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Re:I Got the Fed to Release Its 2011 "Treasury Default" Play... by User23 on Tuesday November 07, 2023 @02:55PM (#38181938)
The answer is already in the submission.

  They would gladly facilitate an option the Treasury pursues in its role as fiscal agent, since they can always claim that it was the Treasury’s decision and they had no other option as fiscal agent (which happens to be true).
The end result is the Federal Reserve would be forced to follow its unwritten 0th commandment: maintain the integrity of the payments system. As a consequence of that imperative it would be operationally forced to continue to ensure Treasury auctions and payments continued to go through. Presumably accounting gimmicks would be employed to avoid “technically” exceeding the debt ceiling, like simply allowing Treasury to overdraw. But at the end of the day there would be no constitutional crisis. At least not a forced one. Of course we shouldn’t underestimate the power of stupidity so it can’t be ruled out entirely.
Re:I Got the Fed to Release Its 2011 "Treasury Default" Play... by JumpCrisscross on Tuesday November 07, 2023 @04:42PM (#38183285)
> it would be operationally forced to continue to ensure Treasury auctions and payments continued to go through

The Fed can't buy debt directly from the Treasury [1].

[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/money_12851.htm

Re:I Got the Fed to Release Its 2011 "Treasury Default" Play... by User23 on Tuesday November 07, 2023 @06:55PM (#38184861)
Sure there’s the primary dealer figleaf/kickback. Operationally though the Fed is just buying government debt with an extra step.

Also the Fed can just let Treasury run negative balances or any other number of accounting tricks.