Barack Obama On The Trillion-Dollar Platinum Coin

Axios reports that Barack Obama gave his last interview to Pod Save America. He recalls his experience with the trillion dollar platinum coin – the idea invented by Carlos Mucha. When he was asked, “When were you most scared in the White House, what was your scariest moment” he said it was the debt ceiling crisis on 2013:

There were all kinds of wacky ideas about how potentially you could have this massive coin I mean… it was like some primitive — it was like out of the stone age or something. And I pictured rolling in some coin … It gets pretty technical, but there was this theory that I had the authority to just issue … through the mint… this massive trillion dollar coin… and that on that basis we could try to pay off our U.S. treasuries. … It was a very realistic possibility that we couldn’t get the votes for that and that we couldn’t get those debts rolled over … and at that point you were in uncharted territory.

The audio mp3 file is available here and the above discussion starts around 27m00s

Of course the President was misinformed because the coin needn’t be “massive”. But it’s nice to know that he seriously considered this possibility.

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