cuts have to come first.” (Right! So let's stop borrowing and use PCS.)

-- “Everyone knows that the U.S. budget is being devoured by entitlements. Everyone also knows that of the Big Three - Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security - Social Security is the most solvable. . . . “ (The budget can be as big as we need it to be with PCS.)

-- “The Social Security Trust fund is a fiction, a mere bookkeeping device.. . . There is no free lunch. There is nothing in the lockbox.” (There will be if we pay back the trust fund through PPCS.)

-- “There is a deficit/debt reduction problem for the Federal Government that is not self-imposed.” (What's the problem? We can't run out of money with PCS!)

-- “The Federal Government is like a household and that since households sacrifice to live within their means, Government ought to do that too.” (What nonsense! As PPCS shows very well; the Government is not like a household. Households can't create unlimited funds through PCS; but the Federal Government can.)

-- “The only way to tackle our deficit is to cut excessive spending wherever we find it.” (It's always good to cut spending that's not in the public interest. But if spending is having good results, and we're using PCS, then there's no reason to cut it, whether taxes cover the spending or not.)

-- “We should also find a bipartisan solution to strengthen Social Security for future generations.” (With PCS, we can easily strengthen SS by extending benefits, and we don't need to do it through a bipartisan Rube Goldberg contraption. [245]

-- “The United States is in danger of becoming the next Greece or Ireland.” (Even without PCS it can't become Greece or Ireland, only the next Japan. But with PCS it can become the United States again.)

-- “Fiscal Responsibility means stabilizing and then reducing the debt-to-GDP ratio and achieving a Federal Government surplus” (With PCS, the debt-to-GDP ratio will be stabilized and reduced, but no "surplus," in the sense of more tax revenue than spending, will ever be necessary for revenue purposes.)

Ezra goes on to say that using the Platinum Coin will trigger a debate within the Republican Party, that will strengthen its worst factions, because its extremists will be able to argue against:

. . . a wild, unprecedented, inflationary power grab by an overreaching president. Making matters more difficult, it will become impossible for more cautious Republicans to break ranks. It’s one thing to argue, as many are already doing, that inducing default risks destroying the Republican Party for a generation. It’s another to abet such a blatantly unconstitutional, dangerous move from the executive branch.

Well, it's not blatantly unconstitutional at all Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe thinks it's legal [246]. Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin thinks it's legal. [61] The lawyer who came up with the idea, beowulf (Carlos Mucha), thinks it's legal. [29] Philip Diehl, former Director of the US Mint thinks it's legal. [247] And, I, a Ph.D. political scientist with some background in Constitutional Law, also think it's legal. [248]

Even Ezra says it's legal earlier in this very column. So, who are the Republicans to label it “blatantly unconstitutional”? What evidence would they have that it's “blatantly illegal? If the President uses it he will have legal opinions supporting its legality. In addition, the plain language of the law says it's legal. Arguments that it's not are more complex and detailed than the plain language of the law. So, how will this play in the court of public opinion?

Ezra goes on to suggest that using the coin won't end the conflict; but will cause the Republicans to work even harder and in a united fashion to get what they want. Well, isn't that too bad, they're just going to work harder at being even more nasty, so the rest of us shouldn't do anything that will get them really ticked off. What kind of advice is that, the advice of a columnist who works for a newspaper with a deficit hawk editorial director, and a financial deal with the world's most prominent deficit hawk: Peter G. Peterson?

Can't you just picture it? Ezra gets called into a meeting with Fred Hiatt who asks him whether he can't do anything to dampen this platinum coin wave that everyone is riding, and Ezra replying says: well, maybe I can write something that will make people very, very afraid of the tea partiers fomenting a new American Revolution.

Of course, Ezra may be right about a big coin making Republicans even more determined to destroy the US economy than they are now. Things could happen that way; but if a very high face value coin, like a $60 T coin, is minted; then the mere presence of the $60 T in the Treasury General Account (TGA), and its use to pay down debt, will change the political context, and make Republican propaganda look much more fanciful, than it does in an imagination that assumes the political context and the future won't be changed by minting a big enough coin and using it to fill the public purse.

So, Ezra, notice what happens to the memes Iisted above. They're just not going to work anymore, if a $60 T coin gets used. If the Republicans remain stiff-necked, what justification would they then have for austerity? Now, they have the debt, and no apparent means of paying it off except lowering spending and raising taxes. But what would they have after that coined filled the public purse? The answer is ZIP!

It is likelier that the platinum coin would drive the Republican Party towards a much more dangerous and enduring standoff. If Republicans never permitted another debt increase, would we just keep minting platinum coins? Would the Federal Reserve abet the strategy and work to hold down inflation, effectively putting itself in the middle of a titanic political fight? Would the market eventually begin to panic because American governance has entered into unknown territory?

If the Administration minted a $60 T coin, then it would probably never have to mint one again, since the first one would lead people to understand that the world won't come to an end if Treasury can print money to fill the public purse to spend Congressional appropriations. Would the Fed help hold down inflation? Of course, it's their mandate. It's not about politics. They'd have to act that way. If they didn't; there'd be immediate talk of folding them into Treasury! Finally, minting and using a $60 T coin to pay for debt and deficit spending won't be inflationary. [202]

There are two ways to truly resolve the debt-ceiling standoff. One is that the Republican Party needs to break, proving to itself and to the country that the adults remain in charge. The other is that America is pushed into default and voters — and the world — reckon with what we’ve become, and what needs to be done about it. Sadly, there’s no easy way out. It’s heads America wins, tails America loses.

Well, rule out the platinum coin, and sure, these may be one's only two choices. But Ezra hasn't shown that using a really BIG coin would elicit real problems, other than getting the Republicans and the right wing really, really, mad (maybe they won't have lunch with him anymore), and there are compelling arguments [249] suggesting the contrary. So, I think that Ezra's gone off the deep end in this column, especially when you consider the cost of default to people, [250] and also the cost of the austerity alternative. Both default-induced austerity; and major party-induced austerity by compromise are both utterly unacceptable.

We must find a third way! Ezra can't just assume that there is no way out of his Hobson's choice. He and we need to consider game-changing PCS [249] before condemning the nation to default.

(Cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives [83].)

No votes yet

Framing Platinum Coin Seigniorage: A Working Document

letsgetitdone's blog [3]
Log in [251] or register [252] to post comments

Departments:

Thread:

Corporatism [88]

Tags:

MMT [12]

TDC [112]

PCS [111]

$60 T coin [108]

Cullen Roche [254]

austerity [194]

Department of Bust Out Profit Models and Vampiric Capitalism [86]

HVPCS [193]

Jack Foster proposed a framing document [256] for High Value Platinum Coin Seigniorage, in a recent comment he made on one of my posts. In response, I posted a six-part blog series to accommodate readers who prefer the blog format.

Some, however, will want to read or reference a single framing document, rather than six separate posts, and I prefer it in that form myself because it facilitates seeing the whole picture provided by the many and diverse objections to PCS and HVPCS. So I've provided one below. I think the full picture provided by the many objections is that of opposition grounded in a fierce unwillingness to change familiar ways of performing Federal deficit spending requiring debt issuance, even though many of those offering objections know very well that the Government is perfectly capable of creating its own high-powered money without selling debt instruments, and even know that all money creation in our financial system is ultimately, if most often indirectly, based on the constitutional authority of the Congress, and its delegation of that authority to other parties.

What can one say about this except that it is mere conservatism and grounded in fear of the unknown at best, or worse, grounded in a desire to continue to benefit from the financial system in one's own, rather than the public interest? I'm not saying that conservatism is never rational, or that it is unjustified in all cases. But I think my evaluation in the series, and the full framing document indicates that many, and perhaps all of the objections that have been offered to HVPCS reflect a transparent bias to preserve the present system and are relatively easy to turn aside, because they are a stretch reflecting the bias of the people offering the objections.

In any event, that's my view of the matter, and I leave it to others to read the framing document and to evaluate for themselves, whether the pattern I'm drawing out of the objections makes sense to them. In doing that I hope others will join me in continuing to gather objections to HVPCS I haven't covered here, and to record these in comments, so that the document may be kept up to date and may become the primary reference for objections and replies to HVPCS. Let's try to transform this into a crowd-sourced document, so that it becomes a true community document. I'll be looking forward to your comments and your contributions!

framing PCS

Attachment	Size
Framing Platinum Coin Seigniorage: The pdf [257]	442.28 KB

No votes yet

Framing Platinum Coin Seigniorage: Part Five, Institutional Objections

letsgetitdone's blog [3]
Log in [258] or register [259] to post comments

Departments:

Thread:

Corporatism [88]

Tags:

MMT [12]

TDC [112]

PCS [111]

$60 T coin [108]

beowulf [8]

Department of Bust Out Profit Models and Vampiric Capitalism [86]

HVPCS [193]

Ezra Klein [220]

Warren Mosler [18]

John Lounsbury [260]

This series provides a framing document for Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS). In the four previous parts of the series, I pointed out that there are three classes of opponents of High Value Platinum Coin Seigniorage [261] (HVPCS, $30 T and above). The first and largest group opposes all Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS) of whatever type. The second, opposes HVPCS, but favors using the Trillion Dollar Coin (TDC) for the limited purpose of avoiding the debt ceiling. The third, opposes HVPCS, and doesn't really favor using the TDC either, except, perhaps, as a last resort to avoid the debt ceiling. It favors an incremental approach to PCS [262] beginning perhaps in the millions or billions in face value, and over a long period of time, after giving people years to adjust to Treasury using platinum coins with unusual, and unprecedented, face values, eventually building up to a TDC.

Parts two, three, and four, and this post (Part Five), and the remaining post in this series considers further objections to HVPCS brought forward by people in one or more of these categories, and my replies to them. As you're seeing, if you're following the series, the opponents of HVPCS are throwing everything but the proverbial kitchen sink at it. In this post, I'll consider some objections to PCS and HVPCS based on their predicted institutional impact.

The platinum coin is “the first cousin of defaulting on our debt”

This objection is from Ezra Klein; he says: [244]

. . . It is a breakdown in the American system of governance, a symbol that we have become a banana republic. And perhaps we have. But the platinum coin is not the first cousin of cleanly raising the debt ceiling. It is the first cousin of defaulting on our debts. As with true default, it proves to the financial markets that we can no longer be trusted to manage our economic affairs predictably and rationally. It’s evidence that American politics has transitioned from dysfunctional to broken and that all manner of once-ludicrous outcomes have muscled their way into the realm of possibility. As with default, it will mean our borrowing costs rise and financial markets gradually lose trust in our system, though perhaps not with the disruptive panic that default would bring.

The “banana republic” stuff is just name-calling. What does using HVPCS, which is authorized by legislation passed in 1996, have to do with being a banana republic? Sure, we've never used HVPCS before to pay down debt and cover deficit spending, but why is it not a superior way to do these things than issuing debt instruments, which require us to deal with bond markets and to provide risk-free interest payments mostly to wealthy elites and foreign nations? It seems to me that it is that method of financing that is much more consistent with the methods used by the Latin American banana republics in the 20th century than HVPCS would be.

And why is the platinum coin the first cousin of defaulting on the debt? Ezra Klein says that it proves to the financial markets that we can't be trusted to manage our economic affairs in a rational and predictable way. But why would it prove that?

It would prove that we've changed our way of paying off debt instruments and deficit spending alright; but that doesn't mean that our new way of doing things wouldn't be predictable and rational, and that financial markets wouldn't know exactly what we were going to do. They'd know, for example, that the US wouldn't be rolling any more debt by issuing new debt instruments, even though they may not like that as well as they like what we're doing right now. They'd also know that with austerity off the table; we'd be likely to deficit spend a lot more to create full employment here, which they might guess would also be good for their flagging export-based economies.

As for our borrowing costs rising; just how does Ezra Klein suppose that would happen since 1) we'd use HVPCS to end sales of debt instruments altogether; and 2) our interest rates on still outstanding debt are mostly fixed, except for the relatively small volume of bonds that are inflation-protected?

This last notion of Ezra Klein's makes two things clear. First, he's fixated on using Trillion Dollar Coins or less; and has never thought through the implications of using a $60 T coin, having freaked out over the small-ball TDC proposal. [263] And second, he hasn't yet figured out that our bond interest rates can only go up if the Federal Reserve raises the Federal Funds Rate which it, and it alone, controls. He still thinks that the bond vigilantes and their “confidence” in US bonds determines our interest rates.

Compromises the independence of the Federal Reserve

That's true. But, the vaunted independence of the Fed has not served us well over the years. What it has amounted to is that the Fed has not been accountable to the public. Its independence has meant independence from the Treasury and, largely, from Congress. But it has not meant independence from the big banks and Wall Street, which the Fed fails to regulate to any visible extent to protect the economy and the public, and whose interests the Fed has served ahead of the interests of the public at large. I am all for the President ordering the Secretary of the Treasury to use HVPCS, because I think the constraints imposed by that upon the Fed, and also the filling of the public purse to such an extent that it will be clear to people that the US can never run out of the currency it alone has the authority to issue, will make the Congress, the Fed, and the Executive Branch all much more accountable to the wishes of the American people.

Destroying the institutional structure of the financial system

I don't know about its destroying the institutional structure of the system; but I will point to a few critical impacts I think HVPCS is likely to have. First, as Warren Mosler has pointed out [264] in his characteristically pithy way,

“And all the coin does is shift interest expense from the Treasury to the Fed. . . “

This is Warren's assessment of the financial system impact. But, second, an HVPCS coin would have a critical impact politically, because as I have pointed out time and again, [249] it would end austerity politics for good, because it would end the debate over the national debt.

Third, it would make Treasury financing operations much more transparent than they are now. “The secrets of the temple” [265] would be much more out in the open. That's important, because right now the Federal Reserve and the banks escape accountability, since the American people don't understand their role.

Fourth, the Federal Reserve Banks would have to pay IOR to maintain their target Federal Funds Rate. From the viewpoint of the public, that kind of operation would look like the bank savings accounts that people are familiar with. The Fed holds reserves and pays depositors an interest rate. Right now, when the Treasury pays interest on securities, that looks like debt to the public, not like the savings accounts that security accounts are like functionally. So, IOR replacing securities in response to HVPCS would greatly improve the political optics of government financing deficit spending.

And fifth, John Lounsbury makes this important point: [266]

The reason Mosler's one-liner is so significant is that, once discovered that it is no longer necessary for private banking to create the credit to pay for government appropriations when they exceed tax revenues, the banks have lost their umbilical cord to the federal government. The government will have demonstrated that private banking is not necessary to fund government operations.

A primal fear of private banking: The government might discover that public finance and private finance can be divorced. An entitlement can be ended: the need for government to pay interest to private institutions to finance operations would be no more.

That might well be beginning of the end for today's institutional structure of the financial system. And I have to confess that after the many banking fiascos of the past 30 years, I can't view that as a bad thing for either this country, or the rest of the world.

But that's just me; maybe Ezra Klein has a different opinion?

(Author's Note: h/t to Jack Foster for proposing a framing document [256] for HVPCS. This is it; but divided into 6 parts for blogging convenience. The rest of the series will continue with objections made to HVPCS and my answers to them.)

(Cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives [83].)

No votes yet

Framing Platinum Coin Seigniorage: Part Four, Political/Economic Objections

letsgetitdone's blog [3]
Log in [267] or register [268] to post comments

Departments:

Thread:

Corporatism [88]

Tags:

MMT [12]

TDC [112]

PCS [111]

$60 T coin [108]

beowulf [8]

Department of Bust Out Profit Models and Vampiric Capitalism [86]

HVPCS [193]

Nassim Nicholas Taleb [269]

Black Swans [270]

This series provides a framing document for Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS). In the three previous parts of the series, I pointed out that there are three classes of opponents of High Value Platinum Coin Seigniorage [261] (HVPCS, $30 T and above). The first and largest group opposes all Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS) of whatever type. The second, opposes HVPCS, but favors using the Trillion Dollar Coin (TDC) for the limited purpose of avoiding the debt ceiling. The third, opposes HVPCS, and doesn't really favor using the TDC either, except, perhaps, as a last resort to avoid the debt ceiling. It favors an incremental approach to PCS [262] beginning perhaps in the millions or billions in face value, and over a long period of time, after giving people years to adjust to Treasury using platinum coins with unusual, and unprecedented, face values, eventually building up to a TDC.

Parts two, and three, this post (Part Four), and the two remaining posts in this series consider still more objections brought forward by people in one or more of these categories, and my replies to them. As you're seeing, if you're following the series, the opponents of HVPCS are throwing everything but the proverbial kitchen sink at it. In this post, I'll consider some political/economic objections to PCS.

An HVPCS coin is a less acceptable option than a TDC or HVCS coin

Less acceptable to who? Certainly, HVPCS would be less acceptable to the FIRE sector than other PCS options. But the truth is that all PCS options would be unacceptable to them. They will scream hysterically if any PCS option is used; and then will raise huge amounts of money, and work as hard as they can to repeal PCS legislation. So, what's the difference whether an HVPCS, TDC, or HVCS approach to PCS is used? Why do we care about how they will react?

The important question is how most people will react; not how special interests will. And people will react much more favorably to PCS, if enough money is minted to fill the public purse, change the game, and solve their perceived debt/deficit problem, than will react if only enough is minted to avoid the debt ceiling, or to fund specific programs with relatively small amounts of seigniorage. That's why HVPCS is actually a much more acceptable option than either of the other two.

An HVPCS coin would bring on “Black Swans”

The argument here is that any new significant thing that we do, will have unintended consequences; and that some of them will be “black swans.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb says (pp. xvii – xviii) [271] that a “Black Swan” is an event with three attributes:

It is an outlier . . .” in the sense that it is “outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. . . it carries an extreme impact . . . human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.”

Keeping this definition in mind, perhaps beowulf's formulation [29] of the PCS option might be considered a black swan; though Ellen Brown had envisioned [272] the possibility of a TDC in her 2007 book, before beowulf advocated it, but without framing it in the context of existing legislation. That might make PCS more a “white swan,” an unexpected event we might have been able to anticipate. However, even if PCS itself is a black, white or “gray swan,” it's much harder to contend, even with the most open-minded thinking about it, that it's potential consequences are likely to include events “. . . outside the realm of regular expectations.”

Looking at the various objections we're surveying here, they include a wide range of unintended consequences, and we are anticipating them, discussing them, evaluating the likelihood of the various possibilities. Black Swans can always arise, and we need to prepare for them as best we can. But that preparation can't include avoiding new innovations that promise to help us solve serious problems that are visiting very heave social and economic costs on much of out population. But, instead, it ought to include measures we can take to adjust and correct for risks that are known and even unknown.

I think that deficit spending using HVPCS, comes with various fail-safes we can use if things begin to develop chaotically. One of them, perhaps the most fundamental, is that we can simply stop using the seigniorage in the TGA, and start issuing securities again. Even if we did that, by then we'd be a better position relative to the perceived threat from the debt, we've been hearing about everyday. Another, is that the Federal Reserve can pay Interest on Reserves (IOR), as it is doing now.

Yet another, is that we can monitor the effects of seigniorage spending carefully, to track the changes occurring in the financial institutional structure caused by seigniorage in itself. Finally, we can use taxation to cool off any overheating of the economy due to seigniorage spending.

In short, with the various alternatives for adjustment we have available, if necessary, and very careful monitoring of effects, I think that fear of the inevitable unintended consequences of using seigniorage should not deter us from using it to attempt to solve the political problem of the national debt and end austerity. To suggest otherwise, is to mistake the “black swan” for a conservative bogeyman. But then again, perhaps that's what Nassim Nicholas Taleb intended all along.

Inflation

Won't creating all this money by using PCS to repay debt and perform deficit spending without issuing any new debt be inflationary? In a word, no! [80]

The credits in the Treasury General Account (TGA) ultimately resulting from using $60 T PCS [93] aren't immediately spent. So, they don't all enter the economy immediately, but over a very long period of time from 15 – 25 years in duration. To gauge the inflationary impact, you have to analyze when and how the credits would be entering the economy.

Roughly $6.5 Trillion in debt subject to the limit was owed by the Treasury to other agencies or to the Fed itself. That debt could be redeemed in the same week after minting a $60 T coin. But the payments wouldn't be inflationary because they would not enter the non-government economy. Nevertheless, these payments would cut back debt subject to the limit by close to 40%, because of the ridiculous quirk in the law that counts intra-governmental debt toward the debt ceiling.

Next, the 10 T or so of debt held by private corporations, individuals, and foreign governments would only be paid as it falls due. Much of it would be paid over the first three years. But, the additional reserves placed in the system by paying the debt, and not issuing new debt instruments would be less inflationary than rolling over bonds would be.

Also, their presence in the banking system, would clearly flood it with reserves and drive overnight interest rates down to zero, [273] rather than raising them. For the Fed to hit any non-zero rate targets it would have to support them by paying IOR, to drain the excess reserves. So, there's no inflationary impact from repaying debt instruments as they fall due by adding reserves to the banking system.

That leaves deficit spending. In the case of a $60 T coin, and a national debt of $16.4 Trillion, we'll assume that $43.6 Trillion would be left in the TGA for future deficit spending. However, the fact that the credits are in the TGA doesn't mean that the Treasury could spend them. In fact, it can only spend them if Congress appropriates deficit spending. So, the bottom line is that the $43.6 T doesn't go into the economy until it's appropriated. Then some portion of it can be inflationary if Congress deficit spends past the point of full employment; but if it doesn't, then there won't be demand-pull inflation. And, if it does, then the inflation will be due to unwise Congressional appropriations and not to using PCS.

In short, there's no way that PCS in itself can have an inflationary impact, [202] no matter how high the value of the platinum coin is. That's because repayment of already held debt is less inflationary than continuous rollover, and gradual increase, of debt. Repayment of debt to government agencies including the Fed doesn't enter the economy, and using PCS-generated funds to cover deficits is not in itself inflationary, unless deficit spending is so large that it continues past the point of full employment.

”First Do No Harm”

“First, Do No Harm,” is a great maxim; but when excessive caution and delay have the very high costs we see in our economy; then we have to weigh those already experienced and continuing costs of not minting a $60 T or other HVPC, and also the risk that the capability to use HVPCS may be repealed, against the potential cost and very low likelihood of inflation resulting from using it to fill the public purse, and then only to pay down the national debt and cover Congressional deficit appropriations. As I've already argued, there's no causal transmission mechanism directly from PCS-based spending to demand-pull inflation. And demand-pull inflation is by far the consequence of HVPCS that people fear most.

It would shake investor confidence in the US

Some skeptics warn that using a $60 T coin would shake investor confidence in the United States lead to the dollar's replacement as the reserve currency, and might and cause the de-evaluation of the dollar in international exchanges. I'm very skeptical about this possible scenario. First, the $60 T coin proceeds would first be used to pay off intragovernmental and Fed debt. This can have little effect on the non-government economy because nothing goes into it as a result of this pay off. Also, the outstanding public debt would suddenly be down by 40%, guaranteeing that would be no more debt ceiling crises in the US for some time. I can't see how this would do anything but increase confidence.

Second, when the seigniorage is used for deficit spending, the immediate effect of that would be to supply no more securities to the market and to create the expectation that supply would be limited in the future. That can only increase demand for the securities still outstanding, increasing their desirability.

Third, during the first year after HVPCS is used another $1.7 T in short-term debt would be paid off, at least. That too, would increase demand for the remaining securities in the market place. As for the swap of $1.7 T in reserves for the securities, I've already argued earlier, that the reserves may be less inflationary than securities, which means that the swap might well be mildly deflationary. But whether it is, or is just a swap with little inflationary impact; it's hard to see why this would effect the value of USD in international trade.

On the reserve currency business, I don’t think there will be any impact on that status as a result of using the coin, because, again, there will be no inflation resulting from it. But let’s say people panicked and replaced USD as the reserve currency. Then 1) our exports would increase and unemployment here would decline; and 2) our military interventionism in foreign policy would take a hit; because fighting wars overseas would be much more expensive due to the decreased value of USDs. Seems to me both of those things are good for us.

If we mint the $60 T then we will “freak out” bond traders since we're “flipping them the bird.”

Well, all I have to say about this one, is that it's probably true. After all, anyone would “freak out” if the primary source of supply for their business was threatened. But what I don't understand about this complaint is why the President and the rest of us ought to worry about it. After all, the bond traders don't worry about us, or the 31 million people who are now dis-employed, [274] do they?

So, if the bond traders are mad at the US, then can they do about it? They can't drive up the interest rates on bonds already sold, and they can't force the United States to sell any more debt instruments if the Treasury doesn't want to. Maybe they can get the Fed to pay a higher IOR rate. But that will have minimal effects on our politics.

In my next post, I'll discuss objections to HVPCS based on institutional impacts

(Cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives [83].)

No votes yet

Framing Platinum Coin Seigniorage: Part One, Basics

letsgetitdone's blog [3]
Log in [275] or register [276] to post comments

Departments:

Thread:

Corporatism [88]

Tags:

MMT [12]

TDC [112]

PCS [111]

$60 T coin [108]

Cullen Roche [254]

austerity [194]

Department of Bust Out Profit Models and Vampiric Capitalism [86]

HVPCS [193]

How many times have you heard that the Government can only spend money after it raises revenue by either taxing or borrowing? Nearly every time someone talks or writes about the US's public deficit/debt problem? How come nobody asks why, since Congress has the unlimited authority to create coins and currency, it doesn't just create money when it deficit spends? The short answer is that Congress in 1913, constrained the Executive Branch from creating currency or bank reserves, delegated its power to do that to the Federal Reserve System, and never looked back when we went off the gold standard in 1971, even though this removed the danger of money-creation outrunning gold reserves, and also created a new monetary system based on fiat currency.

How It Works

But coins, it turns out are different from currency and bank reserves. They're the province of the Executive. And Congress provided the authority, [130] in legislation passed in 1996, for the US Mint to create one oz. platinum bullion or proof platinum coins with arbitrary fiat face value, having no relationship to the market value of the platinum used in the coins. These coins are legal tender. When the Mint deposits them in its Public Enterprise Fund (PEF) account, the Fed must credit it with the face value of these coins. The difference between the Mint's costs in producing the coins, and the reserves provided by the Fed is the US Mint's “coin seigniorage” or profit from the transaction.

The US code also provides [277] for the Treasury to periodically “sweep” the Mint's account at the Fed for profits. These then go into the Treasury General Account (TGA), the spending account of the Treasury, narrowing or eliminating the revenue gap between spending and tax revenues. So, for example, say the Secretary of the Treasury ordered the Director of the Mint to create a $60 Trillion (face value) coin; and deposit it in the PEF account at The NY Federal Reserve Bank. The Fed would credit the PEF with $60 T in reserves, and the Treasury would then “sweep” the seigniorage, nearly $60 T, into its spending account.

Benefits

Platinum coins with huge face values such as $60 T, [93] can produce seigniorage closing the revenue gap and technically end deficit spending, while still retaining the gap between tax revenues and spending that can add to aggregate demand and produce full employment. Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS) is also a way for the Executive to end debt ceiling crises, since the profits could be used to repay debt instruments when they fall due, without the need to issue any more debt.

The seigniorage from a $60 T platinum coin would serve as a potent symbol [157] of the truth that the Federal Government can never involuntarily run out of money. [278] This is one of the central ideas of MMT that the public needs to accept routinely, to understand that the Government’s budget isn’t like their household budget. [279] The presence of the $60 T in the public purse would be a positive enabler of progressive legislation [249] creating benefits that people want now, but austerians say we can’t pass because “we can’t afford it.”

If all debt instruments are re-paid by using PCS, then, eventually the US would have no debt subject to the limit, or presence in the bond market, and would pay no interest to bond holders. No one would worry about the public debt, or use its size to justify blocking legislation that fulfills public purpose and promotes the general welfare.

So, PCS-based elimination of debt can end the whole austerity mind set that provides our current budgetary process with its constraining conservative cast, focused on narrow monetary cost considerations, rather than on a broader progressive framework that weighs the real costs and benefits of proposed fiscal activities of the Federal Government. Congress and the Executive would then evaluate the substance of legislative proposals based on their likely direct impacts and side effects on the lives of Americans, rather than their impact on Federal deficits and surpluses. Then the issues will be about what people need, and what improvements we can make by working together through the Federal Government. That would be the fulcrum of a new, game-changing politics, not debt, deficits, and debt-to-GDP ratios.

Why we need to get it done right now!

It must be done now! If it doesn't, then people who are against the use of PCS will have time to organize against it and get it repealed by the Congress. Now that the PCS capability is widely known, the FIRE Sector will be gunning for it with all the financial, political and propaganda power it can bring to bear. It will do that because using PCS, especially the $30 T or greater coin, High Value Platinum Coin Seigniorage (HVPCS) I propose, strikes at the domination of the financial and political systems by Wall Street and the big banks. Cullen Roche explains why: [280]

The most interesting thing about the coin idea is that the biggest threat of the coin was to the existence of private banking. I am actually surprised that a major bank hasn’t come out very publicly stating that the coin was ridiculous. Why? Because the coin exposes a potentially enormous change in the way the US monetary system functions. Instead of having a money system that is designed almost entirely around private banks (who issue most of the money) the coin threatened to expose the reality that government could self finance if it wanted to. In other words, the government could become the permanent primary issuer of money (as opposed to choosing to use private bank money).

So the Fed’s role is of particular interest here. And we must again ask ourselves. What is the Fed? Is it a public entity or private entity? It’s a bit of both. The Fed is a strange sort of hybrid public/private entity. But the coin decision has to make one wonder where they stand on this issue and whether the Fed has imposed its will on a potentially important debate. Is this merely a case of the Fed being apolitical and independent? Or is this a case of the Fed siding with its true master – the private banking oligopoly? I don’t know, but one thing we know for sure is that the Fed is not merely serving public purpose at all times. After all, its existence as a support feature for an oligopoly that serves private purpose (banks are slaves to their owners) renders the Fed compromised on public purpose to some degree.

So, HVPCS threatens the banks' domination of the Fed, and also their role in money creation, and with it some of their income. The more time that passes without using HVPCS, the more likely it is that the Executive Branch will lose this capability to Wall Street's persistent political efforts at repeal, and become the actual, rather than only the pretended (kabuki) prisoner of debt instruments and austerity once again.

Already, some bloggers in the business press who want to use the TDC to avoid the debt ceiling have proposed [281] and expressed support for the idea [282] that the capability to use PCS could be repealed in a swap for repeal of the debt ceiling legislation. This is a very unequal swap, because the power to use PCS, along with the willingness to use it, already makes the debt limit a dead letter.

The only swap that makes any sense is repeal for legislation giving Treasury the same right as the Fed has now, to create money out of thin air, but only for the purpose of repaying debt subject to the limit and covering deficit spending appropriated by the Congress; because this, and only this, is the equivalent of the PCS power. The only thing that would be more preferable than either of those things is to end the “independent,” really big bank and Wall Street dominated, Fed, and make it accountable by placing it under the direct authority of the Executive Branch and the Secretary of the Treasury with the Fed's current capabilities to create money intact.

Progressives need to fight for retaining the Executive's capability to use PCS, because that is the quickest road to ending austerity politics and preparing the way for Modern Money Theory-based policies [283] to deliver sustainable economic prosperity, full employment, low inflation, and fiscal policy devoted to the public purpose. Removal of the capability would require that austerity politics be ended through change in the Congress. That sort of change, however, is years down the road, whereas the President can make HVPCS happen right now.

(Author's Note: h/t to Jack Foster for proposing a framing document [256] for HVPCS. This is it; but divided into 6 parts for blogging convenience.The rest of the series will deal with objections made to HVPCS and answers to them.)

(Cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives [83].)

No votes yet

Framing Platinum Coin Seigniorage: Part Six, More Political/Economic Objections

letsgetitdone's blog [3]
Log in [284] or register [285] to post comments

Departments:

Thread:

Corporatism [88]

Tags:

MMT [12]

TDC [112]

PCS [111]

$60 T coin [108]

beowulf [8]

Department of Bust Out Profit Models and Vampiric Capitalism [86]

HVPCS [193]

Ezra Klein [220]

Warren Mosler [18]

John Lounsbury [260]

This series provides a framing document for Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS). In the five previous parts of the series, I pointed out that there are three classes of opponents of High Value Platinum Coin Seigniorage [261] (HVPCS, $30 T and above). The first and largest group opposes all Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS) of whatever type. The second, opposes HVPCS, but favors using the Trillion Dollar Coin (TDC) for the limited purpose of avoiding the debt ceiling. The third, opposes HVPCS, and doesn't really favor using the TDC either, except, perhaps, as a last resort to avoid the debt ceiling. It favors an incremental approach to PCS [262] beginning perhaps in the millions or billions in face value, and over a long period of time, after giving people years to adjust to Treasury using platinum coins with unusual, and unprecedented, face values, eventually building up to a TDC.

Parts two, three, four, five and this post (Part Six), considers further objections to HVPCS brought forward by people in one or more of these categories, and my replies to them. As you're seeing, if you're following the series, the opponents of HVPCS are throwing everything but the proverbial kitchen sink at it. In this concluding post, I'll consider some further political/economic objections to PCS and HVPCS.

Destroys confidence in the dollar, here and abroad because it reveals the reality that our fiat money isn't “backed” by anything

This one really makes me see red because it reflects 1) the arrogance of the complainer who thinks he or she is fit to know the reality of the fiat money and our present financial system, while the average citizen is not; 2) the attitude of the complainer that it is OK to maintain the platonic “noble lie” that the operation of our fiat money system is different from the way it really works; 3) the very questionable judgment that if everyone knew that US fiat money was just that, then that would destroy confidence in the dollar, even though it's well-known that all the world's currencies, including our own are fiat currencies; and 4) the attitudes of the globalizing elites that average citizens shouldn't know what they're about. In a word, the anti-democratic character of this objection to HVPCS really creeps me out.

But recognizing that this objection is profoundly anti-democratic also makes it very clear that HVPCS is very much about the larger process of turning back from the evolution toward global plutocracy [286] we see all around us. And it is also about turning back towards both political and social democracy and a decent life for all.

Destroys budgetary discipline

This is another rich one. The idea here is that as long we think we are short of public money, then we will be more disciplined in our spending, and will make sure that the government deficit spending we do approve is only that spending that is necessary for public purpose. On the other hand, if we use HVPCS, then it will be clear that we can have as much money as we choose to have, and so we will lose our fiscal discipline and responsibility, and just spend willy-nilly on foolish things.

Too bad the world and our public spending habits aren't as simple as this picture suggests. But, they're just not.

We now have more than 35 years of experience with austerity politics in the sense that powerful groups in the political system have warned about our deficit and debt problems all that time, and have emphasized the importance of evaluating fiscal policy based on its impact on reducing deficits and balancing budgets, rather than the larger economic and social benefits and costs of those policies.

The record during this time shows that the US has increasingly suffered from a profound fiscal irresponsibility in the sense that we have failed to spend what was necessary to achieve larger public purposes like full employment, decreasing inequality, widely distributed gains in standard of living that keep up with productivity, developing a first class educational system, developing alternatives to fossil energy to serve as the new basis of our economy, developing programs to meet the challenges of environmental sustainability and climate change, increasing family integration, and providing first class universal health care to all Americans as a right. So, for more than 35 years now, our politicians have poor mouthed about not being able to afford expanding our domestic social safety net and discretionary programs, while proceeding to spend lavishly on defense industries, and insisting that we can afford that, all while our country more and more develops the social and economic characteristics of a third world nation.

In short, the last 35 years show that placing artificial constraints on the amount of public deficit spending we will do hasn't worked to produce responsible fiscal policy that fulfills public purpose. I think that's because when politicians and people focus on indicators like the debt and deficit to guide fiscal policy, instead of focusing on the real impacts of fiscal policy, that opens the way for well-funded elites to obscure issues about those real impacts and focus instead on narrow financial details that the elites understand, because they employ armies of analysts to understand them, while the public has no hope of understanding them, and so is in a very bad position to defend its interests.

So, when we look at the history of politics since Jimmy Carter decided we ought to try to balance the budget, and Alice Rivlin assumed a dominant position in DC thinking about fiscal policy, we can see that practicing artificial scarcity in fiat money creation hasn't resulted in our becoming more fiscally responsible, but precisely the opposite. We have to acknowledge that we've been focusing on the wrong things, and we have to stop using them as a way of evaluating fiscal policy and government spending.

The national debt and reducing deficit spending should have no part in our evaluation of our fiscal responsibility. All that ought to matter is evaluating the real effects of Government spending on the economy, politics, society, culture, our resources, and the environment. That's the sort of evaluation that should define budgetary discipline.

Budgetary discipline in that sense is unrelated to HVPCS. It has nothing to do with whether we have, or do not have $60 T in the TGA. It has to do instead, with whether we can mobilize ourselves to make Congress and the Executive accountable to our views about public purpose. Right now they are not.

Instead, they are using their austerity narrative as an excuse to weaken rather than strengthen the safety net. They are using it to refuse to legislate Medicare for All, even though polls have shown for many years that 2/3 of the population wants Medicare for All. They are using it to refuse to enable full employment, including a Job Guarantee for everyone who wants to work full time. They are using it to refuse to make available the funding we need to create a first class educational system. They are using it to refuse to fund sorely needed infrastructure repair and modernization. I can go on and on. But the main point is that the present system of funding Federal deficit spending isn't working to fulfill our public purposes.

It's time to change that system and to have the change reflect the truth that there can be no shortage of money in our system, only shortages of resources, labor, skills, know how, and well-being. The budgetary discipline we ought to pursue is the discipline of ending the real shortages we have, by using the money we can generate in whatever quantity we need to implement government programs that will help us end these other, real, shortages.

Causes the Government bureaucracy to expand and crowd out private sector activities

HVPCS is itself unrelated to the size of government compared to the size of the private sector. We can have HVPCS, use it to pay off the national debt, use it to cover deficits for many years to come, and still choose to have a lower percentage of economic activity performed by government rather than the private sector. Even if we run large deficits, covered by HVPCS, those deficits can be devoted to shoring up private sector growth rather than government growth. Whether we do this or not is our choice, and either shrinking the Government, or growing the Government is compatible with HVPCS.

Having said the above, that doesn't mean that we should decrease the relative size of the government compared to the private economy. In recent years, we have shrunk the government bureaucracy substantially as a percentage of employment. That shrinkage has not led to good times or private sector growth. It has led to the opposite.

The privatization of a lot of government work since the 1970s hasn't led to a reduction in the costs of funding the activities that used to be performed by civil servants. Instead, it's clearly increased those costs. Contracting out was supposed to be cheaper, because the government would avoid expensive fringe benefits, including retirement costs, and supposedly would reduce the cost of services through competition. However, this theory has proven to be incorrect. Civil servants are cheaper than contractors, and they perform as well or better than contract workers, perhaps, because they have little incentive to drag out and prolong work to ensure that they will be employed in the future.

In addition, there is no correlation over time in the United States between prosperity, economic growth, and a smaller Federal government. If anything the correlation is negative. There were better times, lower unemployment, and faster growth from the end of WWII through 1980 when the Government's percentage of the economy was higher than it has been during the period from 1981 to the present. So, maybe we could benefit from some more “crowding out” of the private sector by Government than we now have; but whether we would benefit from this or not, the issue of relative size of the government isn't directly related to whether HVPCS is used or not.

Conclusions

Here are my conclusions based on this six part examination of HVPCS, including all the current objections I could find to the Executive Branch using it to fill the public purse.

Using HVPCS would demonstrate to the public that: the Federal Government's budget isn't like their budget; the Federal Government can never run out of money if it doesn't choose to; there is no need to cut either revenue or spending because we must reduce the deficit; we can use revenues from HVPCS to pay off the national debt as it falls due, and there isn't any need to pursue the current agenda of austerity and "shared sacrifice." There is just no need for austerity and we ought to quit wasting time and causing harm by either discussing it or implementing it. Take it off the table!

So, HVPCS-based elimination of debt can end the whole austerity mind set that provides our current budgetary process with its constraining conservative cast, focused on narrow monetary cost considerations, rather than on a broader progressive framework that weighs the real costs and benefits of proposed fiscal activities of the Federal Government. Congress and the Executive would then evaluate the substance of legislative proposals based on their likely direct impacts and side effects on the lives of Americans, rather than their impact on Federal deficits and surpluses. Then the issues will be about what people need, and what improvements we can make by working together through the Federal Government. That would be the fulcrum of a new, game-changing politics, not debt, deficits, and debt-to-GDP ratios.

HVPCS strikes at the domination of the global financial and political system by Wall Street and the big banks. They will do everything they can to remove the power to use it from the President and the Treasury. That is why HVPCS must be used by the President ASAP! He has the main chance to bring change now. He should take it!

Progressives need to fight for retaining the Executive's capability to use PCS, because that is the quickest road to ending austerity politics and preparing the way for Modern Money Theory-based policies [283] to deliver sustainable economic prosperity, full employment, low inflation, and fiscal policy devoted to the public purpose.

High Value Platinum Coin Seigniorage using coins having $30 Trillion or greater value is most probably a legal alternative for the Treasury to use to fill the public purse. I say most probably, because no one can tell what will happen in response to a Court challenge. However, the likelihood is that the court will not grant standing to any challenger. Even it does, the odds are with the Executive Branch due to the clear language of the coin seigniorage legislation, the relationships between the Fed and the Treasury specified in the Federal Reserve Act, and the unitary executive doctrine.

There are a host of other economic, political, institutional, and political/economic objections to using HVPCS, they range from dismissing it as "weird," "crazy," etc. scary to most people, characterizing it as "printing money" and "inflationary," projecting a political firestorm and projecting political paralysis in Congress if PCS is used at all, worrying about letting the Republicans off the hook for their irresponsible behavior in causing repeated fiscal crises, worrying about appearing to act like a "banana republic," worrying about the possibility that HVPCS will elicit "black swans" with terrible unanticipated consequences, warning that using HVPCS will violate "a social norm," projecting a collapse of investor confidence in the US and its currency and loss of reserve currency status, projecting rising interest rates from the bond traders, warning that HVPCS shouldn't be used because of the maxim "first do no harm," warning that minting a platinum coin is the first cousin of defaulting on the debt, because the act will convince financial markets that we can't manage our affairs, warning that using HVPCS will compromise the independence of the Federal Reserve, and the related objection that it would destroy the institutional structure of the financial system. warning that it would destroy confidence in the dollar because it will reveal the reality that our money is "unbacked" fiat, warning that it would destroy budgetary discipline, and that it would cause "crowding out" of the private sector by the government bureaucracy.
Looking at this list of objections and the replies I've offered in this series, I suggest that every one them, with the possible exception of the inflation objection is insignificant compared to the likely benefits of using HVPCS in place of debt issuance to pay off old debt and perform deficit spending without issuing any new debt instruments.

Even the relatively light austerity being practiced thus far is costing the United States $3.4 Trillion per year in GDP and is leaving more than 30 million dis-employed. If the coming round of austerity from the Congress and the President materializes in the next few months, and we experience another recession, we may end up losing another $1 Trillion off GDP, along with another few million dis-employed.

So, lifting the burden of austerity politics on the 99%, and ending debt ceiling crises, sequesters, and ideological budgetary conflicts, and their attendant effects on economic activity and unemployment, far outweighs the likely negative consequences of any or all of the rest of the objections against HVPCS, apart from demand-pull inflation, which, I've argued, is a very unlikely outcome of HVPCS.

In this series, I've tried to show that there isn't a good reason in the world not to use HVPCS. Of course, one can't prove a negative, so I really haven't shown that. But I hope I've shown that it's costing far too much to continue down the road of debt issuance, in the context of the many objections I've reviewed.

The important cost of doing what we have been doing, is not really the interest on the debt itself; that's only fiat currency which the Government can always make. it's the political consequences of the national debt, which are bipartisan action to practice austerity and "shared sacrifice," that really count. We need to get rid of this before it destroys everything we hold dear. The way to do that is to use HVPCS to get of rid of debt and cover government deficits for many years. HVPCS is a way out of the trap we've built for ourselves. We need to get on with it, now!

(Author's Note: h/t to Jack Foster for proposing a framing document [256] for HVPCS. This is the sixth and concluding part of that document. I'll make available the whole document shortly.)

(Cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives [83].)

No votes yet

Framing Platinum Coin Seigniorage: Part Three, Political Objections

letsgetitdone's blog [3]
Log in [287] or register [288] to post comments

Departments:

Thread:

Corporatism [88]

Tags:

MMT [12]

TDC [112]

PCS [111]

$60 T coin [108]

Ezra kelin [289]

beowulf [8]

Department of Bust Out Profit Models and Vampiric Capitalism [86]

HVPCS [193]

As I pointed out in Part Two of this series, there are three classes of opponents of High Value Platinum Coin Seigniorage [261] (HVPCS, $30 T and above). The first and largest group opposes all Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS) of whatever type. The second, opposes HVPCS, but favors using the Trillion Dollar Coin (TDC) for the limited purpose of avoiding the debt ceiling. The third, opposes HVPCS, and doesn't really favor using the TDC either, except, perhaps, as a last resort. It favors an incremental approach to PCS [262] beginning perhaps in the millions or billions in face value, and over a long period of time eventually building up to a TDC.

Part two, this post (Part Three), and the three remaining posts in this series consider the many objections brought forward by people in one or more of these categories, and my replies to them. As you're seeing, if you're following the series, the opponents of HVPCS have already thrown everything but the proverbial kitchen sink at it. In this post, I'll consider some political objections to PCS.

The Executive will never do it because it's too crazy, weird, bizarre, or outré for words and is beneath the dignity of the United States. Also, it's too big to be practical.

Mostly, this kind of characterization is just name-calling and labeling and is really beneath contempt. A big problem exists. That problem is austerity politics and it is blocking the emergence of progressive economic policy during a time when the presence of nearly 31 million dis-employed people, [274] unprecedented inequality, a stagnating economy, and many other serious challenges requiring an activist Federal government to enable solutions. This is what is too crazy, weird, bizarre, or outré for words and is beneath the dignity of the United States. This is what is profoundly impractical; not minting an HVPC of whatever face value to fill the public purse so we can pay off the debt and cover deficit spending for years to come.

HVPCS can provide the fiscal background that will open the way to constructive economic policies. HVPCS is a novel solution in the sense that it has never been used before. But that doesn't make it crazy, weird, bizarre, or outré. It just makes it “new.”

Fearful, or conservative people will frequently characterize new initiatives in uncomplimentary ways; but their real objection is that the new proposal is outside of their comfort zone; and they believe in as little change as possible because they think that change is most often bad and rarely, if ever, a good thing. From their point of view, this is the best of all possible worlds, however evil it may be for the majority of people.

There’s no point to creating a Strategic Petroleum Reserve-like buffer stock of something the govt has the ability to create at will, especially if it's just going to scare the hell out of people

This is an objection offered by those who prefer an incremental approach to PCS, rather than HVPCS with its consequence that enough seigniorage would be generated to pay off the national debt and cover deficit spending for many years to come. They emphasize the importance of making people comfortable with the idea of PCS before we use it to really change the situation of fiscal politics and move it away from austerity.

Making people comfortable and moving toward consensus is a laudable goal. But PCS will immediately be perceived as a threat to powerful vested interests (as I'll explain below). [290] These interests won't allow the Treasury Department to have the power to create electronic credits in the Treasury's spending account for very long. They will vigorously pursue repeal of the 1996 law to constrain Treasury once again to taxing or borrowing in order to fill the public purse. That's why we do need a buffer stock of funds in the Treasury General Account (TGA) whether or not it scares people.

In addition, just what does “scaring people” people mean? Scaring bond traders? Scaring Wall Street? Scaring the big banks? Scaring the media who have gotten in bed with these interests? Scaring the people who have devoted their lives to propagandizing for austerity? Or does it mean scaring “average” Americans?

I don't think it means scaring most people, because I think they will be comforted to know that the Treasury has enough funds to pay off the public debt as it comes due; and to cover deficit spending appropriated by Congress for many years to come. They will also be comforted to know that there's no need to cut major popular safety net or discretionary programs, or to raise taxes on them.

Let's get real! Using HVPCS may scare elites here in the United States and in other nations around the world. But it won't scare the American people once they understand how it will impact their own lives.

It's the same as “printing money”!

“Printing money” is an epithet from gold standard days [291] used to characterize paper money that wasn't convertible to, and thus “backed by” gold. When the US and other nations ended the gold standard in 1971, all money became fiat money, unbacked by convertibility into any commodity. So, today, when people refer to “printing money” they usually mean the Government issuing currency or bank reserves while deficit spending, without also issuing debt instruments of equal face value to withdraw an equal amount of money from the economy. When debt is sold along with new money created in deficit spending, this is often viewed as “debt-backed” money, and is also thought to be less inflationary than deficit spending unaccompanied by new government debt.

The objection to using PCS then, is precisely that it would provide the credits needed to add new money into the economy without issuing debt, and the basis of the objection is that this is more inflationary than adding the same money into the economy after subtracting an equal amount from it by selling debt. In turn, the idea that PCS-based deficit spending and debt pay off would be more inflationary than debt-based spending is based on the Quantity Theory of Money (QTM). The problem is that the QTM is false, [164] and that both logical analysis of the theory and the empirical evidence available to us refute it.

I'll discuss this a little more below under the inflation objection. But the main point here is that there's no reason to believe that PCS-based deficit spending or debt repayment would be more inflationary than deficit spending or debt repayment accompanied by debt issuance. So, there's nothing to the “printing money” objection. The US isn't either Zimbabwe, or Weimar. [292] It doesn't have crippling external debts in currencies it does create; or wholesale destruction or appropriation of its productive capacities to contend with. So, PCS won't lead to our becoming like either of those historical basket cases.

The political blowback will be fierce, and minting the coin will strengthen the extremist faction in the Republican Party and lead to paralysis in the Congress.

Minting a platinum coin with any appreciable face value over $1 Billion Dollars will create a political firestorm. It doesn't matter if the face value is $100 Billion or $100 Trillion, the act of using PCS, including HVPCS, will be met with outrage, propaganda, labeling, name-calling, and predictions about the decline and fall of the United States. The extremist faction of the Republican Party will have a field day and will be fully supported in their outrage by Wall Street, the big banks, and the financial and political MSM.

However, it won't lead to political paralysis in Congress, provided HVPCS is used rather than “moderate” PCS options. If $60 T gets credited to the TGA, and the President pays down $6.5 T in intragovernmental debt, during the first week after minting the coin, then the Congress will be faced with a game-changing fiscal backdrop to deal with. [249] The President can advocate for action on a variety of measures that will meet national problems with no questions about the fiscal capacity to accomplish these things. If the Republicans simply refuse to pass them, or to work through compromises without having the excuse that we must balance the budget, reduce the deficit, or repay debt because we are running out of money; then they will suffer severe losses in 2014, and the President will get what he wants in 2015.

It really is as simple as that. Without being able to “poor mouth” the country, the Republicans will have no rationalization for their obstructive fiscal politics, and the President will have no excuse for cutting programs people need and want. [293] If the extremist Republicans continue on with their normal economic nonsense, then they will be dead men/women walking as we approach the next election. The 80 CEOs and their “fix the debt” stuff, as well as Peter G. Peterson will also be gone, as political factors. And both parties will have to get about the business of solving our nation's problems, or suffer the consequences in 2014.

The platinum coin will only delay a reckoning we need to have

The “reckoning” here [244] is over the Republicans' “reckless threat to force the United States into default.” Using either the TDC or HVPCS, lets the Republicans off the hook on this issue and makes the new hot issue the President's irresponsible action in minting a platinum coin. I think whether this happens or not depends on the face value of the platinum coins involved. If the platinum coin is a $60 T or some other HVPCS alternative, then I think the political system will quickly begin frying bigger fish than either of those issues.

The issue of whether to let Republicans off the hook is small potatoes compared to the issue of whether HVPCS should be used in place of debt issuance to pay off old debt and perform deficit spending without issuing any new debt instruments. Both this issue and the issue of whether we should end austerity politics when there's no longer any need to worry about solvency or debt when deficit spending, are far bigger issues than whether the Republicans were :reckless” or the President “irresponsible.” In addition, the issue of the President's “irresponsibility” will be gone in a week once he pays off that first $6.5 T in debt subject to the limit.

We can't mint a platinum coin because this would violate a social norm!

Social and cultural norms are properties of social systems, and there are many levels of social systems ranging from families and small friendship groupings to international social systems. You can certainly say that there's a norm against using HVPCS as a plausible solution to the national debt, and claim that this is not how our society pays its bills. And, it's certainly true that we haven't done it in the past; and that people working for, or identifying with, the FIRE sector are opposed to using PCS as a solution to the debt problem and take refuge in ridiculing us and trying to activate a social norm and frame that they think is dominant.

But these things don't show that there really is a social norm preventing this in the United States when viewed as a large-scale political/economic system. Or that President Obama has to move incrementally to change “the social norm” because he would have a problem with implementing High Value PCS with a bold lightening strike minting a $60 T coin, since the country as a whole would rise up in opposition to such a move due to the strength of the social norm that we shouldn't use HVPCS. There's no evidence at all to suggest that this would be the case, and every reason to believe that most people don't care how the national debt is paid off; so long as it's paid off, and is not there to burden themselves, and “their grandchildren.”

After all, most people are completely unaware of how deficit spending and debt instruments work, and completely unaware that "debt is not debt” [294] as we MMTers like to say. What they do know is that the United States has more than $16.4 T in debt instruments out there. That scares them, because they've been made to believe that it's their debt, [295] and I think they really don't care if this “debt” is paid off by taxing more than we spend, or through using platinum coins to get the Federal Reserve to create money out of thin air [156] for Treasury to use in a way that has no obvious short-term effects on them.

In part four, I'll discuss more political as well as some economic objections.

(Cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives [83].)

No votes yet

Framing Platinum Coin Seigniorage: Part Two, Legal Objections

letsgetitdone's blog [3]
Log in [296] or register [297] to post comments

Departments:

Thread:

Corporatism [88]

Tags:

MMT [12]

TDC [112]

PCS [111]

$60 T coin [108]

Dorf On Law [298]

Philip Diehl [197]

beowulf [8]

Department of Bust Out Profit Models and Vampiric Capitalism [86]

HVPCS [193]

There are three classes of opponents of High Value Platinum Coin Seigniorage [261] (HVPCS, $30 T and above). The first and largest group opposes all PCS of whatever type. The second, opposes HVPCS, but favors using the Trillion Dollar Coin (TDC) for the limited purpose of avoiding the debt ceiling. The third, opposes HVPCS, and doesn't really favor using the TDC either, except, perhaps, as a last resort.

It favors an incremental approach to PCS [262] beginning perhaps in the millions or billions in face value, and over a long period of time eventually building up to a TDC. The remaining posts in this series consider the many objections brought forward by people in one or more of these categories, and my replies to them. As you will see, the opponents of HVPCS have already thrown everything but the proverbial kitchen sink at it. In this post, I'll consider some legal objections. [248]

PCS violates the intent of the 1996 legislation, and is an unconstitutional exercise of executive authority, or is an unconstitutional delegation of legislative authority to the executive.

The Courts generally don't try to interpret laws based on theories about Congressional intent, in the face of the plain language of a law. The language of section (k) of the 1996 legislation [130] is particularly plain in providing for platinum coin seigniorage and leaving face values and other coin attributes up to the Secretary. It is not just that section (k) is plain its meaning; but also that other sections of the law constrain what the secretary can do in various ways. The plain implication of the section (k) textual context is that Congress intended to delegate broad powers of platinum coin seigniorage to the Secretary. There is no contrary evidence to the plain meaning of the text of section (k) in the law.

Some have contended [299] that the purpose of the statute was to legislate about commemorative coins, rather than coins intended as a a source of revenue for the Treasury. Philip Diehl, Director of the US Mint at the time of the legislation drafted the language of the law. He flatly denies [300] that the intent of the law was to authorize more commemorative coins, and says it was to provide new coins that would produce profits for the US Mint. Such coins are unambiguously legal tender. There's no further evidence that Congress intended anything else in passing the law he drafted.

The Justices aren't collective psychologists who are expert at divining the intent of the Congress. They are expert, however, at interpreting what the text of a law says, and so that is what they stick to almost all the time. A challenge to PCS based on intent isn't something any Court is likely to take up, in the face of the language of the 1996 legislation, and Congress's plain ability to repeal one or more of countless laws that allow unintended consequences.

What if a $60 trillion dollar coin is used to avoid the debt ceiling, and this saves the United States from defaulting on its debts, and the world financial system from collapsing? Is it then likely that the Supreme Court will entertain any challenges to the plain language of the law based on an interpretation of intent, unsupported in the text of the law, which would then place the Treasury in the position of having to return that trillion dollars in Fed credits, and again look default in the face? Can you see John Roberts ever voting for this?

John Carney, a CNBC blogger, has suggested [301] that the 1996 legislation is unconstitutional because it specified an impermissible delegation of the Congressional authority to coin money to the Executive Branch. He argues that there's no “intelligible principle” behind the language in section (k) limiting the Secretary's powers.

However, Congress delegated to the Treasury the power to mint platinum bullion and proof coins having a variety of properties to be specified by the Secretary; but it did not delegate to the Secretary that power with respect to coins made out of other materials; or even with respect to platinum coins that are neither bullion or proof coins. So, Congress did limit the authority of the Treasury to mint platinum coins according to intelligible principles. Just not the intelligible principle that the coins involved had to be limited to a specific face value. Or, to put it another way, in the area of platinum coins what Congress has done is to delegate its authority according to “the intelligible principle” that the Secretary is to mint such coins with face values he/she deems necessary and proper.

PCS really doesn't avoid breaching the debt ceiling

It's also been suggested [299] that PCS doesn't solve the debt ceiling problem, because in substance, if not in form, using the platinum coin is just a way of Treasury getting a loan from the Fed until the debt ceiling can be raised and it can go back to issuing debt. This argument assumes, however, that Treasury would have an obligation, at some point, to redeem the coin from the Fed with revenue raised from taxes or debt issuance. However, none of the proponents of using PCS, until very recently, when this idea crept into the writing of Paul Krugman, [302] ever proposed restoring the status quo by buying the coin back from the Fed.

Instead, our main idea [48] has always been that any platinum coins deposited at the Fed would remain in its vault as a Fed asset in perpetuity, and that the Fed would credit the US Mint's account with the face values of the coins. In our view the Fed would have the legal duty [303] to provide such credits in response to a deposit of a platinum coin or coins because the coins are legal tender, and the NY Fed, as the fiduciary banking agent of the Treasury Department, cannot refuse to accept and credit a legal tender coin. The Treasury would incur no obligation to the Fed in using PCS, any more than any one of us would incur any obligation to our bank in giving them a coin with $100 in total face value, and expecting the bank to credit our account with that $100.

The Fed can't be forced by Treasury to accept and credit an HVPC it mints

Oh, yes it can. [303] Treasury may choose not to force the Fed to do this, as it just did, but one of the powers vested in the Secretary of the Treasury before creation of the Federal Reserve system was certainly to spend its legal tender into the economy. To do that under an arrangement where the Fed is its fiduciary bank/agent, requires that the Fed deposit and credit its legal tender into its spending account, the TGA. So, I think it follows that under 12 USC 246, the Secretary has the authority to order the Federal Reserve to credit that coin so Federal spending can proceed. If the Fed Chair still refuses, then the President can remove the Fed Chair for cause (12 USC 242). See this more detailed argument [303] for further development. In Part Three, I'll consider political objections to using HVPCS.

(Cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives [83].)

No votes yet

Good Luck Stopping Austerity With Incremental Platinum Coin Seigniorage!

letsgetitdone's blog [3]
Log in [304] or register [305] to post comments

Departments:

Thread:

Corporatism [88]

Tags:

MMT [12]

Department of Bust Out Profit Models and Vampiric Capitalism [86]

HVPCS [193]

$60 T coin [108]

austerity [194]

incrementalism [195]

Some have responded to the recent boomlet for using Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS) [125] as a solution to the debt ceiling problem, by reacting to the ridicule visited upon PCS advocates by know-nothings like Heidi Moore [306] of the Guardian and Matt O'Brien [307] of the Atlantic, by proposing “smaller ball” PCS than the clearly inadequate Trillion Dollar Coin (TDC) [228] itself. This post will focus on J. D. Alt's interesting post [308] which makes five points about the TDC debate as it was addressed on a recent Chris Hayes show. [309]

-- 1. Stephanie Kelton's reframing of a question about financial constraints to point out that the real issue is resource and productive capability constraints and not purely financial constraints, is a point that is essential to keep in the forefront our discussions and also that this is “. . . the central truth of MMT [31].

-- 2. It's not laws but social norms that:

. . . that form the living tissue, muscle and sinew that cling to the bones. Social norms change, but they change slowly, over time—they do NOT, by their nature, change “all at once.”

Clearly, it is a social norm that will not allow the Trillion Dollar Coin to be considered as a plausible solution to the national debt—and which necessitated so much giggling on the show. Legal or not, economy-saving or not, minting trillion dollar coins is NOT how our society pays its bills. Any shift in this social norm has to be very incremental.

-- 3. Producing too much money and spending it into the economy, as Joe Wiesenthal pointed out on the show can cause inflation if the amount of spending injected exceeds the resources of the economy to absorb it. On the other hand, if it doesn't exceed those resources then “the result will not be inflation but rather a growing of the economy and an expansion of national assets; in that case, in could be argued, to withhold the spending is indefensible.”

-- 4. “Paying your debts and living within your means”:

. . . is a very powerful message to the religious psyche that permeates our cultural norms. It can only be countered by explaining WHY, in fact, the sovereign government is in debt (see item no. 5 below) and making clear, over and over, Dr. Kelton’s point that the “means” we have to live within are not FINANCIAL means but, rather, RESOURCE means.

-- 5. A point not directly addressed in Hayes's show is that the constantly and casually reiterated idea that the Federal Government can only raise money for spending by either taxing or borrowing is false; and that it can also create money though issuing currency. He also points out that it has to be made clear to people that the reason for the existence of the debt is this false assumption. And then he ends with:

“Issuing” currency (rather than borrowing in the bond market) to pay for sovereign spending over and above what is collected in taxes might be one of those things that could be done incrementally. Instead of threatening the institutional and social norms of the bond market with total annihilation, MMT could propose that sovereign spending be “monetized” only on a limited basis, to accomplish certain specific and special goals that would strengthen and benefit the nation as a whole. Over time, as people saw the benefits of monetized sovereign spending—and became assured it did not, if properly managed, lead to inflation—the social norm would likely shift. If that happened, the next time Chris Hayes had a panel discussion about the national debt, there wouldn’t have to be so much giggling.

I agree with the first of these five points. But I have either questions or qualifications to raise about the rest.

On Social Norms, and their impact on MMT Policy Advocacy

First, I don't flatly disagree with the notion that social norms change slowly over time, but do not change all at once. I just wonder about the application of this generalization to reality. For example, if something were called “a social norm” and that something did, apparently, break down rather quickly, to be replaced by another something we called a social norm, would we then change our mind about the first thing we called a norm, or would we conclude that it was not, after all, a “real” social norm. In other words, what evidence would J. D. Alt accept as sfficient for him to falsify the generalization that social norms change only slowly? There has to be some or we're looking at tautology here, not empirical social science.

Second, in looking at a specific social norm that doesn't “change all at once” how would we mark the beginning of the process of change of that social norm over time? In a recent article, Ellen Brown points out [214]that the idea of using coin seigniorage to pay off the national debt was first suggested in the early 1980s by a chairman of the Coinage Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives. Does this count as the beginning of a process to change the social norm that Federal spending must be based on either taxing or borrowing?

How about the beginning of the MMT synthesis in 1996, [310] and the thinking associated with it that the Governments with fiat currencies can spend freely by printing money? Is that the beginning? What about the acceleration of MMT work in the late 1990s and early 2000s? Is that the beginning of the change in social norms involved here? How about the publication of Ellen Brown's book in 2007; [311] which mentioned the possibility of coin seigniorage being used to disintegrate “the Web of Debt”? Is that the beginning?

I could go on with this; but you see the point. Unless we can agree on the starting point of the process of change for a social norm, J. D. Alt's generalization is pretty meaningless for any coherent application.

He wants us to think that High Value Platinum Coin Seigniorage (HVPCS) [249] won't happen anytime soon because it violates a social norm, and these change only very slowly; but if we don't have the starting date of such a change, we can't very well evaluate whether we're looking at an overnight change about to happen; or whether a change that happens tomorrow, or next week, or next month, has actually been 42 years in the making; say since Nixon took the US entirely off the gold standard; or even since FDR took the domestic economy off the gold standard 80 years ago.

Third, I have some background in Complex Adaptive Systems Theory (See Ch. 2), [312] plus many years of research [313] in Conflict studies, Civil Strife, mass movements, and the social sciences more generally. I know that when complex systems are having difficulties maintaining themselves at “the edge of chaos,” they can easily fall into the death spirals of either rigid mechanical order, or seemingly chaotic dynamics, before they reorganize into a new pattern that successfully maintains their identity as a complex system. During the process of reorganization new global properties of the reorganized complex system emerge [314] in very short time frames. These new global properties can easily involve social and cultural norms that were never dominant in the previous state of the complex system subject to system transformation.

Does that mean that the old dominant social norms changed very rapidly or only very slowly? Again, that's going to depend on your perspective. If you look at the rapid breakdown and transformation of the system involved you'd swear that the change was very rapid.

On the other hand, if you do a historical analysis, it's almost never hard to show that the change you're analyzing has deep historical roots and was a long time coming. Do I really have to cite historical examples on this point? What about the norm that the major European powers wouldn't fight major wars against one another. That one lasted for 1815 – 1914, almost 100 years; and then was gone with the wind. How about the social norm, that Russia would always be ruled by a Czar? That one lasted for hundreds of years, until 1917, even if we date it from the first Romanov? How about the gold standard? How about slavery in the US? How about no taxes on income? How about the norm of not having a Central Bank in the United States?

Fourth, it's important to keep in mind that social and cultural norms are properties of social systems, and that there are many levels of social systems ranging from families and small friendship groupings to international social systems. J. D. Alt says that there's a norm against using the TDC as a plausible solution to the national debt, and he flat out claims that this is not how our society pays its bills.

Well, it's certainly true that we haven't done it in the past; and it's certainly true that people working for, or identifying with, the FIRE sector are opposed to using PCS as a solution to the debt problem and take refuge in ridiculing us and trying to activate a social norm and frame that they think is dominant. But these things don't show that there really is a social norm preventing this in the United States when viewed as a large-scale political/economic system. Or that President Obama has to move incrementally to change “the social norm” because he would have a problem with implementing High Value PCS with a bold lightening strike minting a $60 T coin, since the country as a whole would rise up in opposition to such a move due to the strength of the social norm that we shouldn't use PCS.

There's no evidence to suggest that this would be the case, and every reason to believe that most people don't care how the national debt is paid off; so long as it's paid off, and is not there to burden themselves, and “their grandchildren.” After all, most people are completely unaware of how deficit spending and debt instruments work, and completely unaware that "debt is not debt” [294] as we MMTers like to say. What they do know is that the United States has more than $16.4 T in debt instruments out there. That scares them, because they've been made to believe that it's their debt, [295] and I think they really don't care if this “debt” is paid off by taxing more than we spend, or through using platinum coins to get the Federal Reserve to create money out of thin air [156] for Treasury to use in a way that has no obvious short-term effects on them.

Joe Wiesenthal and Inflation

Joe Wiesenthal's formulation on inflation during the Chris Hayes panel discussion was a good one. But in Joe's writing [263] he's taken pains to point out that while the inflation issue doesn't affect the Trillion Dollar Coin (TDC); Higher Value PCS applications are likely to create inflation and perhaps even hyperinflation. Joe Wiesenthal has no basis for saying this that is apparent in his writings. But, it is a position opposed to HVPCS, and biases him towards what I've called “small ball” PCS applications, rather than game-changing ones.

Paying Your Debts and Living Within Your Means

I agree that this meme is powerful and representative of our cultural norms, and also that it needs to countered with explanations of why the public debt exists, and also that the issue of “means” is not financial, but involves our resources and our productive capacity. But I don't agree that telling or teaching people this is the “only” way to counter the norm as applied to financial means.

Telling and teaching is important for both the short and long terms; but even more important is action that will remove the public debt, while not tanking the economy or causing inflation. This is what a $60 T PCS solution will do, that small ball PCS activity will not.

In fact, if the President used a $60 T solution to pay off large chunks of the national debt, people would quickly get the point that the debt existed only because Congress and the Executive blocked using coin seigniorage on the debt and the deficit and insisted that only taxing and borrowing could be used for spending. Using the coin would illustrate that there was never any issue of financial means. When that debt began to get paid off quickly it would be “a teachable moment;” one in which we could get the message across that the real constraints are in resources and capacity, and that we need to quit worrying about the financial end and start building a prosperous sustainable economy characterized by economic and social democracy.

Currency Issuing Incrementalism

J. D. Alt's last point is that “issuing” currency to pay for deficit spending might be introduced incrementally, “instead of threatening the bond market with total annihilation.” He thinks that if we propose to use seigniorage to do deficit spending on specific policies that would be clearly of benefit to the nation, and these policies were legislated than as people saw the benefits, and also saw that there was no inflation accompanying the currency issuance, then the social norm against using seigniorage or just issuing currency without debt would change, and then there wouldn't be “so much giggling” about us PCS advocates, by panelists on TV shows representing the FIRE Sector.

The first problem with this is that people like me who favor HVPCS, don't favor “threatening the bond market . . . “, but rather, destroying its foundation, [93] new debt issuance, nearly over night. I don't intend this flippantly. I don't think the President should threaten HVPCS. I think he should just do it; and let the chips fall where they may.

The second problem with this and similar proposals, [315] is that neoliberal deficit hawks will be unalterably opposed to PCS, no matter the context in which it is used. They will work as hard as they can to prevent the PCS camel from getting its nose into the public financing tent.

They will do everything possible to repeal the PCS legislation. And they will try to impeach any President who uses PCS for any significant purpose at all, because they know very well that if either small ball or game-changing PCS works, then their austerity politics game, so important for the developing plutocracy, is up.

J. D. Alt assumes that “small-ball” or incremental PCS will be less threatening to the FIRE sector than game-changiing PCS, and so, will elicit less vigorous opposition. It is the same kind of assumption that led progressives to turn away from supporting Medicare for All, and to push for the “public option” sparkle pony, prior to caving in to the ACA, because "it's better than notihing," and the same kind of assumption that led the Clintons to propose managed care rather than Medicare for All in the 1990s, which got them a great, big fat loss to the opposition.

These kinds of “pre-compromises" do not work, because they elicit just as vigorous opposition as a “full-monty” option, would, but don't offer the same level of benefits to people. That is, people often don't love the compromise legislation, so you can't get them to support it, or to support you in the next election. That's certainly what happened with the ACA, which was a big factor in costing the Democrats the election of 2010.

In the case of PCS, incrementalism will lead to a series of exhausting political conflicts in which progressive victories will be pyrrhic, because they will drain political capital, but won't solve the problem that people are concerned about, and that the deficit/debt hawk/austerians use for leverage to make austerity politics seem reasonable. That problem is not getting PCS or currency issuance accepted. But acceptance WILL occur as a by-product of solving the problem that most people care about.

That problem is a national debt that seems self-evidently outrageous in size to most people and opposed to common sense. We can't solve that problem in a visible way that people will instantly understand with 'small-ball“ PCS. We can only solve it with game-changing PCS, that eliminates the national debt, covers projected deficits for a long time to come, and so transforms the basis of progressive politics addressed toward the economy.

Conclusion

The idea that we need to move slowly with policies that will significantly change politics and economics, because social norms are arrayed against such policy changes is perhaps the central idea of Conservative [316] Ideology (notice I'm using the capital “c” and not the small “c” here). Edmund Burke might have made the same argument against PCS as J. D. Alt put forward in his post.

It is an argument that is vague in nature, lacks criteria for application, and is opposed to the rational progressive temperament that is in the tradition of long-time MMT authors like Bill Mitchell, Randy Wray, Warren Mosler, Mat Forstater, Stephanie Kelton, Scott Fullwiler, and Pavlina Tcherneva. And it's also opposed to the temperament of newer MMT writers like Marshall Auerback, Mike Norman, Bill Black and Michael Hudson.

The position of MMT is that the preferred situation for a nation sovereign in its own fiat currency is that its Treasury Department simply create currency in the act of deficit spending without issuing accompanying debt. Let's be clear here.

A $60 T or $100 T platinum coin would, if minted and deposited, achieve this MMT preference for some time to come. Not forever, but it would be the proper pilot experiment for legislating that MMT preferred change, because it would give people years to assess how that kind of system would work. So why aren't all MMT writers supporting this change? It isn't quite pure MMT; but it's damned close, and much closer than incremental PCS would be.

The counsel of pursuing incrementalism makes no sense here. There are some problems that incrementalism just won't fix. Getting rid of the national debt, and the discomfort of people with it, can't be done incrementally, because the opposition to incremental initiatives would be too fierce, and the benefits from those initiatives too little, to justify the political conflicts that would ensue. Also, there's the question of opportunity.

Right now, the President has the opportunity to make High Value $60 T PCS a fait accompli, and to eliminate fiscal austerity politics forever. How long that opportunity will exist I don't know. But it is much more risky to give the opposition a chance to mobilize against PCS, than it is to just mint that $60 T coin, get the electronic credits into the public purse (the TGA), and the begin to pay off huge chunks of the national debt quickly.

That is what will get “issuing currency” accepted. But incremental “small ball” PCS that will be fought with propaganda, money, law suits, mass media opposition, and constant ridicule, before it has had a chance to be effective, won't work, and we shouldn't advocate it.

The right kind of answer to Heidi Moore, Matt O'Brien, and others who ridicule HVPCS, isn't PCS incrementalism. It's an answer like the ones here [317] and here. [318] It is, more directly, #mintthe60Tcoin

(Cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives [139].)

No votes yet

Make 'Em Do It! I Still Choose Using High Value Platinum Coin Seigniorage To End Austerity!

letsgetitdone's blog [3]
Log in [319] or register [320] to post comments

Departments:

Thread:

Corporatism [88]

Tags:

MMT [12]

TDC [112]

HVPCS [193]

$60 T coin [108]

Ezra Klein [220]

austerity [194]

grand bargain [222]

great betrayal [223]

#mintthehvpcs [224]

Yesterday, Ezra Klein reported in the Washington Post [226] that:

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 would have to treat it as a legal way for the Treasury Department to create currency. If they don’t believe it’s legal and would not credit the Treasury Department’s deposit, the platinum coin would be worthless.

This statement from Ezra Klein would have us believe that the Federal Reserve is an independent agent in this matter, and that it can refuse to credit the deposit of a newly minted high face value proof platinum coin, if the Treasury makes such a deposit. It also assumes that if the Treasury insisted on the deposit of the coin, that the Fed would be in a position to go Court to contest that; that it has a choice in the matter.

I don't believe that either of these things are true. I also think they are just a rationalization, so the President, who most probably decided this can pretend that this decision isn't on him; or at least can be partially blamed on the Fed. Let's review some critical aspects of the relationship between the Fed and the Treasury.

Fed Independence?

First, here are a some quotes from the US Code and comments.

"…banks, when required by the Secretary of the Treasury, shall act as fiscal agents of the United States; and the revenues of the Government or any part thereof may be deposited in such banks, and disbursements may be made by checks drawn against such deposits."12 USC 391

The coins are legal tender, and disbursements can't be made unless a deposit is credited. So, both imply that all banks that receive such deposits must credit them, and that the Bank officers at the New York Fed cannot refuse to credit the face values of a deposit of coins by the US Mint in its Public Enterprise Fund (PEF) Account. As for the Board of Governors, including the Fed Chair, forbidding the New York Fed from crediting the deposit, there is this part of the USC:

". . . wherever any power vested by this chapter in the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System or the Federal reserve agent appears to conflict with the powers of the Secretary of the Treasury, such powers shall be exercised subject to the supervision and control of the Secretary." 12 USC 246

The US code says that the Secretary has supervision and control, not the Fed Chair, or the bank officers at any of the banks, however exalted, within the Fed system. So, if anyone in the Fed system wants to go to Court about this; it's hard to see that they could get standing even to file an injunction. In fact, if they attempted to get an injunction and to sue after a Treasury order prohibiting them from doing that, apparently the Treasury Secretary could fire the offending parties if “supervision and control” means what it usually means.

In short, the Platinum coin is still on the books. [130] The legal rationalizations of the Treasury and the Fed are a smoke screen to obscure the President's deciding not to use the authority he is granted by the Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS) [125] legislation. And finally the coin certainly would work if the President decided to use it, provided he ordered the Secretary to mint and have a platinum coin deposited in the Mint's PEF at the New York Fed; and provided the Secretary sent instructions to the New York Fed and the Board of Governors ordering that the coin be credited and no attempts be made to contest the Secretary's action in a Court of Law.

The Wrong Kind of Coin

After a hiatus of 16 months the Trillion Dollar Coin (TDC) surfaced again in the mainstream blogging and MSM World [211] at the beginning of December. The outbreak of posts and discussions [321] was fairly intense as people began looking beyond the “fiscal cliff “crisis and started looking ahead to the debt ceiling fight to come. During the second half of December however, posts and commentary slowed as we got closer and closer to the “cliff,” and most commentary focused on that.

But at the beginning of the New Year, after the 'cliff” was partially deflated, new posts from mainstream bloggers on the possibility of minting a Trillion Dollar Coin (TDC) to avoid the debt ceiling appeared, including a post from Paul Krugman. [322] In addition, Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) became the first Congressman to advocate for the TDC [323] to get around the debt ceiling, the TDC was suddenly ubiquitous on MSNBC, and began appearing on other networks as well.

The ground swell for the TDC continued through the first week of January and kept growing larger and larger facilitated by the #minthecoin twitter campaign. The hashtag #mintthecoin was originated By Stephanie Kelton [324] of the Economics Department of the University of Missouri at Kansas City. Joe Wiesenthal, blogging at Business Insider, [282] picked it up, used it to name a White House petition, and marketed a viral petition drive [325] urging the President to mint a TDC and use it to pay down debt so the debt ceiling could be avoided.

The twitter campaign became a phenomenon and a trending topic, accompanied by more and more blog posts across the political spectrum, both pro and con, about using the TDC. Signatures on the petition grew fast, finally resulting in questions at White House news conferences about the TDC, asking whether the President was going to use it or had considered it.

Increasingly, after January 5th, the platinum coin was everywhere even getting covered by the Colbert show. Finally, on June 12, as the web frenzy continued to grow and after a very notable panel discussion of Platinum Coin Seigniorage on Chris Hayes's Up show, [309] including both Wiesenthal and Kelton, among others, this past Saturday morning at MSNBC, the Treasury and the Fed tried to put an end to speculation by announcing that the Administration would not mint the coin.

So, now the web echos with cries that the platinum coin is dead, [326] some of the cries are joyful. Some of them are angry [327]. Perhaps they're right. Perhaps the coin is dead. But perhaps also it will come back again, in a new guise, when conditions are right. How can that be?

Well first, we need to recognize that the TDC, with its intense and frenzied web-based campaign was based on the wrong coin [328] and the wrong cause. The cause or the problem it was addressed to was getting past the debt ceiling by creating some head room below it with the seigniorage proceeds. After that, the TDC bloggers envisioned that deficit spending would continue to require issuing debt instruments, and that there would be no further “disruption” in the normal way of doing things, and also that the President would cope with the coming sequester, and continuing resolution (CR) conflicts separately.

So, the TDC, even if used, would really change very little. It wouldn't stop the Republicans from pursuing spending cuts in entitlements and important discretionary programs. It wouldn't change the fundamental drive for austerity in both parties, fueled as it is by the view that “national debt” is both frighteningly large, and also unsustainable. So, at best, the TDC was a tactic to put off the day of reckoning with the Republicans, and perhaps to use the law authorizing it as the basis for a swap with the Republicans of the PCS legislation for the debt ceiling law, a very silly [228] and odious idea proposed by a mainstream blogger, [281] wanting to return the system to “normal” but not change it.

Considering this background, it is easy for the President to say that we won't use PCS. Maybe not as easy he would have liked. But still the TDC was only a tactic. The President can abandon it and talk about other tactics, or his apologists can talk about his desire to avoid default by having a government shutdown that will break Republican resistance, as President Clinton was able to do. If they and he can do that for long enough, then the President can keep Democratic Congresspeople in line for as long as it takes for him to make his “grand bargain” for austerity with enough Republicans to join with the supine Democrats to pass it.

Even though I have blogged more frequently about PCS than anyone, I have never been for minting one TDC and returning to normal Treasury/Fed procedures for deficit spending. I have always proposed substantial and significant change in the financial system, change that would end with paying off the national debt, and with destroying the underlying political rationale for austerity based on the debt and the related idea of fiscal unsustainability.

During the whole current TDC campaign I have blogged constantly about High Value Platinum Coin Seigniorage (HVPCS) and its potential for changing the fiscal and political landscape and destroying the basis for austerity politics, while changing the game radically for progressive attempts to create greater economic and social justice. I referred to HVPCS as the big story the mainstream was missing [329], and also as game-changing PCS [249] that would change the context of politics.

I believe that if the MSM bloggers hadn't set up one of their usual “only talk to fellow villagers” echo chambers, but instead had embarked on an honest discussion of PCS options, they would have ended with a groundswell of support for HVPCS to fight austerity and that idea, since it is more strategic than tactical, would have been much harder for the President, Geithner, and Bernanke to dismiss, after a campaign that had identified it as the way out of austerity for the United States.

The President must, if he's going to be successful in making the “grand bargain” continue to present himself as preferring not to make serious cuts to entitlement and other valued domestic programs, unless the Republicans “make him do it.” To the extent possible, the Democrats who will support him, also want to deny responsibility for the actions they will take. For the President and his Democrats to be seen as forced into the “grand bargain,” the President cannot be seen as acting to take an important way out of the austerity trap “off the table.” And that is what he would have had to do if the TDC campaign had been replaced with an HVPCS campaign sold as an answer to austerity.

The MSM and the blogosphere generally have missed the chance to generate such a campaign with the really heavy pressure it would have placed on the President and the Democratic Party. That is its failure; yet another disservice to the American people by the MSM Press.

The Right Kind of Coin

I've been blogging about the right kind of coin for a long time now, and very frequently since the latest wave of PCS began in December. That kind of coin is a platinum coin with a face value of $60 T. [201] Why $60 T? Because that's the face value needed to pay off the national debt, and to cover deficit spending for 15 – 25 years, enough time to educate people about the nature of fiat money and the desirability of changing the current financial system so that the Federal Reserve is reorganized as part of the Treasury Department, and the Treasury's authority to create reserves as it spends, without either debt financing or seigniorage, is recognized as the way things ought to be done.

The idea that after Congress appropriates money for Federal deficit spending, that spending can only occur if and when the Treasury can raise the money, is a hangover from gold standard days and ridiculous for a fiat sovereign government like the United States. The authority to spend should be delegated by Congress to the Treasury at the point appropriations are approved.

Appropriations are a mandate on the Executive; that mandate, in a sane nation, would be accompanied by the delegation of the authority to fulfill the mandate. That is the system we should eventually have because it is the only one that makes any sense and that can keep both the Executive and Congress accountable for their actions.

But until Congress passes legislation creating that system, it ought to be recognized by all that the PCS legislation is on the books, and that for the President not to use it to fill the public purse with enough funds to banish the underlying fiscal conditions that underlie austerity politics, the national debt, and the ability to cover the deficit for a long time to come, is inexcusably corrupt, fiscally and economically irresponsible, and completely opposed to the public public purpose that the President is supposed to serve.

So, I want to tell the President that for as long as the PCS law is on the books, and austerity is impending, he has the duty and the obligation to reject it and to mint a game-changing PCS solution using a very high value platinum coin, that after it is credited by the Fed, will make it very plain that there is no need for austerity, but that there is a need for whatever deficit spending Congress needs to appropriate, and he needs to implement, to put America back on the road to the economic and social justice we ought to be pursuing as part of a Green New Deal.

I call on him to mint that $60 T coin now. And if he fails to do that; and instead, along with the Democrats, goes ahead with his plans to impose unnecessary austerity and sacrifice on most Americans other than the wealthy, in the face of his ability to create financial plenty, then I, and others who I am able to persuade about game-changing HVPCS, will do all we can to place the blame where it belongs for “the great betrayal,” and to see that Congresspeople who join in the “grand bargain” travesty of justice pay for it at the polls!

But before we get to that point, I call on others who want to see an end to austerity join me in beginning again to blog, comment, facebook, and tweet about PCS; but this time to forget about the TDC, which was always the wrong coin, and to focus on #minttheHVPC instead. That is up the ante! Make this about ending austerity, and using the right platinum coin to create the political space needed for doing it!

Forget about them taking PCS off the table! We're putting it back on the Table! Make 'Em Mint the HVPC! Make 'Em Do It!

No votes yet

Paul Goes Platinum!

letsgetitdone's blog [3]
Log in [330] or register [331] to post comments

Tags:

MMT [12]

Department of Bust Out Profit Models and Vampiric Capitalism [86]

TDC [112]

PCS [111]

60Tcoin [332]

Krugman [333]

wigwam [334]

Michael Sankowski [335]

Robert Rice [336]

Jerrold Nadler [337]

Krystal Ball [338]

Steve Kornacke [339]

Another platinum coin surge in the Second Wave rippled through the mainstream media yesterday and this time hit the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Domenico Mantanaro of MSNBC kicked things off on one of the morning shows by mentioning the Trillion Dollar Coin (TDC) as a possible solution to the debt ceiling problem. Then, in the afternoon, on MSNBC's the cycle, Krystal Ball, and Steve Kornacke, in discussing the coming debt ceiling conflict talked rather matter-of-factly, I thought, about minting some TDCs to get around the debt ceiling.

Then Paul Krugman blogged about [322] platinum coins. In the context of answering a question about whether we can “print money,” to get around the debt ceiling, he answers no, and then says:

The peculiar exception is that clause allowing the Treasury to mint platinum coins in any denomination it chooses. Of course this was intended as a way to issue commemorative coins and stuff, not as a fiscal measure; but at least as I understand it, the letter of the law would allow Treasury to stamp out a platinum coin, say it’s worth a trillion dollars, and deposit it at the Fed — thereby avoiding the need to issue debt.

An admirably brief statement of the basic idea, but followed then by this puzzler:

In reality, to pursue the thought further, the coin really would be as much a Federal debt as the T-bills the Fed owns, since eventually Treasury would want to buy it back. So this is all a gimmick — but since the debt ceiling itself is crazy, allowing Congress to tell the president to spend money then tell him that he can’t raise the money he’s supposed to spend, there’s a pretty good case for using whatever gimmicks come to hand.

So, it's gimmicks for gimmicks to get around the debt ceiling, and no notion on Paul Krugman's part that Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS) might have a much broader use [329] than simply countering a gimmick the Republicans are using to try to trash the social safety net and drown the Government in a bathtub.

Apart from that, however, this “. . . the coin really would be as much a Federal debt as the T-bills the Fed owns, since eventually Treasury would want to buy it back” is a bit strange. A very high value platinum coin deposited by the Mint in its account at the Fed would have its value credited to the Mint's account in the form of electronic credits. The Fed would then keep the coin in a vault forever, as an asset on its balance sheet, and the seigniorage profits from the deposit of the coin would be swept into the Treasury General Account (TGA) where it would be used for repaying debt or other spending appropriated by Congress. So why would the Treasury ever want or need to buy that coin back from the Fed? And why would the coin be a Federal debt that the Treasury must repay?

It's true that base money issued by the Federal Government is a Federal debt in the sense that the Government has an obligation to accept it in payment of taxes. But in this case, the Fed holds the coin and it has no taxes to pay. Also, the coin never goes into circulation, but sits in a Fed vault, so where does a debt that the Treasury must repay come into this picture and why?

Paul Krugman goes on to make a number of comments about the Fed printing money and the need for the Fed to pull that money back by selling its Treasury debt at some future time when the economy is growing rapidly to prevent inflation. But these comments aren't directly relevant to using PCS, since using it is no more, and perhaps less, inflationary [202] than using debt financing.

The appearance of PCS in Paul Krugman's blog apparently had an immediate impact. Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), in an interview [323] reported in Capital New York said:

"There is specific statutory authority that says that the Federal Reserve can mint any non-gold or -silver coin in any denomination, so all you do is you tell the Federal Reserve to make a platinum coin for one trillion dollars, and then you deposit it in the Treasury account, and you pay your bills,"

Well, that's a little garbled, since it's the Treasury that orders the Mint to create the coin which is then deposited in the Mint's account, which is then credited by the Fed with electronic credits because the coin is legal tender, and is then swept by the Treasury for the seigniorage profits which end up in the Treasury Account, and then you pay your bills. But, regardless, Congressman Nadler has the right idea. It is legal for Treasury to make platinum coins with arbitrary face values and to use the seigniorage to pay bills.

In the same interview, the Congressman also refers to invoking the 14th amendment as a way in which the President could justify not complying with the debt ceiling. But, I think, this is not as good a solution as using PCS. The reason why, is that the debt ceiling isn't unconstitutional as long as Congress has provided alternative ways for Treasury to meet its obligations. PCS is such an alternative, so, as long as it is legal, I think the President is obligated to use it and not the 14th amendment to defeat the debt ceiling constraint.

Mike Sankowski at Monetary Realism, also reviews Krugman's views and Nadler's interview [340] and points out that:

I don’t think the coin will be used, but the idea of the coin has now hit critical mass. He’s a congressperson, so he only knows what his aides are telling him. If his aides are talking about it, you can be sure all of the democratic aides are talking about it over drinks. It’s just part of the everyday conversation in the support staff of congress.
Nadler is right – it’s not normally proper to consider such an extreme tactic. It is terrible it had to come to this, but here we are. It would be good if we just didn’t have a debt ceiling at all. Then, it would be so much nicer if the government had a well established, and commonsensical method to allow for the Treasury to print money directly – along with rules on how much and when this could be done.

I think Mike is right about the coin reaching critical mass and now being a topic of conversation among Congressional Staff. Even more, since the coin reference comes from Jerry Nadler, we can suppose that PCS is making the rounds within the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) specifically, and may become a key element in stiffening their spines during the debt ceiling fight. The CPC is much less likely to accept a lousy deal from the Republicans and the President if they know very well that the President can rise above the whole debt ceiling crisis by minting a very high value platinum coin.

Mike Sankowski voices misgivings about the coin. Above he calls it an “extreme tactic” and later on in his post he talks about the problem of giving politicians the power to print money. On the last point, I think the Constitution has already given the politicians the power to “print money.” And it's a wonder that instead of grasping that power more firmly, they've constructed all kinds of constraints preventing them just issuing it.

Until 1971, they constrained themselves with the gold standard. And from then until the present, they've constrained themselves by insisting that deficit spending be preceded by debt issuance even though there's no reason to believe, except the discredited Quantity Theory of Money (QTM) [164], that issuing fiat money in the act of spending is any less or more inflationary if it's preceded by issuing debt than if it's not.

Commenter Robert Rice answered Mike's misgivings [341] about the power to print money, by pointing out that every power of Government is subject to abuse and that this is no reason not to have government and to use its powers for public purpose. And I agree, Mike Sankowki's misgivings about the “printing money” power are no more than the usual conservative disposition to always mistrust government.

It's wise to do that, since one must never cease to look gift horses in the mouth. But it's not wise to let one's mistrust cripple one's government and, as a result, arrive at the kinds of conditions we are finding ourselves in right now. After all, what is the debt ceiling legislation itself, but an expression of the same conservative impulse that Mike is voicing? Listening to it is what has caused the mess we're in. To get out of it, we have go onto a new track. That track is using Platinum Coin Seigniorage as our primary tool when deficit spending.

As for PCS being an “extreme tactic.” I'm afraid, I think that's just labeling. Wigwam, a blogger at FDL and DailyKos, had this answer for people [342] who label PCS as “weird,” a very similar label to “extreme.” He said:

Such coins are “legal tender” and can therefore be deposited into the Treasury’s General Account at the Fed, from which the Nation’s bills are ultimately paid. Therefore, there is no need for the Treasury to borrow money to meet the obligations of the United States. But, and this is critical, none of that money can be withdrawn except for congressionally appropriated expenditures; e.g., the Treasury cannot monetize the national debt except insofar as such expenditures are appropriated by Congress.

For the past 220 years, the Treasury has been paying a portion of each year’s expenditures via the markup (seigniorage) on the minting of coins — last year coin seigniorage covered about 1% of the tax deficit — Abraham Lincoln went even further and paid for the Civil War with printed fiat money (“Greenbacks”), as did the European powers to finance WW I, and as did Germany to finance its part in WW II.

All of the above is background to keep in mind the next time you read a financial/economic pundit declare that it would be “weird” for the Secretary of the Treasury to exercise his powers under 31USC5112(k) and recommend that he instead foment a constitutional crises by directly violating 31USC3101(b), which I think would be “weird” at best.

And further, how much “weirder” or “more extreme” is it for a government with a sovereign fiat currency system to deficit spend only after it borrows back its own currency, than it would be for that same government just to forget about borrowing and paying interest to rich investors and foreign nations on what it can create in unlimited quantities itself. In short, what we're doing now is a lot more “weird” and “extreme” than just using existing legal authority fill the public purse to spend what Congress has already appropriated.

(Cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives [83].)

No votes yet

The Great Austerity Swindle!

letsgetitdone's blog [3]
Log in [343] or register [344] to post comments

Departments:

Thread:

Corporatism [88]

Tags:

MMT [12]

HVPCS [193]

$60 T coin [108]

austerity [194]

grand bargain [222]

great betrayal [223]

#mintthehvpcs [224]

Our Congresspeople, corporate CEOs, tea partiers, most economists, Pete Peterson's minions, [345] and even our President, tell us that we're running out of money; and that we can't keep running huge deficits, and increasing our national debt forever, because eventually, our creditors will just cease lending us our dollars back.

They also tell us that the Government can only raise money by either taxing or borrowing, and that when it comes to taxing, we can't tax “the job creators” very much or they'll go on strike and won't create any jobs because we'll have killed their incentive. So, here we are, we have to reduce our borrowing, and we can have hardly any tax increases on “the job creators,” so what's a fiscally responsible nation to do?

Well, they say, clearly “we” have to lower taxes on “the job creators” even more, raise them on the “unproductive” 47% or is it the 99%? And also, cut spending substantially on programs that provide benefits for the poor, the middle class, and even the 99%, so we can “. . . live within our means,” and remove the burden of excessive public debt on our grandchildren.

But, what if we say to these people, well, “the job creators” aren't making any jobs? That's a fact! They give all kinds of excuses, but the truth is that they have no sales, so they have no incentive to create any more jobs.

On the other hand, the more we lower their taxes, the more money they have sitting idle, and the more they have an incentive to use that money to invest in financial manipulation schemes rather than jobs. So, why not tax them at extremely high rates on net profits and provide them an incentive to lower their net profits by spending more of their gross profits on tax-deductible business expenses like employees and business expansion? Why won't high taxes on them do more to create jobs than lower taxes? Didn't we have far lower unemployment rates when marginal tax rates were sky-high, than we have now when they are a pittance on the wealthy?

And what if we say to them, well, Congress can always reorganize the Federal Reserve so that the regional Fed Banks are nationalized and both they and the Board of Governors are placed under the authority of the Secretary of the Treasury, so that the Secretary is empowered to create reserves out of thin air to fill the Treasury's spending account, and keep it filled with sufficient funds to repay the national debt and cover the deficit without borrowing? And what if we tell them further, that we know that Congress has the Constitutional authority to do this? And what if we ask them, why doesn't it do this, and get the national debt that you, our leaders, are so worried about, paid off, and keep us debt free? And what if we ask them still further, and if you do this then why would we have to have any spending cuts or tax increases, at all?

And what if we say to them, we also know that to pay off the national debt and cover the deficits for years to come; it isn't even necessary for Congress to reorganize the Fed, because the Treasury can use the Fed to create money in Treasury's account from seigniorage? [48] What if we say to them that all that's necessary is for the President to mint a High Value Platinum Coin (HVPC) with a face value of $60 Trillion dollars, [201] deposit it at the Fed, and then begin to pay off the national debt and implement deficit spending using the electronic credits created in the process of seigniorage?

And what if we say to them, we also know that it is a myth that the Federal Government can only get money for spending from taxing or borrowing because Congress can modify the laws, as just described, so Treasury can generate US money out of thin air, just as the Fed does today, that Treasury can use to pay down the debt and cover deficit spending?

And what if we say to them, we know that you'll say that this is “printing money” and will cause inflation? But what if we then say, sorry, but we know very well that it will not cause inflation; because reserves issued unaccompanied by debt are no more inflationary than reserves issued along with debt [202] and, most importantly, we also know that if you legislate the ability for Treasury to do this, then you won't have to worry about the deficit and debt or our grand children anymore; and we won't have to worry about your cutting safety net and other necessary programs anymore?

And what if we say to them, we also know that it is a myth that the Federal Government can only get money for spending from taxing or borrowing, because the President can use Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS) [48] to harness the power of the Fed to generate reserves that end up in the Treasury General Account (TGA), and Treasury can then use the reserves to pay down the debt and cover deficit spending?

And what if we say to them, we also know that this won't cause inflation for reasons stated above, and, most importantly, we also know that if Treasury does this on orders of the President, then you won't have to worry about the deficit and debt or our grand children anymore; and we won't have to worry about your cutting safety net and other necessary programs anymore either?

And what if we tell them that, for all the reasons indicated in these questions, we also know that all your reasons for wanting to reduce the deficit and impose austerity on the 99% are bogus? We don't know which of you believe in these reasons and which of you do not. But this isn't as important as it seems, because we know that the debt commissions, the debt ceiling crises, the fiscal cliff, the sequestration, the continuing resolution, budgetary crises, and the constant propaganda campaign from all of you directed at all of us, is a grand “shock doctrine” process attempting to swindle us out of a government that works for 99% of us rather than the 1%. We know that “the Grand Bargain” is “the Great Betrayal”! And we won't have it!

(Cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives [139].)

No votes yet

The President's Leverage: He Can Go Platinum!

letsgetitdone's blog [3]
Log in [346] or register [347] to post comments

Tags:

$60 T coin [108]

congress [348]

debt limit [349]

deficit [350]

deficit spending [351]

MMT [12]

national debt [352]

Well, that's over. The President had a chance to go “over the cliff,” bargain hard with the Republicans, get more of what he said he wanted at the price of perhaps some more days of crisis with extreme pressure building on the Republican caucus, and he blinked. I don't much care that he blinked on tax rates for the top 2% and on inheritance taxes, because tax rate increases for purposes of deficit reduction simply aren't needed for getting deficit spending needed to create jobs, as the rest of this post will show. Here's what I care about:

-- First, he claimed to be after extending the partial payroll tax holiday; but he didn't get that, a $125 Billion would-be stimulus failure that is likely to cost at least a million jobs;

-- Second, he claimed to be trying to get the debt ceiling issue off the table for at least two years, and he didn't even get anything to deal with it in the bill;

-- Third, he claimed to want to resolve the sequestration issue, but only got that can kicked down the road for two months;

So, in sum, he's already achieved some unneeded austerity with this “negotiation” and, in addition, he's set things up beautifully for a truly extreme episode of extortion by the Republican House over the next couple of months, as Congress faces the upcoming sequester, debt ceiling, and Continuing Resolution (CR) conflicts. Why did he insist on making his year-end deal, rather than allowing things to kick over to the new Congress and negotiating a better one?

There are different theories about that. One, is that he wanted, at all costs, to avoid Wall Street panicking and then tanking, even if, only temporarily. A second is that he has good “progressive” motives, but he's just a lousy negotiator, who just can't avoid first establishing firm positions and then showing the other side that he will always cave in if they, in turn, stand firm. A third theory, and the one I favor, is that since 2009 he's been conducting a careful campaign to get Americans to accept austerity through forced deficit reduction including heavy cuts to the social safety net programs that Americans love so well.

During this campaign, he's ignored the evidence from Europe and elsewhere that austerity doesn't work and hurts most of the people, most of the time. He's also ignored all the polling data showing how Americans feel about Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. And he has moved slowly, deliberately, persistently, and in concert with allies outside the Administration like Peter G. Peterson, high-level Wall Street Executives, and MSM media personalities and journalists to create a consensus around the idea that “entitlement reform” is both inevitable and necessary for long-term fiscal sustainability. Finally, he has “negotiated” with Republicans during a series of “shock doctrine” crises to try to gradually implement austerity, while making sure that the Republicans, rather than his own party end up bearing the blame for the end result of austerity policies.

The results of the “cliff” negotiations have now set up a confluence of three events: the sequestration; the debt ceiling; and the CR; creating the occasion for the mother of all fiscal “shock doctrine” negotiations over the next three months. This confluence can be seen as an intentional emergence of the conflict between the Republicans and the “progressive” President Obama, or it can be seen as the result of a very long-term conservative campaign setting the stage for austerity, and a comprehensive attempt to weaken the social safety net.

I won't try to make the case that the dangerous confluence we're about to face is due to a deliberate staging by the President, even though I suspect that it is. Nor will I try to make the contrary case that the President has excellent motives, but stumbled into this mess due to incompetence at negotiating, and the Republican victories in the House in the past two elections, for which his supporters might say, he was blameless. What, I'll do instead, is try to show that either way, the President has leverage to get what he wants.

If His Game Is Deliberate Austerity?

Then, of course, he's maneuvered us into a situation where, he will claim, there either has to be a Government shutdown, frightening to most people, or concessions to Republican demands for cutting discretionary programs and entitlements. He will be in a very good position then, to regale all of us with horror stories about the consequences of shutting down the Government for weeks until the “crazy” Republicans capitulate; compared to the lesser evil of making “balanced” spending cuts among defense, discretionary, and entitlement programs, while he prepares to reluctantly give into the hostage takers to avoid disaster; while constantly letting us know that as the adult in the room he must arrive at a “compromise” settlement. So, if his game is deliberate austerity, then he will have plenty of leverage to get what he wants.

If His Game Is to Avoid Cuts That Will Hurt the Economy and the Safety Net?

Today, most people commenting on the fiscal cliff agreement are assuming that this is his game, and are saying that the President has given away his leverage for future deal-making. Their logic is that he's already made deals on the tax rate cuts and on the inheritance tax rates, so that he has little left to offer the Republicans except painful cuts in programs most of the American like. This, however, isn't true.

First, the President still has some leverage when it comes to defense cuts. Republicans don't want those at all. So, if he's willing to cut there; he can sincerely threaten cuts and then trade for their sparing popular programs from the ax.

But, second, the main thing being ignored by most of the strategists commenting on the morning after is the President's ability to change the fiscal context of the coming negotiations from one of apparent scarcity "justifying" austerity to one where spending capacity is so plentiful, that Congress will be hard-pressed to impose austerity, because its justification in the form of apparent limitations on spending capacity will just seem silly. Now, that can translate into leverage in the negotiations!

How can it be done? Through the use of Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS). [353]

PCS Variations

Here are some variations on PCS, an idea first proposed by beowulf. [29] (Carlos Mucha).

First, mint a $1.6 Trillion coin and have Treasury use the profits from it to buy all the outstanding debt instruments held by the Fed [36]. This would retire a substantial part of the national debt and immediately create $1.6 T in “headroom” relative to the debt ceiling. This alternative involves the least amount of change in current procedures. The coin, once deposited at the Fed, would remain in a Fed vault, and would not go into circulation.

A third proposal for applying PCS is to mint a coin with face value large enough to cover the $6.7 T intra-governmental and Fed debt repayment, plus all debt to the non-government sector coming to maturity during the next four years, and all Congressional Appropriations expected to require deficit spending through the 2016 elections. I'll estimate, roughly, that a $20 T coin is enough for that, including about $6.2 T to more than close the expected gap between tax revenues and Government spending through the 2016 elections, and the rest for paying down the national debt. Issuing a coin that large, using the profits from seigniorage, and assuming that Congressional appropriations continue the pattern of the past 2 years or so, that would result in a remaining public debt outstanding of roughly a few trillion dollars in long term debt, which would please the bond markets except for the fact that the US wasn't issuing any more debt instruments, which would probably make the bond vigilantes scream for those safe harbor debt instruments again.

Why not mint a $60 T coin? [93]

So, please keep in mind the distinction between the capability to spend more than government collects in taxes, and the appropriations that mandate such spending. The capability is what's in the public purse, and it is unlimited as long as the Government doesn't constrain itself from creating credits in its own accounts. With PCS, its capability could be and should be publicly demonstrated by minting the $60 T coin, and getting the profits from depositing it at the Fed transferred to the Treasury General Account (TGA).

This fourth alternative is the one that best solves both the debt ceiling problem and the problem of taking austerity, justified by “we're running out of money,” off the table. The debt ceiling would no longer be an issue if the Treasury immediately paid off $6.7 T in Fed and intra-governmental debt, and was poised, with the money in its account, to pay off the rest of the debt subject to the limit as it falls due. Nor would there be any justification for austerity policies if the Treasury had a public purse with $44 T of unearmarked funds in it to cover future deficit spending. So, this is the progressive alternative, the one that changes the political context of fiscal policy debates for the foreseeable future. It also gives progressive enough time to fight a major political battle that ought to and must occur; the battle to free the Fed from control by Wall Street and banking interests and to make it accountable to the people by placing it under the authority of the Treasury Department, and our nationally elected executive, the President.

What about inflation? Well using PCS isn't intrinsically inflationary. For the reasons why, see my previous post. [354] I outline how to justify it politically in the next and final section.

The Speech

If the President wanted to emulate the great Democratic Presidents of the past, end austerity and decide to rise above the debt ceiling controversy, safeguard the social safety net, and do something really, really important from the perspective of history by using $60 T coin seigniorage to short circuit the upcoming fights over the debt ceiling and the budget, then there would be a spectacular uproar in the Congress and the Press over what he had done. All kinds of overblown and downright crazy claims would be made because the President's action would shock people, everyone would have a tough time getting their minds around it, and the media would report on what was going on in a very sensationalist way using stereotypes created by the neo-liberal perspective that journalists at places like the WaPo, NYT, WSJ, and CNN are superficially well-schooled in. Places like CNBC and Fox would be absolutely foaming at the mouth in response to something like this, and Geithner might very well resign over it, as might Ben Bernanke, since he'd be forced to have the Fed credit the coin.

There would also be an immediate move in Congress to repeal the 1996 law that enabled the President's action. This would fail however, because even if it got through the Congress, the President would simply veto it. The opposition couldn't possibly get the 2/3 vote necessary to override the veto. Even if by some miracle, repeal got through, however, it would be too late. The coin would have done its work and the $60 T would be in the Treasury General Account, a fait accompli, and a vivid demonstration that the government can create as much money as it wants, and can only run out of money by choice.

However, the President would then have to defend himself with a political campaign aimed at persuading the public that his move was a bold and liberating move and the first step in finally getting out of this protracted economic depression. And yes, he should use the D-word, whatever the Republicans, and the so-called “fact-checkers” say about it. And he should also begin the campaign by explaining the issuance and deposit of the first $60 T coin in a high profile TV address to the public, the following way.

My Fellow Americans:

1) Until now the Treasury has been borrowing the money the Government created back from the private sector, in order to cover our deficit spending, so the national debt has been steadily growing.

2) That’s silly! According to the Constitution, this Government, of the people, by the people, and for the people, is the ultimate source of all US money. So why should we ever borrow US money back and pay interest on it, since we can create it any time by the authority of the Constitution and Congress?

3) Congress has also imposed a debt ceiling, so, if and when we reach it, we can’t borrow back our own money without Congressional approval, anyway, and lately Congress has been using the need to raise the debt ceiling as an excuse to extort cuts in safety net and discretionary programs that the majority of Americans support.

4) So, on my order, and in accordance with legislation passed by Congress in 1996, and with the US Code, [130] the US Mint has issued $60 Trillion using a single 1 oz. platinum coin, and deposited it at the NY Fed. It’s legal tender, so the Fed credited the Mint's Public Enterprise Fund (PEF) account with $60 Trillion in US Dollar credits using its unlimited authority from Congress to create them.

5) This is not inflationary because the Fed will put our coin into its vault, and keep it there permanently out of circulation, and the Treasury will use the $60 T in USD credits only to pay back the national debt and to spend what Congress has already approved, which is only a small fraction of these credits and far from the amount needed to cause inflation.

6) My action ends any possibility of a debt ceiling crisis in February or March, because we have no further need to borrow our own money back in the markets, and that's why we don’t need the tea party or other Republicans, or even my fellow Democrats to agree to raise the debt ceiling any more.

7) Now the Treasury, has plenty of money, much more than we need, in fact, to pay for all appropriations Congress has already approved for 2013, and may approve in March, including all deficit spending and, again, we won’t have to borrow our own money back, either to repay debts or to implement future deficit spending.

8) So, we will pay all Government debts which will come due in 2013 and 2014. Treasury securities and all other debts included. We will also pay back all debts held by other agencies of Government and the Federal Reserve. When we do this we will lower the national debt by about $12 T, reducing the “debt burden” by about 75% by the end of 2014, and creating an actual Social Security trust fund with 2.7 T in cash reserves in it; and again, to do this we don’t have to borrow any of our own money back, and we will also reduce our interest costs on the outstanding national debt all through the remainder of 2013, 2014, and beyond until it is all paid off.

9) None of the $60 T in new credits created by our actions is “money” in the private sector economy until the Treasury spends it. For now it is just capability to spend awaiting the appropriations of Congress to mandate deficit spending, should it need to compensate for the reduction in demand, probably close to 10% of GDP right now, caused by your own desire to save (which we want to do our best to facilitate), and your desire to import goods from foreign nations.

10) We have created $60 Trillion in new credits even though we probably needed less than that to cover anticipated deficit spending and debt repayment until at least 2028. The reason for this, is that I wanted to have enough capability created in the Treasury account, so that the national debt could be completely paid off (except for a small amount in very long-term Treasury debt still not mature by 2028), and all projected Federal deficits covered over the next 15 years, even extraordinary deficit spending needed to be performed without further borrowing over this period.

11) Of course, we can always make new coins if our projections about future deficits turn out to be wrong; but I thought it would be best to ensure that all $16.4 T plus of the “debt burden” can be completely eliminated from our political concerns; and also to provide enough funds in our spending account at the Fed, so that it would be very clear to Congress and all newly elected Representatives and Senators, that even though they, as required by the Constitution, continue to control the purse strings, the national purse is very, very full, and that we would be able to cover from the Treasury General Account whatever deficit spending for the public purpose, including for full employment, Medicare for All, infrastructure, education, and other things, that Congress, in its wisdom, chooses to appropriate now, before the next election, and for some elections to come.

Good night, my fellow Americans! Rest well knowing that our beloved country won't be defaulting on any of its debts when the debt ceiling is reached, and that I've prevented this without going over the legal debt ceiling, or borrowing any more, by providing money for spending mandated appropriations, in compliance with the laws authorizing Platinum Coin Seigniorage, while supporting the Constitution's prohibition against our Government ever defaulting on its debts. I hope that, in the future, everyone in Congress will obey the 14th Amendment's prohibition against questioning the validity of Federal Government debts, and think twice before they indulge themselves in loose talk about the possibility of the Federal Government defaulting on its obligations.

America will always pay its debts in US Dollars according to the terms of the contracts it has concluded, and in line with the pension payments and other obligations that it owes. Neither you, nor the rest of the world need ever doubt that again! Nor need you ever think that our Government is running out of money for the things we must do. We can never run short of money unless Congress refuses voluntarily, to use its unlimited constitutional authority to make more of it. But as long as it delegates to me the authority to create high value platinum coins to cover our needs, you can be sure that running out of US money will never happen!

(Cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives [83].)

No votes yet

The Small Ball Trillion Dollar Coin Seigniorage Exception

letsgetitdone's blog [3]
Log in [355] or register [356] to post comments

Departments:

Department Of Stop it! You're killing Everything! [357]

Thread:

Corporatism [88]

Tags:

MMT [12]

TDC [112]

PCS [111]

60Tcoin [332]

Joe Wiesenthal [110]

fed [358]

small ball PCS [359]

Department of Now It All Makes Sense [6]

inflation [162]

Scott Fullwiler [360]

The exception to the general pattern focusing on the Trillion Dollar Coin (TDC) as the solution to the debt ceiling problem I outlined and critiqued in my last post, is in Joe Wiesenthal 's posts here [361] and here. [282] Wiesenthal alone criticizes, rather than ignores, other options than the TDC, namely the $16 T and $100 T options, on grounds that they are no more effective at meeting the debt ceiling crisis than the TDC. He says that the issue is not a lack money but the debt ceiling law, and also that if a coin that large were minted and used to pay back the debt, then the result would be inflation or hyperinflation because of the flow of the large quantity of reserves into the economy, and the ensuing great expansion in the money supply.

I think that Joe Wiesenthal is both showing his bias towards solving the smaller, more immediate (debt ceiling), rather than the larger (austerity) problem, and also that he's dead wrong about the impact of a $100 T coin on inflation. On his bias: I can only say, that I don't agree that “we” are talking about a legal problem rather than a money problem.

If all “we” are concerned with is the debt ceiling, then Wiesenthal is right; we need only consider the TDC option, which the President can use either once, or until the House gets tired of his minting TDCs, and raises the debt ceiling. But I think that most Americans, if they understood Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS) and its possible meaning for fiscal politics would go beyond debt ceiling concerns to the issue of austerity. And they would also realize that the face value of the PCS option chosen by the Secretary of the Treasury is of enormous importance for removing any perceived need for austerity arising from the level of the national debt or the debt-to-GDP ratio.

Wiesenthal's main additional stated objection to extremely high value PCS on the order of $50 - $100 Trillion is the inflationary impact he expects it to have. I've already analyzed the likely impact of a $60 T coin on inflation [202] in a fair amount of detail in an earlier post, based on Scott Fullwiler's comprehensive framework. [80] My analysis shows that there would be no inflation due to the effect of $60 T PCS itself on the economy. I can summarize the argument this way.

The credits in the Treasury General Account (TGA) ultimately resulting from using $60 T PCS aren't immediately spent. So, they don't all enter the economy immediately, but over a very long period of time from 15 – 25 years in duration. So, to gauge the inflationary impact, you have to analyze when and how the credits would be entering the economy. At the end of the last fiscal year, $6.4 Trillion in debt subject to the limit was owed by the Treasury to other agencies and to the Fed itself. That debt could be redeemed in the same week after minting a $60 T coin. But the payments wouldn't be inflationary because they would not enter the non-government economy. Nevertheless, these payments would cut back debt subject to the limit by close to 40%, because of the ridiculous quirk in the law that counts intra-governmental debt toward the debt ceiling.

Next, the 10 T or so of debt held by private corporations, individuals, and foreign governments would only be paid as it falls due. Much of it would be paid over the first three years. But as I've argued above, the additional reserves placed in the system by paying the debt, and not issuing new debt instruments would be less inflationary than bonds would be.

Also, their presence in the banking system, would clearly flood it with reserves and drive overnight interest rates down to zero, [273] rather than raising them. For the Fed to hit any non-zero rate targets it would have to support them either paying IOR, or issuing debt instruments of its own to drain the excess reserves. In either case, there's no inflationary impact from repaying debt instruments as they fall due by adding reserves to the banking system.

In short, there's no way that PCS in itself can have an inflationary impact, no matter how high the value of the platinum coin is. That's because repayment of already held debt is less inflationary than continuous rollover of and gradual increase of debt, repayment of debt to government agencies including the Fed doesn't enter the economy, and using PCS-generated funds to cover deficits is not in itself inflationary unless deficit spending is so large that it continues past full employment.

So, that's the true narrative about PCS and inflation. Not, ZOMG "Weimar, Zimbabwe." That's nonsense! Let's hope that Joe Wiesenthal, and other MSM bloggers who have jumped into the PCS pool in the past few weeks read it and cease to spread “the silly idea” that PCS, in whatever denomination greater than say a few Trillion Dollars may be used, is inherently inflationary. It is nothing of the kind! Inflation, due to Government spending, is always and everywhere, in the rare instances that it occurs, a Congressional phenomenon!

(Cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives [83].)

No votes yet

Trillion Dollar Coin: Posts on Legality and Constitutionality

letsgetitdone's blog [3]
Log in [362] or register [363] to post comments

Departments:

Thread:

Corporatism [88]

Tags:

MMT [12]

TDC [112]

PCS [111]

Kevin Drum [138]

John Carney [129]

constitutionality [364]

non-delegation doctrine [365]

beowulf [8]

Federal Reserve [209]

Enthusiasm for using Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS) [125] to produce a Trillion Dollar Coin [156], or coins totaling a few trillion dollars continues to increase. The twitterverse went mad two nights ago around #mintthecoin [156], a hashtag originated by MMT [31]'s Stephanie Kelton [324], which by yesterday morning had become the 5th most highly trending topic on twitter.

Meanwhile, the blogosphere continued to produce more points of view on the Platinum Coin. The points of view divide into those that are very negative; either claiming that 1) using Platinum Coins would be illegal or unconstitutional, or 2) using them would be just ridiculous and financially irresponsible, and so should be avoided; and others that favor using PCS 3) either in a limited way to avoid the debt ceiling crisis, or 4) in a much more robust way, that would change the procedures underlying Federal spending, so that fiscal policies advocating austerity no longer have a political foundation in a visible and rising national debt that austerity advocates can constantly talk about fixing through “shared sacrifice.” In this post I'll review new posts on legality and constitutionality.

Kevin Drum on legality

Kevin Drum of Mother Jones filed his second recent post [366] claiming that the trillion dollar coin is illegal and will be subject to challenge in Court on grounds of intent. He repeats exactly the same reasoning he used in his first post. I've already critiqued that reasoning [367] saying that the Courts generally don't try to interpret laws based on theories about Congressional intent. The Justices aren't collective psychologists who are expert at divining the intent of the Congress. They are expert, however, at interpreting what the text of a law says, and so that is what they stick to almost all the time. A challenge to PCS based on intent isn't something any Court is likely to take up. Drum then adds:

There is, apparently, a widespread belief that courts will uphold a literal, hypertechnical reading of legislative language regardless of its obvious intent, but I'm quite certain this isn't true. Courts are expected to rule based on the most sensible interpretation of a law, not its most tortured possible construction. I don't think there's even a remote chance that any court in the country would uphold a Treasury reading of this law that used it as a pretense for minting a $1 trillion coin.

I am, obviously, not a lawyer. So if someone with actual legal training in the appropriate area of the law says I'm wrong, then I guess I'm wrong.

Well,, the language of 31USC5112(k) doesn't look very tortured or “hypertechnical” either to myself or many others who have looked at this including lawyers Jack Balkin [61] and Carlos Mucha (beowulf); [29] but seems very plain and unambiguous. Drum is entitled to his opinion, but as he keeps saying, he's no lawyer, and his judgment about what the Courts will do based on the problem of intent isn't very plausible.

What if a trillion dollar coin is used to avoid the debt ceiling, and this saves the United States from defaulting on its debts, and the world financial system from collapsing? Is it then likely that the Supreme Court will entertain any challenges to the plain language of the law based on an interpretation of intent, which would then place the Treasury in the position of having to return that trillion dollars in Fed credits, and again look default in the face? Can you see John Roberts ever voting for this? Please Kevin, give us a break!

John Carney on Unconstitutionality

John Carney believes that Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS) and the Trillion Dollar Coin are unconstitutional. The core of his argument is: [301]

There are limits to how far Congress can stretch its powers under the necessary and proper clause. Of particular interest to us here is the non-delegation doctrine, which holds that the Constitution's requirement that laws be passed by both houses of Congress and signed into law by the government constrains the ability of Congress to delegate its lawmaking authority to other bodies. . . .

The Supreme Court . . . . went out of its way to affirm the basic principle of non-delegation . . .

Article I, Section 1, of the Constitution vests "[a]ll legislative Powers herein granted... in a Congress of the United States." This text permits no delegation of those powers, and so we repeatedly have said that when Congress confers decision making authority upon agencies Congress must "lay down by legislative act an intelligible principle to which the person or body authorized to [act] is directed to conform."

So the question that is relevant for us here is whether or not the law that authorizes the creation of platinum coins by the U.S. Treasury lays down an "intelligible principle" to which the Treasury is directed to conform.

He then quotes the law authorizing PCS:

"The Secretary may mint and issue bullion and proof platinum coins in accordance with such specifications, designs, varieties, quantities, denominations, and inscriptions as the Secretary, in the Secretary's discretion, may prescribe from time to time."

You see the problem here, right? There's no intelligible principle whatsoever. The law gives the Secretary complete discretion over everything having to do with the minting of platinum coins. This is very likely an unconstitutional delegation of the legislative power to coin money and regulate the value thereof.

Carney goes on to talk about issues of standing recognizing that standing may be very difficult to get from the Courts and that therefore it may not be possible to challenge the law. But he still thinks that the above argument is a decisive one and that the coin seigniorage law is unconstitutional. You see the problems here, right?

First, the power to physically mint coins is not a law making power, per se. In delegating this power to the Treasury and the Mint, no law making is involved. So, the principle of non-delegation of legislative power may not apply even if “intelligible principles” didn't exist. But, as we'll see they do exist anyway.

Second, Congress delegated the Treasury the power to mint platinum bullion and proof coins having a variety of properties to be specified by the Secretary; but it did not delegate to the Secretary that power with respect to coins made out of other materials; or even with respect to platinum coins that are neither bullion or proof coins. So, Congress did limit the authority of the Treasury according to intelligible principles. And in the area of platinum coins what Congress has done is to delegate its authority according to “the intelligible principle” that the Secretary is to mint such coins with face values he/she deems necessary and proper. That seems like an intelligible principle to me, even though John Carney may not like the principle.

Beowulf goes much further [368] in pointing out that the Treasury Secretary's broad coin minting authority is, in fact, highly constrained by Congress. He says:

Now here’s where John is wrong, the Secretary has no legal discretion in this matter whatsoever. His path is laid out by Congress like he’s the mechanical rabbit at a dog race.

1. Congress tells the Secretary (as supervisor of the IRS) how much to collect in tax receipts and (with somewhat less effort) in miscellaneous receipts.

2. Congress tells the Secretary as signatory of every single appropriation warrant how much money to transfer to federal agency sub-accounts (called “appropriation symbols” for some obscure reason).

3. Congress tells the Secretary he MAY borrow on the credit of the United State to fund expenditures but not for one penny more than the debt ceiling.

4. Congress tells the Secretary he SHALL mint coins such coins as he decides are necessary to meet the needs of the United States.

When Congress orders the Secretary to spend appropriations in excess of the receipts they’ve ordered him to collect, the unavoidable budget deficit must be filled by the combination of the Secretary’s powers to borrow (debt limit-constrained) money and to mint (debt-free) money. If Congress refuses to increase receipts or cut appropriations or extend the debt limit, the Secretary has only one and only one path to comply with all of his legal duties. Maybe I’m naive, but I’m confident the path to salvation will never be ruled unconstitutional by any United States Court.

This is a pretty decisive argument about "intelligible principles" governing Treasury's responsibility to coin, isn't it?

Third, Carney's using his non-delegation argument to apply against the PCS legislation is remarkably devoid of the legal context of Congress's delegation of its money power. If the Court were willing to consider such a theory in relation to PCS, then how would it avoid applying the same theory, when someone comes along who wants to challenge the constitutionality of the Fed?

In creating the Fed Congress not only delegated very, very broad money creating powers without specifying intelligible principles to guide the delegation; but in addition, it created an executive institution which is independent of the Executive Branch. Surely, this is an unconstitutional delegation of its power that infringes on the rights of the Executive Branch of Government. But it is an unconstitutional delegation that no one except the President has obvious standing to challenge, as Senator Phil Hart (D-Mich) and Congressman Henry Reuss (D-WI) found during the 1970s when they were denied standing to pursue their suit against the Fed on its constitutionality.

In a second post [369] yesterday John Carney replies to the criticism that the non-delegation principle, if applicable to PCS, should apply equally well to the Fed. He says:

The Federal Reserve Act, which establishes and empowers the Fed, is a long bill full of instructions from Congress about what the Fed may and may not do. (In fact, the Fed's powers were changed recently, under the Dodd-Frank Act.) Most importantly, the Act directs the Fed to implement monetary policy to meet some very specific goals.

And Carney goes on to quote the mandate of the Fed under the Federal Reserve Act following that with the conclusion:

That's an extremely explicit "intelligible principle." The Fed cannot make policy willy-nilly.It must conform its policy to increase production while promoting maximum employment, stable prices and moderate long-term interest rates. The Fed has a lot of latitude when it comes to how best to pursue those goals but the goals are very clear.

All that is true, but, this very explicit instruction of the Fed in the Act makes it quite clear that the Fed performs Executive functions, and the question immediately arises about whether Congress has the constitutional authority to create and maintain it as independent from the Executive Branch, especially since there is no clearer principle in the Constitution than separation of powers and the establishment of only three branches of Government. In addition, the Act establishing the Fed isn't very explicit in regulating and guiding its money creation powers. Surely it doesn't explicitly give the Fed the authority to create money out of thin air, or limit this power in any coherent way.

Apart from this however, Carney's comparison between the Fed legislation and the coin seigniorage legislation is an unfair comparison, because the Fed as an institution with delegated powers should surely be compared to the Treasury as an institution with delegated powers, and then the question should be asked whether Congress has specified “intelligible principles” for both. I think the answer is clearly yes, and also that there is little to distinguish between them on these grounds.

Also, the relevant and fair comparison between the Fed and the Treasury Carney should have made is in the area of money creation powers, rather than comparing the Fed as an institution with the narrow Treasury function of platinum coin minting and seigniorage authority. Once one does that; it's plain that the authority of the Fed with respect to respect to reserve and currency creation is lavish, and much less regulated and governed by the Congress in the form of “intelligible principles”, than is the coinage authority of the Treasury.

In fact, it is only in the area of PCS that the Treasury has anywhere near the freedom and authority that the Fed routinely exercises over reserves. So, with respect to money creation powers it seems that a much greater delegation problem, if there is one, exists between Congress and the Fed than between Congress and the Treasury.

Of course, no one can be sure about what strange decisions may ensue from this Supreme Court. But the same problem exists with Carney's theory about what the Courts might do as with Drum's. That is, if the President uses PCS, cites the legislation, and then prevents a default, will the Courts really then declare the PCS legislation unconstitutional based on a vague doctrine like non-delegation which has had limited previous applicability, which would be questionable in this application, and which might have the consequence of crashing the global financial system? Somehow I doubt that John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy would join in such a ruling; and Justices Kagan, Ginsberg, Briar, and Sotomayor are even less likely to decide that way. In other words, John Carney, if it ever gets to the Supreme Court, which is highly doubtful due to standing problems, I think there's a 6-3, or perhaps even a 7-2 vote in favor of constitutionality coming up on this one.

Conclusion

Summing up, I think the efforts of Drum and Carney to put forward legal theories about the coin seigniorage legislation are both questionable. Drum really offers a tough argument to make stick, because the kinds of intent considerations he brings forward could be used to challenge any Act that had unintended consequences. When we realize that almost every piece of legislation has unintended consequences, it's clear that an attack based on intent would really be a difficult one to sustain in the face of the plain language of 31USC5112(k).

And with respect to Carney's legal theory, that the non-delegation doctrine can be applied to coin seigniorage, it is very hard to take his theory seriously. Sure, legislation that assigns legislative powers to other branches of the Government is unconstitutional. It's also true that legislation assigning executive functions to agencies outside the Executive Branch is also unconstitutional.

But what is a legislative function and what is an executive function? The boundaries between the two are often not so sharp, and some deference must be and has been given by the courts to Congress's own decisions in delegating both its own and executive functions (like the Fed's) to other agencies. So, the application of the non-delegation doctrine is a very subjective matter, and is very unlikely to be relied upon by Courts to check the coinage authority delegated to the Executive by the Congress in the clear language of the law.

(Cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives [83].)

No votes yet

Wake Up Progressives: The Bad Guys Are Trying To Steal the Trillion Dollar Coin to Save the Financial Status Quo!

letsgetitdone's blog [3]
Log in [370] or register [371] to post comments

Departments:

Department Of Stop it! You're killing Everything! [357]

Thread:

Corporatism [88]

Tags:

MMT [12]

TDC [112]

PCS [111]

60Tcoin [332]

Krugman [333]

Joe Wiesenthal [110]

Jerrold Nadler [337]

fed [358]

Josh Barro [372]

default [373]

TDC swap [374]

small ball PCS [359]

Among the many posts on the Trillion Dollar Coin (TDC) [29] and Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS) [375] we're seeing this week, is a category of posts favoring using PCS in a limited way to avoid the debt ceiling crisis, rather than using it in a much more robust way, that would change the procedures underlying Federal spending, so that fiscal policies advocating austerity no longer have a political foundation in a visible and rising national debt that austerity advocates can constantly talk about fixing through “shared sacrifice.”

The Trillion Dollar Coin, as in #TDC and #mintthecoin is a meme representing more than a Trillion Dollar Coin. It represents, instead, the general capability of the Treasury Department under 31USC5112(k) [376] to mint platinum coins of whatever face value the Secretary cares to specify.

The coins involved could have $1,000, or $1 million, or $1 Billion, or $1 Trillion, or $60 Trillion, or $100 Trillion, or even $1 Quadrillion face values. So, an issue immediately raised is what platinum coin denomination(s) should be minted by the Treasury Department if it decides it wants to use PCS to help fill the Treasury General Account (TGA) with enough electronic credits to fulfill its objectives?

Of course, the answer to this question is inherent in the way I posed it. It depends on the objectives involved, and these objectives will not and should not be merely narrowly financial or technical. They will and should be political.

And the two main political objectives associated with PCS and the TDC up to this time have been a) remove the risk of a politically induced default on the debts of the US Government caused by a refusal of the Radical Republicans to raise the debt ceiling to accommodate deficit spending appropriations Congress has already made; and b) to end the political context of austerity which has constrained and limited government activity in the service of public purpose, since the “fiscally responsible” (really stupidly fiscally irresponsible) Democrats gained control of the Executive Branch of government in 2009.

In the latest outburst of posts, tweets, articles, and videos about the TDC, we're beginning to see, a feeding frenzy in which the participants self-organize around the TDC meme AND the objective of avoiding the debt ceiling, but without providing any consideration at all to higher value PCS options that could both make the debt ceiling a dead letter and also remove the driving force for austerity politics. This focus on the bare TDC and its application to the debt ceiling is “small ball” policy analysis that ignores larger issues related to PCS. It needs to stop before it totally drives PCS into a defend the status quo solution, that may defuse the debt ceiling, but still leave us in the sorry state of austerity-driven politics

The focus on “small ball” policy analysis of PCS is emblematic of the superficiality of media outlets and what passes for “journalism” in the early 21st century. Too many content professionals are no more than marketers and propagandists, and don't make even minimal attempts to get at the heart of the larger PCS news story.

If the small ballers get to control the PCS debate it will result in the waste of a remarkable opportunity to change the whole direction of American politics. Progressives need to wake up and try to grasp this opportunity, before the fiscal conservatives save their version of the financial system with its increasing tendency to impose austerity on the rest of us while the 1% get more and more wealthy.

Let's review the pattern of those recent “small ball” PCS posts (each one summarized in the Appendix), and the significance of the position they take on PCS, then in my next post, I'll deal with an exception to the “small-ball” pattern. And in the Post after that I'll compare the small ball position with the one taken in the relatively few PCS “game-changer” posts.

The “Small Ball” Pattern

The primary characteristics of the small ball posting pattern are:

-- They generally don't consider any other options but the “TDC” option. They take the TDC meme literally and address their description, analysis, and advocacy to the TDC option, and its ability to end the debt ceiling crisis, and not to any of the other Platinum Coin Seigniorage variations, and what they may be able to do.

-- They view the TDC option as somehow screwy, outrageous, ridiculous, looney, bizarre, or highly inappropriate, even though they acknowledge that it is legal, and probably would not be inflationary.

-- They also believe that debt issuance prior to deficit spending, the way things are now done, is preferable to issuing platinum coins and then spending without debt issuance. So, some are concerned about the impact the TDC will have on the Federal Reserve's control of monetary policy and its independence and most are advocating Josh Barro's idea of swapping PCS capability for repeal of the debt ceiling legislation.

-- They favor the TDC, however, despite its negative characteristics, for one very good reason: using it is preferable to defaulting, in violation of the Constitution, when the debt ceiling is reached, and, again, according to Josh Barro's proposal, the capability to make TDCs can be traded for debt ceiling repeal, once it's shown that it can be used to avoid the debt ceiling and prevent default.

Let's evaluate this pattern. First, the idea that we have only one problem to deal with and that's the debt ceiling problem is short-sighted and narrow, and reflects the bias of small-ball writers towards the economic and political status quo. What they all want is for the debt ceiling crises to be over, for it to go away, and for the political system to return to normal.

Well, that may be what these writers want; but “normal” in the current political system is austerity politics, a politics in which “the fiscally responsible” people in both parties are about to agree on severe cuts to discretionary spending and the social safety net, and also, perhaps to increasing tax revenue, which will extract further money from the economy. The cuts in deficit spending being planned, with or without any debt ceiling crisis, will severely reduce aggregate demand, and will do that for years to come; condemning American to a depressed and stagnant economy for several more years and perhaps beyond. That situation's not much good for most of us, but it would be the result of the failure to end austerity resulting from viewing PCS as just an expedient for solving the debt ceiling crisis.

Second, I know it's fashionable for the Very Serious [204] People (VSP) who comprise the New York/Washington policy/financial axis to view PCS as silly, ludicrous, and all the other various epithets they've seen fit to bestow on it. But. In doing so, they reveal their ignorance of the history of fiat money issuance and coin seigiorage unaccompanied by debt issuance in the United States and elsewhere.

Lincoln's Greenbacks funded the Civil War without ruinous inflation, and many nations funded their spending in World War I without debt issuance, and Nazi Germany, even if we hate the example, used it without issuing debt and without inflation in the pre-World War II period. Platinum Coin Seigniorage is not a priori silly. It is just not the way things have been done before, and if used in high denominations, it would require adjustments by the Federal Reserve. That does not make it silly, or looney, or ludicrous, or any such thing. It just makes it new and untried. That may be a problem for conservatives, and members of the MSM village, who, above all, want to be viewed as among the VSP; but it should not be one for progressives.

Third, the belief that deficit spending preceded by debt issuance is preferable to using PCS to close the gap between tax revenues and government spending is a belief I don't share. The basis of it, apart from some of its advocates benefiting from current arrangements in some way, is the belief, that Treasury issued reserves in the process of spending without debt issuance are more inflationary; than reserves added only after debt issuance. This, in turn, requires assuming that debt instruments added to the economy as net financial assets are less inflationary than reserves added when unaccompanied by debt instrument sales. This assumption is false. [80]

Debt financing is accompanied by interest payments into the economy of some $245 Billion at present. In addition, debt instruments can be sold anytime reserves are needed, and also, debt instruments can be leveraged multiple times when used as collateral in credit transactions. Reserves do receive Interest-On-Reserves (IOR) from the Fed these days. But the rate paid is lower than on Treasuries and also the payments are made by the Fed and are not a cost to the Treasury. Finally, since reserves injected into the economy through deficit spending cannot be leveraged as effectively as debt instruments, they are not as potentially inflationary in a financial system where private banks and the Fed, based on credit, routinely create money out of thin air, whether the Treasury deficit spends or not.

Believing that it's preferable to have debt issuance precede deficit spending, rather than to use PCS prior to it, also is accompanied by concern about the impact of use of massive PCS would have on Federal Reserve control of monetary policy. PCS, in fact, is likely to result in the Federal Reserve's having to adjust whatever it wants to do in response to deficit spending. Is this a problem, or a bad thing? Does that compromise the Fed's independence? Doesn't the Fed now formulate its monetary policy based on the assumption that the Treasury will issue debt?

Of course, it does. So, what the Fed does now is already impacted by what the Treasury does. It is already reacting to what the Treasury and Congress do, and we also know very well that it reacts to what Wall Street does. And the change that would be introduced by using PCS as the basis of all deficit spending would do no more than cause the Federal Reserve to make some different assumptions before it reacted to these various forces.

The idea that this is destroying the Fed's vaunted independence, and that this makes it impossible to consider very high value PCS, is no more than a bias that prefers the status quo, and the way things are done now, where the predominant influence at the Fed is from the big banks and Wall Street. It is just conservatism talking again. Just a willingness to avoid changing how we do things to take austerity off the table, and make a better life for everyone out of fear of the new, the strange, and the unknown.

Fourth, even though the “small ball” writers are for using the TDC as a last resort, most of them endorsed Josh Barro's idea of making a deal to swap the PCS capability in return for repeal of the debt ceiling law. This idea is a terrible one, and if progressives support it or even accept such a trade, then that would a perfect example of “loser liberalism.”

It's essential to understand that if the Treasury uses PCS and continues to have the PCS capability, then the debt ceiling legislation is already a dead letter. [201] It doesn't matter if it exists, since the outstanding debt can be paid using PCS, and all future deficit spending can be covered by credits generated by the Fed in the course of using PCS.

Since that's the case, a trade of the PCS capability for repeal of the debt ceiling legislation is a trade of something potentially very, very valuable as an enabler of progressive politics in return for nothing at all. It would be a bizarre trade. A silly trade. It would be a moronic trade. A trade made for no purpose at all.

Conclusion

Only a person who wants to keep the system of government deficit spending exactly as it is today can possibly advocate such a trade. But why would people want to keep it the same as it is now, since the political impact of such a system is so disastrous for progressive politics and for government efforts to achieve the public purpose? Why would people want to preserve a system that constantly sets the political table for austerity by constantly increasing something called “the national debt?”

What do austerity advocates now use to justify the policies they prefer? The answer is that they use the existence of the debt. And then they talk about fiscal responsibility, and the grandchildren, and the markets driving interest rates up, and the possibility of running out of money, and about cutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, discretionary programs that people need, and then they go on to talk about this thing we need that we can't pay for, and that thing we need that we can't pay for, and all the financial limitations we have in doing things that we desperately need to do to make our country viable again.

We need to put an end to all that. And we can do that if the PCS capability is maintained; and if we can find a President who will use its power to its full extent. That's why progressives need to wake up, and not only defend PCS against a Republican attack that has already begun; [377] but also come forward with their own PCS proposals that will go beyond the TDC and offer PCS options [201] that will put an end to the political basis of austerity!

Appendix: ”Small Ball” Views on the Trillion Dollar Coin

This survey summarizes what each of the pieces on the Trillion Dollar Coin appearing in the last few days I had the opportunity to review had to say. They served as the foundation for the above analysis. The dominant pattern is established by the Wiesenthal and Barro posts, and then is replicated by pretty much what looks like an MSM-based echo chamber. Not every post appearing in this time frame is replicated here. And some posts on the TDC were opposed to the idea and so, are not part of the 'small-ball” category. Nevertheless, I think the posts and the video segment reviewed here are representative and that they served as a good basis for the pattern I identify in the Post.

Joe Wiesenthal: [361] Minting the Trillion Dollar Coin won't cause massive hyperinflation because: the money from a TDC wouldn't go into the economy since it wouldn't be used to pay back the debt; and even if some of it did go into the economy, the Fed could “sterilize” that by selling enough of the Treasuries it's holding to get money out of the system.

The TDC won't destroy the dollar because: the money won't be just poured into the economy like “a helicopter drop” of money to people would be. It's just a stop-gap to get by the debt ceiling and keep services going.

People who say we should mint a $16 Trillion coin or a $100 Trillion coin are missing the point. The point isn't to pay off our debt. It's to get by the debt ceiling. If we did try to pay off the debt with a minted coin we'd get inflation or hyperinflation because of the massive expansion of money.

Joe Wiesenthal2: [282] Wiesenthal points out that Paul Krugman, Jerry Nadler (D-NY), and Josh Barro of Bloomberg News have endorsed it. Barro proposes an agreement in which the Republicans give up the debt ceiling and Obama gives up the PCS capability. Wiesenthal then says that it's silly to think of funding the Treasury with a coin, but even sillier to think that defaulting is a good idea. So, let's do the lesser silly (my paraphrase).

He also thinks that minting a TDC would not result in massive inflation because that results only from a massive injection of new money into the system, and a TDC could result only in spending conforming to Congressional appropriations. Also, we should not mint a $100 Trillion coin because: the current economic constraint is not about money, it's about law and getting around the debt ceiling, and a $1 T coin gets around that just as well as a $100 T coin.

Josh Barro: [281] The Treasury has the authority to mint large denomination platinum coins and deposit them at the Fed to finance payments of the Government's bills in lieu of issuing debt. If the Republicans offer a list of demands to be met before they vote to increase the debt ceiling then the President should should simply say that he will mint platinum coins to pay the Government's bills until the debt ceiling is raised. And he should also promise that as soon as the debt ceiling is raised he will have Treasury issue bonds to drain the economy of currency equal to the value of the platinum coins in order to dampen down inflationary expectations. Josh Barro then says:

And then he should offer to sign a bill revoking his authority to issue platinum coins -- so long as that bill also abolishes the debt ceiling. The executive branch will give up its unwarranted power to print if the legislative branch will give up its unwarranted restriction on borrowing to cover already appropriated obligations.

He goes on to say that debt ceiling coercion is no way to run a country and neither is “. . . . monetizing deficits through direct presidential of the currency, in lieu of borrowing.” So, the ideal “concession” for Obama to offer is to trade this power for repeal of the debt ceiling legislation.

Matthew Yglesias: [378] Platinum Coin finance would create new spending capacity, but no new spending authority. But because “it's mighty silly” he supports Josh Barro's call for legislation that would trade platinum coin financing authority for repealing the debt ceiling.

Joshua Holland, [379] a progressive writer, likes the idea of using the TDC. He cites Josh Barro's post and also Jerry Nadler's support of the TDC idea, and then brings in Kevin Drum's legal qualms [366] about the platinum coin legislation which I've reviewed earlier. But then he concludes that he'd just use the coin and let the chips fall where they may. He grants that there may be law suits, but says he still thinks it's a good idea because there's “. . . nothing more ridiculous than a Congressional minority threatening the economy by trying to extract unpopular concessions in exchange for paying the bills that Congress itself already ran up. Let's not pretend this is normal behavior we're dealing with.”

And then he points out we should not pretend that the behavior of hostage taking using the debt ceiling is constitutional behavior and then cites the 14th Amendment Section 4, and the oath of office to strengthen his case.

William Wei [380] at Business Insider produced a youtube explaining the mechanics of the TDC, inaccurately, in the interests of brevity I suppose, lets people know about the #mintthecoin movement, and then asks people to choose which is more silly, minting the TDC and paying your bills; or not minting it and going to default.

The #mintthecoinpetition [325] asks the White House to direct the Mint to make a single platinum trillion dollar coin! It asks for this simple solution to avoid playing political football with the US and global economies.

Charles Riley [381] of CNN also writes about the TDC. He says it's not going to happen because it could lead to even people worrying about inflation and to critics of Federal reserve QE being apoplectic if the Treasury Department did a further “helicopter drop” of $1 Trillion. But later after outlining the solution, he refers to it as “elegant,” and points out that Jerry Nadler supports it as do many on twitter.

Alex Hern [382] put together piece which combines the Wiesenthal and Barro posts and follows Barro down the road of advocating the swap I outlined earlier. He also repeats Wiesenthal's statement that the TDC idea was first suggested by Cullen Roche on July 7, 2011. So clearly Hern did no research of his own on the coin and its origin.

Connor Simpson [383] at the Atlantic Wire is another participant in the echo chamber generated by Joe Wiesenthal. Connor mentions the platinum coin, links to all the names I've mentioned above, repeats Wiesenthal's viral error about the origins of the TDC movement, mentions the #mintthecoin petition, and then follows Barro down the line about what ought to be done, but also emphasizes using the coin as a negotiating tool to get the debt ceiling leverage off the back of the President in the negotiations over the budget. Then he asks why Obama didn't think of this before? And answers: “Because no one's first resort to a debt ceiling fight is to create what is essentially a loonie on horse steroids, duh.” He then concludes by presenting various humorous tweets on the subject by way of agreeing with the position that the move would not damage the economy much.

Bonnie Kavoussi [384] of The Huffington Post provides a piece on the #mintthecoin petition. She calls attention to the debt ceiling and the possible dangerous consequences of default and then refers to the concerns of some that using the TDC may “could be a slippery slope to hyperinflation.” The piece also contains a video explaining the TDC, and reproduces a number tweets about the #mintthecoin petition drive. Everything is focused around the TDC and the debt ceiling problem.

Rachelle Younglai of Reuters [385] This article just reports on the coin proposal, the #mintthecoin petition drive, and the context in the debt ceiling crisis. It doesn't question the legality of platinum coin seigniorage, and doesn't suggest that the proposal is “wacky” or “silly” or “ludicrous.” It mentions the likelihood of Congressional opposition from members trying to reduce deficits, and also mentions that using the coin would compromise the independence of the Fed.

Cullen Roche [386] joined the small-ball party with a brief post at Pragmatic Capitalism. The debt ceiling is silly. The platinum coin solution is silly. The US government has no solvency constraint, and “Willingly defaulting on US debt by using the debt ceiling as a threat is pure madness. I can’t think of many things that would be more reckless than this.” The platinum coin is a legal workaround for the debt ceiling problem first discussed in a web comment by Carlos Mucha (beowulf). Mint the TDC. Deposit it at the Fed. Use the proceeds to pay down debt and it functions like raising the debt ceiling by $1T. It's not inflationary because it's not new spending. It's an accounting gimmick and shouldn't be used. But if the choice is between the coin and default, then “. . . then the decision is a no-brainer. It would be unpatriotic to default. Even more unpatriotic for leaders to allow default when they could mint the coin.” And then he endorses the Josh Barro solution of swapping the PCS capability for repeal of the debt ceiling.

Steve Randy Waldman [315] also weighs in on the controversy. SRW thinks “The benefit of the plan (depending on your politics) is that it circumvents an institutional quirk, the debt ceiling. The cost of the plan is that it would inflame US politics, and there is a slim chance that it would make Paul Krugman’s “confidence fairies” suddenly become real. But note that both of these costs are matters of perception.” He thinks Treasury will reluctantly issue coins in the Million Dollar, rather than the Trillion Dollar range, to continue spending, and that the Fed will “sterilize” this spending selling assets to absorb an equal amount of money in the private sector. He thinks that's all that would happen and that it would be a “big nothingburger.”

Chris Hayes [387] segment with Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and others on video.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news [388], world news [389], and news about the economy [390]

This segment reflects the dominant pattern discussed in the text perfectly. The segment poses the issue as a trade-off between using the TDC and default due to the debt ceiling. Notice how Veronique De Rugy defends Republican debt ceiling tactics. Notice, also, that Chris Hayes appears not to have thought beyond the TDC idea as a solution to the debt ceiling.

Today, Paul Krugman [391] weighed in with a very specific statement advising the Administration to be ready to mint the TDC immediately to take the debt ceiling issue off the table. He says: “Given the realities of our political situation, and in particular the mixture of ruthlessness and craziness that now characterizes House Republicans, it’s just ridiculous — far more ridiculous than the notion of the coin.”

(Cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives [83].)

Average: 5 (1 vote)

Wake Up Progressives: the Trillion Dollar Coin Can Be Game-Changing!

letsgetitdone's blog [3]
Log in [392] or register [393] to post comments

Departments:

Department of Why Can't We Do That? [394]

Thread:

Corporatism [88]

Tags:

MMT [12]

TDC [112]

PCS [111]

$60 T coin [108]

Krugman [333]

Wiesenthal [395]

Linkins [396]

O'Brien [397]

austerity [194]