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Armchair economists have hit upon an unorthodox way to fix the US
debt problem, writes Tim Walker. Thanks to a legal quirk, one of Tim
Geithner's last acts in office could be to mint a single platinum
coin with a face value of $1trillion (620bn) and deposit it in the
Federal Reserve, putting an abrupt end to Congressional bickering by
wiping out most of the deficit at a stroke.
The notion was dismissed by the New York Times columnist Paul
Krugman as a "gimmick", but the #MintTheCoin Twitter hashtag
translated into a White House petition, urging the Obama
administration to mint and deposit the coin. At the time of writing
the petition had just 1,626 signatures.
