While weighing in on the recent furor over a proposal to mint a $1 trillion platinum coin to swiftly resolve the US government’s debt woes, Fox News has committed an egregious blunder by confusing the denominated value of a coin with the value of its constituent metals.
Fox News staffers failed to realize that the notional value of modern fiat currency is not commensurate with the value of the materials used in its fashioning – the paper used for a hundred dollar bill for example is worth far less than one hundred dollars.
This in turn led the popular news channel to assume that the $1 trillion coin recently proposed as a means of alleviating America’s debt problems would actually have to be made from $1 trillion’s worth of platinum.
According to Fox researchers, the $1 trillion platinum coin would thus weigh a total of 17,773.995 tonnes, equivalent in mass to a ballistic missile submarine, or 89 blue whales.