#stablecoins

FedFin reports since at least 2011 have identified the comparative advantage nonbanks enjoy thanks to lots of costly bank-only standards.  However, we missed one big nonbank advantage sure to prove even more decisive in the stablecoin wars:  bankers crave regulatory certainty even as their competitors aggressively exploit the battlefield advantage that uncertainty gives to those who dare.

Bankers aren’t dare-devils because they’re not supposed to be.  Indeed, anyone who takes someone else’s money should be very, very careful.  Decades of accepting deposits under strict rules without meaningful competition meant that most bankers rightly asked a lot of questions before doing anything even a little bit novel.  To be sure, high-flying bankers abused taxpayer benefits thanks to negligent or even captive supervisors and rules weren’t always right.  Still, rules and the supervisors who enforced them generally kept bankers in their lane since there wasn’t any faster traffic.

This comfy balance between caution and competitiveness was fiercely challenged for the first time when money-market funds dawned in the late 1970s, luring bank deposits at a time when anachronistic rules barred banks from offering competitive interest rates.  High-flying bankers then sought to evade these constraints by making high-risk loans, thus bringing about the 1980s S&L crisis and the banking debacle that followed in the early 1990s.  Both of these were systemic in terms of taxpayer cost, but neither had macroeconomic or financial-stability impact.

Newer, better rules succeeded these crises, but they were outflanked as “nonbank banks” became the first commercial firms to exploit …