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More and more politicians are waking up to the fact that in an emergency, the Treasury could mint a trillion-dollar platinum coin in order to stave off a default on U.S. government debt. A default on U.S. Treasuries would likely be catastrophic, and so this “Plan C” is seen as an option to maintain financial order in the event that Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling in a timely manner.
While we normally think of spending as having to be balanced out by tax revenues and borrowing. There is a third option, which is the creation of coinage. Coinage revenue, obviously is usually small change (pun somewhat intended), but in an emergency, it doesn’t have to be. And in this case, creating a trillion-dollar platinum coin would solve both a financial problem (avoiding default) and a constitutional problem (allowing the executive branch to fulfill both of the instructions sent to it by Congress, which are to spend money and to not borrow more).
