Nadler says the president should have a couple of trillion-dollar coins minted. Pol: Pay national debt with platinum

Paying off the national debt could be as easy as reaching for coins in your pocket — platinum $1 trillion coins.

Here’s how it’d work: The U.S. Mint has strict regulations about how paper, gold, silver and copper money get printed. But there’s nothing on platinum.


So supporters — including Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) — say that President Barack Obama should order that a couple of platinum trillion-dollar coins be made and then have the coins deposited in to the Fed and, voilà, debt ceiling crisis averted.

Not so fast, says Jim Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute, who blogged about it earlier Friday.

“It is like economics meets an episode of ‘The Simpsons.’ It’s not likely to happen,” he told POLITICO. “First, it could be wildly inflationary. And the fact that we’re talking about it in semi-serious tones, if I was an investor — and I saw supposedly serious people talking about this as an option, I would be very alarmed.”

Another issue?

“Heaven help us if the U.S. Treasury secretary has a hole in his pocket — we’d lose the coin,” he quipped. “What a fiasco.”

Nadler isn’t laughing. He told Capital New York earlier this week that it’s a perfectly viable option.

“There is specific statutory authority that says that the Federal Reserve can mint any non-gold or -silver coin in any denomination, so all you do is you tell the Federal Reserve to make a platinum coin for 1 trillion dollars, and then you deposit it in the Treasury account, and you pay your bills,” Nadler told Capital New York.

He continued: “I’m being absolutely serious. It sounds silly but it’s absolutely legal. And it would normally not be proper to consider such a thing, except when you’re faced with blackmail to destroy the country’s economy, you have to consider things.”

Nadler isn’t alone: Bloomberg View’s Josh Barro endorsed the idea, as has Business Insider’s deputy editor Joseph Weisenthal — he even launched a twitter campaign #MintTheCoin about it.

The national debt is currently around $16.4 trillion.