This Week's Sneak Peek

I had some late-night TV on while cartooning last night — one of those channels our cable system puts up in the 900's — and a commercial by one of those Franklin Mint type companies came on. You may have seen them: they hawk silver or gold coins with the suggestion that they are somehow an official entity with the backing of the federal government, which they aren't.

This time, they were selling $2.00 silver coins "authorized by the 37th Treasurer of the United States, Angela Bay Buchanan." Surely President Biden never appointed Pat Buchanan's sister to the post, I thought, and sure enough, she was Treasurer of the United States way back during the Reagan administration.

(President Biden has not appointed anyone to the post yet, which has been vacant since January 14, 2020. Lengthy vacancies have been fairly common lately; over the last six decades, the post has been vacant a cumulative eleven years. Treasurer appointments used to require Senate confirmation, but that requirement was done away with ten years ago.)

What should be a dead giveaway that the $2.00 coin has no backing whatsoever from the United States treasury is that for some scarcely fathomable reason, Queen Elizabeth II's profile appears juxtaposed onto the Liberty Bell. The coin has instead the full faith and backing of the Cook Islands, a self-governing bunch of islands in the South Pacific near American Samoa. Tourism has been their major industry, but since homosexuality is punishable there by seven years in prison, I don't plan to visit any time soon.

If silver isn't your thing, they also offer the one on the right containing a half gram of gold. Current price $81US. Coins may not be to scale.

Perhaps more to the point of Cook Island coins, Wikipedia points out:

Since approximately 1989, the Cook Islands have become a location specializing in so-called asset protection trusts, by which investors shelter assets from the reach of creditors and legal authorities. According to The New York Times, the Cooks have "laws devised to protect foreigners' assets from legal claims in their home countries," which were apparently crafted specifically to thwart the long arm of American justice; creditors must travel to the Cook Islands and argue their cases under Cooks law, often at prohibitive expense. Unlike other foreign jurisdictions such as the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands and Switzerland, the Cooks "generally disregard foreign court orders" and do not require that bank accounts, real estate, or other assets protected from scrutiny (it is illegal to disclose names or any information about Cooks trusts) be physically located within the archipelago. Taxes on trusts and trust employees account for some 8% of the Cook Islands economy, behind tourism but ahead of fishing.

In recent years, the Cook Islands has gained a reputation as a debtor paradise, through the enactment of legislation that permits debtors to shield their property from the claims of creditors.