Jon Stewart and Operation Just The Tip

Stewart is back from Iran.

Please change your mind on the Platinum Coin of Freedom, Mr. Stewart! Krugman is usually right! He won a Noble Prize!

Fed Watch: On The Disruptiveness of the Platinum Coin by Tim Duy

Jon Stewart Flunks Econ by Jonathan Chait

Aaron Swartz, Precocious Programmer and Internet Activist, Dies at 26

In 2007, Mr. Swartz wrote about his struggle with depression, distinguishing it from the emotion of sadness. “Go outside and get some fresh air or cuddle with a loved one and you don’t feel any better, only more upset at being unable to feel the joy that everyone else seems to feel. Everything gets colored by the sadness.” When the condition gets worse, he wrote, “you feel as if streaks of pain are running through your head, you thrash your body, you search for some escape but find none. And this is one of the more moderate forms.” Earlier that year, he gave a talk in which he described having had suicidal thoughts during a low period in his career.... 

Lawrence Lessig, who heads the Safra Center at Harvard and had worked for a time on behalf of Mr. Swartz’s legal defense, noted in an interview that Mr. Swartz had been arrested by the M.I.T. campus police two years to the day before his suicide. That arrest led to the eventual federal indictment and financial ruin for Mr. Swartz, who had made money on the sale of Reddit to Condé Nast but had never tried to turn his intellect to making money. “I can just imagine him thinking it was going to be a million-dollar defense,” Mr. Lessig said. “He didn’t have a million dollars.”

Tributes to a Digital Pioneer Follow Reports of His Death

Another friend, the legal scholar and copyright activist Lawrence Lessig, wrote an angry post, describing the federal government’s decision to indict Mr. Swartz in 2011 — when he was charged with downloading 4.8 million articles and other documents from JSTOR, a nonprofit online service for distributing scholarly articles, and plotting to make them available online for free — as a kind of “bullying.”

Here is where we need a better sense of justice, and shame. For the outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron. It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor’s behavior. From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The “property” Aaron had “stolen,” we were told, was worth “millions of dollars” — with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed.

Aaron had literally done nothing in his life “to make money.” He was fortunate Reddit turned out as it did, but from his work building the RSS standard, to his work architecting Creative Commons, to his work liberating public records, to his work building a free public library, to his work supporting Change Congress/FixCongressFirst/Rootstrikers, and then Demand Progress, Aaron was always and only working for (at least his conception of) the public good. He was brilliant, and funny. A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying.

Tributes also appeared on Twitter, where Mr. Swartz had recently posted a note [his last] drawing attention to the campaign for the Treasury to mint a $1 trillion platinum coin to avoid a showdown over the debt ceiling.

"Philip Diehl, the most respected U.S. Mint director America's ever had, joins the campaign to #mintthecoin: buff.ly/Zp58iM" 8 Jan. 13

Mint the coin. For Aaron. Regarding the bullying of prosecutors, I always thought the anti-bullying campaign targeting school kids was worthwhile but kind of weird. American culture is all about the bullying. It's how you get ahead. Where do these bully kids learn it but from their older siblings and parents?

Platinomics by Greg Ip

I disagree with Ip more often than with most economic writers I read in that he seems to take it easy on Bernanke and the Fed, often writing with skepticism about what the Fed can accomplish. That's exactly what Romer and Romer warn about.

Fed Watch: More on Central Bank Independence by Tim Duy

IOUs

The Debt Ceiling’s Escape Hatch by Edward Kleinbard

A Trillion-Dollar Coin Brings a Jackpot of Jests by Annie Lowrey

The inflation dragon is just around the corner by Simon Wren-Lewis

Coin of Freedom

The platinum coin idea is idiotic. That is the point. by Neil Irwin (Jan. 9)

This idea is positively idiotic, though it has gained a more and more respectable set of fans. (They now include Bill Gross, the nation’s biggest bond investor, a Bush administration economist named Donald Marron, and the Nobel laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman). Some of the critics are misunderstanding what it would do and wouldn’t do. The fact that it is idiotic is kind of the point.

Everything You Need to Know About the Crazy Plan to Save the Economy With a Trillion-Dollar Coin by Matt O'Brien

Enter the trillion-dollar coin. It sounds nuts. But there's a loophole that actually lets the Treasury create coins in whatever value it wants, even $1 trillion. It's all straightforward enough. The Treasury would create one of these coins, deposit it at the Federal Reserve, and use the new money in its account to pay our bills if the debt ceiling isn't increased. This has gone from being just another wacky idea in the world of internet comments to something that's getting taken seriously due, in large part, to the efforts of Joe Weisenthal of Business Insider and Josh Barro of Bloomberg View to promote it. (Which you can follow on Twitter at #MintTheCoin). Their logic is that as silly as the trillion-dollar coin sounds, the debt ceiling is far sillier -- and much more destructive.

As this terrifying report from the Bipartisan Policy Center shows, the consequences of going over the debt ceiling are unthinkable and unpredictable. At best, it will mean immediate 40 percent austerity; at worst, it will mean an outright default on our debt. Both are bad enough that a legal gimmick like the trillion dollar coin sounds sane in comparison, if it comes to that. At least that's what Representative Jerry Nadler, Paul Krugman, and, as of pixel time, over 6,000 other patriotic Americans think.

The Hobson's choice is either let the economy crash and burn or further the banana-republicization of America.

The Fire Next Time

Or Hostage-taking extortion by the banks and Republicans

Rebranding the “trillion-dollar coin” by Steve Randy Waldman

Kicking the can down the road, either by Waldman's reasonable suggestion or by a deal that doesn't include cuts to entitlement benefits but does have spending cuts, may buy time for the Republicans to be voted out of office. My preference would be for a confrontation.

Secret and Lies of the Bailout by Matt Taibbi

Yellen: Fed Likely to Vary Interest Rates for Reserves in Future (via Thoma)

I don't believe there will be bailouts next time. And there will be another bubble as the financial industry successfully blocked reforms.

So we should just shoot the hostages in both cases and let the banks and Republicans deal with the consequences.

Sen. John Cornyn's Outrageous Op-Ed on the Debt Ceiling by Yglesias

Politicians are often successful shakedown artists and the debt ceiling clown show is just a big shakedown. Republicans lost the Presidential race and Senate seats hopefully in part because of the clown show in 2011.

Coin of Freedom

What goes on the other side of Ronnie Raygun's face?

Deo vindice often translated as "God will vindicate us."