Blame it on the Heat

Things are getting goofy in DC.  Anne Lowrey of Slate explains the latest idea to plunge the clogged toilet that is Congress:

“One option is coin seigniorage—aka, the “really-huge-coin workaround.” The United States has a statutory limit on the amount of paper money in circulation, but no such limit on coins. The Treasury secretary has the authority to mint certain coins of any denomination, with no need for the value of the metal to equal the value of the coin. (It gets a bit technical.) But the idea is that Secretary Timothy Geithner could order the Mint to make a, say, $5 trillion coin. It could then use the coin to buy back and extinguish debt from the Fed, pushing the country back under the ceiling. Or it could deposit it, and the Fed could counteract the inflation by selling government debt.”