Ex-Treasury official: "As a straightforward matter the Federal Reserve wouldn’t give Treasury a trillion dollars for that coin."
That said, he's keeping with the party line that the US "always pays it's bills on time", so take it with a grain of salt (the US defaulted twice or more in the 20th century, depending on how you count)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/03/w...
"Here in the Anglo-Saxon world—never mind how few of us in it have any substantial proportion of our ancestors coming ashore with Hengest, Horsa, Esc, Ella, Cymen, Wlenking, and Cissa to loot, pillage, rape, and burn—we have not seen any government default since the “stop of the exchequer” of Charles II Stuart, when he simply got sick of paying his bills and decided to balance his budget by defaulting on his debt and then accepting bribes from Louis XIV of France, who was desperately anxious that Britain not help the Dutch resist his invasion."
http://delong.typepad.com/files/20120221-the-budget-and-macr...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_bond#Default_of_the_Fou... http://www.npr.org/2011/07/11/137773341/looking-at-when-the-...