| Debt deadline looms, Evergrande problems pile up, and top central bankers gather. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen yesterday put a firm date -- Oct. 18 -- on when her department will effectively run out of cash. Senate Democrats are seeking a vote today on a stopgap funding bill that would avert a government shutdown this week when the fiscal year ends, while Republicans resist efforts to raise the debt ceiling. Democrats in the House remain divided over the progress of the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the larger tax and social spending package that encompasses much of Joe Biden's economic agenda. No wonder the president has cancelled a trip to Chicago today to concentrate on lobbying lawmakers. Troubled developer China Evergrande Group's problems are piling up as more interest payments come due and the company's credit rating is cut to one level above default by Fitch Ratings. There still is some cash coming in, with the developer agreeing to sell a stake in a Chinese bank for about 10 billion yuan ($1.55 billion). China's central bank continues to support the wider economy with an injection of liquidity into the banking system for the ninth day in a row. Regulators remain concerned about the possibility of contagion from Evergrande's debt problems with banks on Wall Street and in Hong Kong questioned about their exposure.  | Spiking energy prices and bottlenecks in supply chains around the world are raising fears that the acceleration in inflation may not be as transitory as originally foreseen. This means there will likely be a lot of attention on today's European Central Bank policy panel discussion that features ECB President Christine Lagarde, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda and Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey. Investors will be looking for reassurance that fears over a stagflation-like economic climate are unfounded. Yesterday's strong selloff tumbled through Asia, but ran out of steam when European stocks opened for trading. Overnight the MSCI Asia Pacific Index dropped 1.2% while Japan's Topix index closed 2.1% lower. In Europe, the Stoxx 600 Index was 1% higher at 5:50 a.m. Eastern Time with every industry sector in the green. S&P 500 futures pointed to a strong start to the session, the 10-year Treasury yield was at 1.499%, oil dropped below $75 a barrel and gold rose. U.S. pending home sales are at 10:00 a.m. Latest crude oil inventories numbers are at 10:30 a.m. The big ECB policy panel begins at 11:45 a.m. Philadelphia Fed President Patrick Harker, San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly and Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic speak at various events today. Cintas Corp. and Jabil Inc. report results. Here's what caught our eye over the last 24 hours. Yesterday was a historic day for the mainstreaming of the #MintTheCoin idea, with multiple members of Congress coming out and saying that the Treasury minting a trillion-dollar platinum coin may be the best way out of the debt ceiling impasse. (A refresher on how it all works can be be found here). However despite the elegance of it all, there's surprisingly little serious talk about this solution, and the D.C. conversation remains dominated by convoluted Congressional procedure. The thing is, if a coin were to be minted, it would be an ideological Pandora's box, ultimately changing much of the debate about all of public finance, rather than just the narrow question of the debt ceiling. We've all seen those big, scary looking national debt clocks that purport to show the U.S. drowning in red ink. But now imagine if you will, the Treasury minted a trillion-dollar coin, bought back $1 trillion worth of debt from the Fed, and retired it. Instantly that number on the top left would drop by $1 trillion. If the Treasury minted two trillion dollar coins the number would drop by $2 trillion. And there would be on real economic effect, because this would just be an asset swap between the Treasury and the Fed (which is the same reason QE hasn't had much of an affect, because it's just a swap of Fed reserves for Treasury debt). The upshot is that these numbers have very little economic meaning, they would no longer be deemed scary, and they would lose their rhetorical oomph. Politicians intent on, say, cutting back entitlement spending would have a harder time pointing to these big scary numbers as a reason to do so, once it were made clear how arbitrary and malleable they all are. I saw a tweet the other day about the "GLOBAL SPIRAL OF GOVERNMENT DEBT" showing the most indebted nations in red on the inside, with the least indebted ones on the outside in green. It looks kinda scary, until you realize some of the implications. Near the middle are some of the most wealthy, stable nations in the world, like Japan, Canada, and the U.S. On the outside, with low levels of GDP are countries like Turkey (which is famous for its inflation and volatile currency). The upshot is that you'll learn next to nothing about a country's wealth and stability from its debt-to-GDP. Again, the trillion-dollar coin would further discredit debt clocks and debt-to-GDP ratios, establishing that these numbers show us basically nothing that matters to the real economy. Politicians would no longer be able to use them as a cudgel in favor or against various spending plans. That doesn't mean politics would go away. As Stephanie Kelton explained on Odd Lots back in March, you'd still have different priorities. Some politicians might favor more military spending. Others might favor a more robust safety net. Others might favor a less robust safety net. That's all fine and what you'd expect in a democracy: Different ideas about the best use of public money. But the minting of the coin would help establish that we've been misled by debates focusing on big nominal figures or arbitrary ratios. Follow Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal on Twitter at @TheStalwart Like Bloomberg's Five Things? Subscribe for unlimited access to trusted, data-based journalism in 120 countries around the world and gain expert analysis from exclusive daily newsletters, The Bloomberg Open and The Bloomberg Close. | 
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