Obama gov't kills notion of minting platinum coins to avoid debt crisis

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　　"Neither the Treasury⁴ Department nor the Federal Reserve believes that the law can or should be used to facilitate the production of platinum coins for the purpose of avoiding an increase in the debt limit," Treasury Department spokesman Anthony Coley said in a short statement.

　　Some Democrats⁵ and economists⁷, including Nobel Prize-winning economist⁶ Paul Krugman, contended that the Treasury could mint a platinum coin with a face value of 1 trillion dollars and deposit it at the Federal Reserve, which would credit the sum to the government's account and continue the government's normal operations.

　　The U.S. federal government reached its debt limit of 16.4 trillion dollars on December 31, 2012 and the Treasury was taking extraordinary measures to temporarily postpone⁸ the date that the United States would otherwise default on its legal obligations.

　　Democrats and Republicans struck a deal on Jan. 1 to avoid the so-called "fiscal⁹ cliff," a combination of tax hikes and automatic government spending cuts. Raising the federal government's debt ceiling would be the next flash point between Democrats and Republicans, as Republicans were urging for steep government cuts in line with a debt ceiling increase.

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