Second, it’s probably possible to use financial engineering to bypass the debt limit. The most famous proposal calls for minting a platinum coin with a face value of, say, $1 trillion, depositing that coin with the Federal Reserve and spending out of the bank account thus created. Believe it or not, this would almost certainly be legal.

I noticed the paragraph above in this article about the debt limit.

A few things came to mind:

  1. WTF?!
  2. It’s amazing the systems and institutions we rely on have such weird foundational stuff as could be dreamed up as a story.
  3. How come Hollywood hasn’t made a heist move about this already?!