That's what The Atlantic calls the comment from a Georgia lawyer that led to the idea that Secretary of the Treasury can sidestep the debt ceiling by minting a coin and giving it a value of $1 trillion and depositing it in the treasury. He has no economics training, which he considers helpful.
The idea came to him initially after reading a 2009 Wall Street Journal article about frequent-flier point collectors taking advantage of an offer from the U.S. Mint. When the Mint offered free shipping for purchases of $1 legal-tender Native American coins, entrepreneurial citizens bought them with their credit cards, collected the points, and then deposited the coins into their bank accounts. It amounted to free frequent flier miles.
This story was so intriguing to Beowulf that he began looking into monetary law and found this: “The Secretary may mint and issue platinum bullion coins 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.”
He took the idea to a website's comment section and waited.
In the midst of the debt-ceiling negotiations in the summer of 2011, a commenter on the blog Pragmatic Capitalism offered a simple suggestion to end the debate over the debt ceiling once and for all: “Geithner could sidestep the debt ceiling this afternoon by ordering the West Point Mint to coin a 1 oz. $ 1 trillion coin.” For months, it suffered the fate of the vast majority of Internet comments lingering in the ash heap of history. And yet, somehow, this one comment was plucked from obscurity and has become the talk of the nation.
Lately it’s seemed like everyone wants to talk about this platinum coin idea. It resurfaced largely thanks to Joe Weisenthal of Business Insider and Josh Barro of Bloomberg View, and it has now become a favorite topic for journalists around the country (including Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman) and was even brought up in a White House press briefing this week. But it all started with someone going by the name of “Beowulf.”
But the Treasury Department has apparently ruled out minting it. Its legal status is still unclear.
- A wikipedia page has been set up for the coin.
When we cover the media, we discuss how the internet has decentralized the flow of information and agenda setting. I'm not aware of a comment having an impact on political debate though. This is new stuff.
