This Is How the Trillion Dollar Coin Could End Debt Ceiling Fights for Good
Odd Lots
Bloomberg
4.5 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 4 October 2021
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Every few years, people are reminded of the weird law the United States has: the debt ceiling. Congress has to vote affirmatively to raise the total outstanding legal stock of debt the country can take on. If Congress fails to vote in favor of it, you could see a theoretical debt default, with devastating consequences. Sometimes the vote is routine and easy. Sometimes it's contentious, as it was in 2011. But arguably there's an easy solution that could avoid these fights altogether: A provision in the law which gives the Treasury Secretary the unilateral right to create platinum coins of any denomination. While this sounds like a joke, there's a serious argument that it offers a robust legal path out of the problem. On this episode we speak with Rohan Grey, a professor at Willamette University College of Law and one of the foremost experts on the legality of the coin maneuver, on how it works in practice and in theory.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Adlots is brought to you by Apollo. When it comes to building and financing stronger businesses, |
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| 0:30.0 | Hello and welcome to another episode of the Adlots podcast. I'm Joe Wyzenthal. |
| 1:00.0 | And I'm Tracy Alley. So Tracy, you know, like, I'm a serious financial journalist. I'm a serious |
| 1:08.8 | journalist. And one aspect of journalism that I think is important. Why are you laughing? Sorry, |
| 1:14.3 | I shouldn't laugh. I shouldn't. I'm sorry. I just know where this is going. Go on. |
| 1:20.5 | No, no. I just feel like one important aspect of journalism is impartiality. Like, you know, |
| 1:27.4 | I don't think we should like take views on many things. We should be open-minded. We should be |
| 1:33.0 | intellectually honest, but it's not really our job to like take a position on things. You don't |
| 1:37.7 | I'm saying. Sorry, I don't know why I can't stop laughing. Because impartiality is very, |
| 1:43.2 | very important. I think the difficulty comes when you, I mean, in a lot of financial journalism, |
| 1:49.2 | people have strong opinions about one topic one way or the other. And sometimes those opinions |
| 1:55.7 | seem to be grounded in logic. And so you get frustrated if other people don't see the same logic. |
| 2:00.9 | But yes, like, we are not supposed to take sides. We're supposed to lay out both sides of the argument |
| 2:06.0 | every time. So I take this responsibility as a serious capital J journalist, very seriously. But |
| 2:15.3 | I have to admit, if I'm being completely honest, if I'm being completely honest, there is one |
| 2:21.3 | topic that I find very hard to let's say avoid showing my bias. |
| 2:29.2 | Yes. Okay. So we're talking about minting the trillion dollar coin of which you have been an |
| 2:35.5 | advocate for a very long time. First of all, I can't believe that we've managed to do what is it |
| 2:41.7 | like six years of the Adlots podcast and we haven't yet done a mint the coin episode. So that's |
| 2:48.4 | one thing. And then secondly, I mean, this is the one thing that I remember about your writing or |
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