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Who Will Steal The Trillion Dollar Platinum Coin?
And other questions about the world’s largest currency denomination
A debt crisis was narrowly avoided in Congress this month but the brinkmanship made the Treasury tip their hand about what cards they hold close to the vest. One of the most interesting, and criticized, ideas was for the Treasury to order the minting of a single coin with a denomination of one trillion dollars. This coin would then be deposited into the vaults and credited to the government so they could cover their debts.
The coin would be minted from a set of blank Platinum Eagle coins that the Treasury has lying around. Instead of stamping it with a standard denomination like one dollar, they would add on twelve zeroes and make the coin legally worth a trillion dollars. Legal experts said the plan it technically within the rights of the Treasury to do but the details were a little hazy.
It is a bold plan and one that would be unprecedented. Naturally, it raised a lot of questions in my mind regarding the status of such a powerful coin.
1. Where do all of the zeroes go?
Twelve zeroes is a lot of little circles to cram onto a coin blank the size of a silver dollar. Do the zeroes curl around the edge of the coin in a…
