This Is How the Trillion Dollar Coin Could End Debt Ceiling Fights for Good

Joe Weisenthal (0:11)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:16)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:18)

So Tracy, you know, like, I'm a serious financial journalist, I'm a serious journalist, and one aspect of journalism that I think is important. Why are you laughing?

Tracy Alloway (0:30)

Sorry, I shouldn't laugh.

I shouldn't, I'm sorry. I just know where this is going. Go on.

Joe Weisenthal (0:37)

No, no, I just feel like one important aspect of journalism is impartiality. Like, you know, I don't think we should, like, take views on many things. We should be open minded. We should be intellectually honest, but it's not really our job to, like, take a position on things.

Tracy Alloway (0:55)

Sorry, I don't know why I can't stop laughing, because impartiality is very, very important. I think the difficulty comes when you, I mean, in a lot of financial journalism, people have strong opinions about one topic one way or the other, and sometimes those opinions seem to be grounded in logic, and so you get frustrated if other people don't see the same logic. But yes, like, we are not supposed to take sides. We're supposed to lay out both sides of the argument every time.

Joe Weisenthal (1:24)

So I take this responsibility as a serious capital J journalist very seriously, but I have to admit, if I'm being completely honest, if I'm being completely honest, there is one topic that I find very hard to, let's say, avoid showing my bias.

Tracy Alloway (1:45)

Yes, okay.

So we're talking about minting the trillion dollar coin of which you have been an advocate for a very long time. First of all, I can't believe that we've managed to do, what is it, like six years of the Odd Lots podcast, and we haven't yet done a mint the coin episode. So that's one thing. And then secondly, I mean, this is the one thing that I remember about your writing, or like the foremost thing about your writing before we started working together at Bloomberg. It was the big post you did at Business Insider, I think it was way back in 2013, something like that, about minting the coin and the discussion people were having about it at the time. And I remember reading that and thinking, this must be a joke, this is so weird.

I started thinking about whether or not we're in a simulation again. And now like fast forward to 2021, and there are actual politicians in Washington who are talking about it.

Joe Weisenthal (2:48)

It's been a really incredible decade. So yes, I am going to fully admit my bias. I actually admitted it to one of our colleagues the other day. I was like, you know, I'm a serious journalist, but I have to admit that I really think the debt ceiling is a very absurd law, and that a very good solution is for the treasury to mint a trillion dollar platinum coin and just end this farce once and for all. So yes, that is my bias. But you know, people, it is weird. And I will be the first to admit, it's like a weird thing. Like I'm not going to deny that it's strange, that it seems like it's a legal loophole, that it's a hack, that people have lots of questions, both on the economics, the legality, and the sort of like the institutional aspects of how this can be done, and who is the unilaterally authority to just create a trillion dollars of money. I admit that there's a lot of questions, and people have reason to be skeptical.

Nonetheless, I think it's a good idea. Maybe you do too. Maybe you'll be convinced.

And I think though, it is surprising that after all these years of the Odd Lots podcast, we are finally for the first time doing a coin episode. Because as you point out, I've actually been writing about this topic for really almost a decade now.

Tracy Alloway (4:00)

Yeah, so this is gonna be one of the episodes where I think I sit back and learn a lot from both you and our guests. And I think I'm probably going to be representative of maybe the average person who encounters the idea. I kind of get how the mechanics of it would work, but again, instinctively, it just seems absolutely crazy to, I guess, try to fix the absurdity of American political theater with what basically amounts to more absurdity. But I have a feeling we're gonna get into that.

Joe Weisenthal (4:34)

There is some logic to that. So I hope you play an active role in this conversation because we have to ask the tough questions. Let's get started. So let's see, without further ado, we have the best guest, I think, to discuss it. So we're gonna be speaking to Rohan Grey. He is an Assistant Professor of Law at Willamette University. He is also a long-time coin advocate, and he has in fact written what I think is probably the definitive sort of law review article on the legality of the coin. It is extremely thorough, both in terms of talking through its economics, some of the common objections to it, and why he believes it's illegal, and perhaps even mandatory route to circumvent the debt ceiling.