Saturday, January 5, 2013

Steve Randy Waldman — Rebranding the “trillion-dollar coin”


A balanced approach that aims to transcend the ridiculous factor. Worth a read even if you are not following this closely. We are going to be hearing a lot more about it, it seems.

Interfluidity
Rebranding the “trillion-dollar coin”
Steve Randy Waldman

4 comments:

Matt Franko said...

Pretty good from SRW there!

I guess what he is saying is still do Platinum coins but just smaller denomination and have the Fed "sterilize" (btw not necessary) the coins by selling some of it's portfolio at the same time in offsetting amounts so as to humor the monetarist morons and not cause them high blood pressure or seizures/stroke ...

Includes some more operational steps than the $1T approach and is mindful of not putting the monetarists into cardiac arrest.. how considerate!

rsp,

Tom Hickey said...

AS I said, it reduces the "ridiculous" factor by making it look more or less normal. "Everyone knows" that the US issues coins, and people in the know also know that this is direct issuance that is not debt-offset. The monetarist fear is that there is no debt-offset, so interest rates will be affected and the ploy of the Fed reverse "financing" the issuance with tsys from its own book addressed that illusion with another illusion. The money game is all smoke and mirrors anyway. It has to be dressed up to look like something "natural."

Matt Franko said...

btw Lincoln had the same concerns as SRW addresses here when he did the US notes... Lincoln was afraid that his spending notes would be inflationary as no bonds or taxes were issued simultaneously, but specie was also in circulation at that time also...

Lincoln 1863:

"I think it my duty to express my sincere regret that it has been found necessary to authorize so large an additional issue of United States notes, when this circulation, and that of the suspended banks together have become already so redundant as to increase prices beyond real values, thereby augmenting the cost of living to the injury of labor, and the cost of supplies to the injury of the whole country.
It seems very plain that continued issues of United States notes, without any check to the issues of suspended banks, and without adequate provision for the raising of money by loans, and for founding the issues so as to keep them within due limits, must soon produce disastrous consequences...."

So SRW is in good company to mind the monetarists ... but today "it is about price not quantity" rsp,

Ralph Musgrave said...

I hope vending machines the great US of A are being adjusted so as to take trillion dollar coins.