Link: https://mises.org/wire/yellen-wrong-us-government-doesnt-always-pay-its-debts
Excerpt:
In 1934, the United States defaulted on the fourth Liberty Bond. The contracts between debtor and creditor on these bonds was clear. The bonds were to be payable in gold. This presented a big problem for the US, which was facing big debts into the 1930s after the First World War.
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So how did the US government deal with this? Chamberlain notes “Roosevelt decided to default on the whole of the domestically-held debt by refusing to redeem in gold to Americans.”
Moreover, with the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, Congress devalued the dollar from $20.67 per ounce to $35 per ounce—a reduction of 40 percent. Or, put another way, the amount of gold represented by a dollar was reduced to 59 percent of its former amount.
The US offered to pay its creditors in paper dollars, but only in new, devalued dollars.1 This constituted default on these Liberty Bonds, since, as the Supreme Court noted in Perry v. United States, Congress had “regulated the value of money so as to invalidate the obligations which the Government had theretofore issued in the exercise of the power to borrow money on the credit of the United States.”
This was clearly not a case of the US making good on its debt obligations, and to claim this is not default requires the sort of hairsplitting that only the most credulous Beltway insider could embrace.
Author(s): Ryan McMaken
Publication Date: 28 Sept 2021
Publication Site: Mises Wire