The platinum coin has a future as a collector’s item but not, it would seem, as a way to avoid the debt ceiling.

The Obama Administration announced late Saturday that it will not be minting a trillion dollar coin and depositing it in the Federal Reserve, thereby allowing the government to spend money even if Congress refuses to increase government's borrowing authority. That's potentially a big deal. Without the ability to borrow or spend, the government wouldn't be pay its bills. And, as you may have heard, the government has a lot of bills to pay—to Social Security recipients, for example, and to vendors who sell products to the government. The government also owes interest payments to the holders of U.S. bonds. Defaulting on those payments could, according to many economists, be catastrophic.

Obama’s decision, first reported by Ezra Klein in the Washington Post, is not surprising. Obama did not avail himself of the coin option in 2011, the first time Republicans used the once-routine debt ceiling increase to demand cuts in the federal budget. Similarly, the administration has ruled out borrowing money on its own authority, by drawing on the 14th Amendment for justification. An array of legal scholars has indicated that one, if not both, of the options would be constitutional. But Obama has never shown even the slighest enthusiasm for these maneuvers.

The interesting question is why. By refusing to increase the debt ceiling, the Republican Congress is practicing a form of economic extortion. The coin, like the 14th Amendment, seemed to give the administration a chance to stop that extortion from working. Just this week, Senate Democratic leaders issued a letter, made public by Greg Sargent in the Post, practically begging Obama to invoke this sort of authority. With Saturday's announcement, Obama basically said "no thanks." Is this yet another one of those concessions that congressional Democrats and other administration allies will come to rue?

Perhaps. But the White House doesn't think it's backing down. Administration officials believe they are standing firm—that the coin option, if anything, was becoming a distraction. "There are no magic coins," one senior official told the Huffington Post. "There is no way to get out of this. We feel fine about the politics of it. We think we are in a stronger position if Republicans realize there is no out."