Former US Mint director addresses legal concerns with trillion-dollar coin proposal

Former US Mint director Philip N. Diehl, co-author of the law authorizing minting of platinum coins at the executive branch’s discretion, speaks to legal and practical concerns regarding #MintTheCoin. In short, there’s little inflation risk; the accounting treatment moving money between the Treasury and the Fed “is entirely routine”; and since Congress wrote the law, court challenges are unlikely to succeed. The real problems are entirely political. But if you support #MintTheCoin “as much for the possibility of making it 16 feet tall and engraved with the runes from Zep IV as for its policy merits,” that probably doesn’t bother you.