#Trump

12 05, 2025

Karen Petrou: Why Stablecoin Hegemony Could Cost Too Much

Shane Smith2025-05-12T09:49:18-04:00May 12th, 2025|The Vault|

In the battle over stablecoin regulation, defenders of the pending legislation make much of the need for the U.S. to become the dominant global leader. That’s fine, but what if the new stablecoin framework gives the U.S. crypto preeminence at the cost of U.S. bank resilience and macroeconomic growth? That would be a high price to pay, but it’s nonetheless the Faustian bargain lurking in the latest legislation.

As our analyses have made clear, the House and Senate bills address only payment stablecoins – i.e., digital assets used by consumers and companies to settle financial accounts or to purchase goods and services. The idea is to make regulated stablecoins as reliable a medium of exchange as dollars, with the bills’ reserve-asset requirements meant to ensure that one stablecoin dollar always equals one U.S. dollar. This is fine as far as it goes, but that’s not far enough to ensure payment-system finality, ubiquity, and equality. A more robust stablecoin also does little but make it still more likely that regulated banks will be disintermediated as deposits move from the current, fractional system into a new, “narrow bank” model that does little for anyone but stablecoin issuers, their affiliates, and parent companies such as giant tech platforms.

A dollar’s worth of stablecoins is little more than an abstraction until one knows how it moves across the payment system. If the payment rails are weak or the engineer is negligent, then armored boxcars just make an even bigger, harder bang when they derail.…

17 04, 2025

FedFin on: Antitrust Policy

Arezou Rafikian-12025-04-17T16:29:07-04:00April 17th, 2025|The Vault|

As required by an executive order (EO) from President Trump mandating both review and then repeal of any rules that adversely affect competition, the FTC is seeking public comment on which rules to target and whether these standards could be modified or must be rescinded to meet the President’s goals. This process will clearly invite new scrutiny of the bank-merger process, also likely to lead to comment from banking organizations seeking relief in areas such as de novo chartering requirements and access to brokered or reciprocal deposits….

The full report is available to retainer clients. To find out how you can sign up for the service, click here and here.

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14 04, 2025

Karen Petrou: The Fed Has Given Itself Nothing But Bad Choices

Shane Smith2025-04-14T09:13:54-04:00April 14th, 2025|The Vault|

Much has been written of late about the pickle in which the Fed finds itself due to the President’s quixotic trade war. The Fed is indeed facing a dilemma setting monetary policy, but it confronts a Rubik’s Cube trying also to ensure financial stability. The reason: the more the Fed fights inflation, the less it can secure the financial system and the more it is forced to secure the financial system, the less able it will be to conduct monetary policy. This vise results from the Fed’s huge portfolio, yet another example of why the Fed should have reduced its portfolio as quickly as possible after both 2008 and 2020. Since it didn’t, it now has only bad choices if Treasury-market illiquidity turns toxic.

This negative feedback loop is the result not only of the Fed’s cumbersome trillions, but also of its unwillingness to make another hard decision: meaningful action to address identified systemic risks. Had the Fed heeded its own warnings going back to 2020, it might have done something to reduce Treasury-market dependence on high-risk, leveraged hedge funds. To be fair, the Fed cannot directly regulate hedge funds and the SEC lacks prudential authority, but both agencies had lots of ways to curtail systemic risk long before basis-trading hedge funds came to hold at least $1 trillion in assets.

So far, hedge-fund deleveraging is proceeding in a reasonably-ordered way, but risks such as these have a bad habit of cascading. Jamie Dimon already anticipates this, but he …

7 04, 2025

Karen Petrou: Why Regulators Will be Flat-Footed if Bad Now Turns Soon to Worse

Shane Smith2025-04-07T09:15:06-04:00April 7th, 2025|The Vault|

One of the comforts with which bank regulators will doubtless console themselves after last week’s market rout is that the largest U.S. banks have the capital not only to withstand this, but also the probable, profound consequences of the President’s punitive tariffs. However, because U.S. regulators mismeasure capital resilience, this confidence is misplaced. Using the economic-capital approach I recently endorsed shows that, while U.S. banks still are strong, they are not fortresses.

FedFin recently analyzed two new studies demonstrating that geopolitical risk is hard on bank solvency. To this, one of course can say that there’s no real-world need for exhaustive studies of dozens of countries over decades – common sense buttressed by history makes this all too clear. These hard lessons and the data that describe them do, though, make clear that it’s more than worth revisiting the United States after the Smoot-Hawley tariffs to get a sobering idea of the negative feedback loop between geopolitical risk, macroeconomic hazards, bank vulnerability, and – back to the beginning, geopolitical risk. Any talk of the 1930s is alarmist and also inapplicable in numerous respects, but it is the most pertinent example of geopolitical risk over the past century and thus demonstrates the need now to be very, very careful – not something this White House appears to be good at.

Economic-capital measures are a more robust platform to assess bank resilience than regulatory capital and are thus of particular pertinence at this dangerous moment. Regulatory-capital measurements are so complex and often …

31 03, 2025

Karen Petrou: The President Ditches the Dollar

Eliza Allen2025-03-31T10:49:46-04:00March 31st, 2025|The Vault|

Given the controversies aroused by many of last week’s executive orders, it’s understandable that those redesigning Treasury’s payment system generally escaped notice. They shouldn’t. On purpose or not, President Trump has mandated that digital currency henceforth counts along with the dollar as U.S. fiat currency. That is a very, very big decision with consequences far beyond the ostensible goal of speeding Treasury payments and, yet again, ending waste, fraud, and abuse.

As I laid out in my book, there is nothing preordained about the dollar serving as the U.S. “fiat” currency. The medium of exchange a sovereign demands to honor its obligations is the fiat currency, but nothing forces the citizenry to accept it if the sovereign state is weak, the fiat currency is of dubious value, or options such as gold – the centuries-old go-to or a digital alternative – are better. As the U.S. gained economic power at home and abroad, the fiat currency Lincoln selected to fund the Civil War – the dollar – came to dominate U.S. transactions, especially those with the federal government. Now, the dollar is the dominant fiat currency not only at home, but is also the reserve currency around the globe. This “exorbitant privilege” is preordained by the United States; it was earned.

Now though, the U.S. is stepping back from the once “almighty dollar.” The President said it will accept alternatives to the dollar for tax and all other payments to and apparently also from the Treasury. The executive order …

3 03, 2025

Karen Petrou: The Casualties of Slash-and-Burn Regulatory Rewrites

Eliza Allen2025-03-03T10:54:41-05:00March 3rd, 2025|The Vault|

There’s no doubt that many U.S. institutions have grown such long teeth over the years that they bit themselves in the foot. As a result, radical reform challenging conventional wisdom is long overdue. But, there are two ways to do this: the break-first/fix-later approach taken by the Trump Administration in biomedical research and other vital arenas; the other is to think first, then act decisively within the boundaries of current law or the better ones you demand. Radical reform to U.S. biomedical research is already leaving near-term treatments and cures on the cutting-room floor. If slash-and-burn transformation is also applied to financial-services supervision and regulation, systemic-risk guardrails could be unintentionally, but dangerously, dismantled.

The risks to biomedical research are not so much in what the Trump Administration has done, but that it’s more often than not done retroactively regardless of contractual commitments for continuing funding authorized under longstanding appropriations and by frenetic, indiscriminate firings of well-performing staff. You simply can’t suddenly stop a clinical trial without endangering patients and putting treatments years behind, if they continue at all. You also can’t stop basic biomedical research all of a sudden without leaving labs with a lot of mice, dogs, and primates to feed and no money for kibble. It also takes years to train good biomedical researchers; suddenly firing thousands of them endangers this pipeline and, with it, treatments and cures.

Biomedical research and financial-system governance have little in common, but leaving financial policy in tatters will also have unintended consequences …

24 02, 2025

Karen Petrou: How the White House Could Have Fun with the Fed

Shane Smith2025-02-24T09:11:47-05:00February 24th, 2025|The Vault|

President Trump has an awesome ability to keep even his closest allies perplexed by nonstop announcements that often break precedent, accepted norms, and even the law. Just as opponents begin to rally against one initiative, the White House launches another, sending dissenters off in a different direction, leaving the actions they initially targeted unchanged or even forgotten. Still, several policy themes are coming through loud and clear through all these different actions that have far-reaching financial-market cumulative impact. One is the sheer volatility all this chaos creates; another to which I turn here is the President’s sure and certain effort to make the Federal Reserve a tool of the executive branch, going beyond setting interest rates to turn it into America’s sovereign wealth fund.

As we noted, The President’s executive-order barrage includes one demanding a U.S. sovereign wealth fund (SWF). The tricky bit here is not the lines that would quickly blur between public and private enterprise, an historic U.S. economic principle that won’t slow Mr. Trump down for a minute. Instead, it’s where the money funding the SWF comes from given the lack of a nationalized commodities enterprise such as Norway’s and the Administration’s hell-bent campaign to reduce the federal deficit. Solution? The Fed.

U.S. law is seemingly an obstacle to deploying the Fed as an SWF since it allows the Fed to hold only direct obligations of the U.S. Treasury and its agencies as well as – a Fed sleight of hand in the 2008 crisis – Fannie …

10 02, 2025

Karen Petrou: Payment-System Politics and the Havoc It Wreaks

Shane Smith2025-02-10T09:16:53-05:00February 10th, 2025|The Vault|

Any bank that granted even just “read-only” access to its payment services with as few controls as the U.S. Treasury would and should be harshly sanctioned by its supervisors. Who steps in to ensure the smooth functioning of the multi-trillion Treasury payment system? Do any of Mr. Musk’s operatives know what would happen if they pulled the wrong plug and disabled critical payments on U.S. debt or to American citizens such as those for Social Security? And, what if they don’t care if they disrupt payments if they believe this suits a political purpose?

When I wrote my memo last week hoping that these fears are alarmist, we didn’t know then what we know now about unlimited payment system access by a key DOGE warrior since named to head the Fiscal Service and the youth, inexperience, and dubious histories of the payment-system teams. Do any of them know that payment-system finality is an essential element of payment-system credibility and financial-system stability or do they view the payment system as a video game with a prize for the team member who finds the target that rings the loudest political bell? Do any of these Trump appointees know that making even a little mistake could be catastrophic in a system handling trillions of dollars in billions of transactions or are they looking for viral moments on encrypted social-media platforms so they become the envy of like-minded young men?

As FedFin noted last week, what Congress and the press took as a pledge …

3 02, 2025

Karen Petrou: Why Playing with Treasury’s Payment System is Playing with Fire

Shane Smith2025-02-03T09:04:54-05:00February 3rd, 2025|The Vault|

In just two weeks, Donald Trump has done something no one ever expected which he may not even intend: overturning the axiomatic expectation that a full-faith-and-credit obligation of the United States government is the best there is. Now, the U.S. will honor its commitments only if it still likes them. Anything that upends financial-market axioms stokes systemic risk and stoking is now so heated that it threatens even the multi-trillion Treasury market on which U.S. prosperity and global financial stability depend.

Is this alarmist? Yes, but then who would have thought the White House would issue an edict freezing all federal funding or maybe just some federal funding even though more than just some federal funding was frozen? Who would have thought the U.S. would cease all but a very few foreign-aid payments including those with other sovereign governments no matter which geopolitical or humanitarian interests are sacrificed? Even if some of this was audible on the campaign trail, none of it was thinkable to anyone counting on constitutional checks and balances along with a sound sense by someone in the White House of second-order effects.

It is in this context that one more Trump Administration action is particularly worrisome and why I fear even for the once-sacrosanct promise that the U.S. will not just honor its commitments, but also pay its bills. Elon Musk’s acolytes at DOGE have now been granted unfettered access to the Treasury payment system. Why?

Maybe it’s just curiosity or maybe DOGE wants to update …

27 01, 2025

Karen Petrou: Why It is Hard to Damn Debanking

Shane Smith2025-01-27T09:07:41-05:00January 27th, 2025|The Vault|

As we noted last week, one of the next executive orders flying off the resolute desk in the Oval Office is likely to demand an end to debanking. In sharp contrast to the executive orders eviscerating DEI, the independent banking agencies need not follow a presidential debanking order. This affects their independent safety-and-soundness powers unlike personnel policy subject to the Executive Branch. But, independent or not, the banking agencies are nothing if not politically aware and at least two of the three agencies are also now politically-aligned with the president. It’s thus not a question of whether there will be anti-debanking standards, but rather what they do to banks trying to make a buck.

Wanting debanking doesn’t mean that getting debanking will be easy or inconsequential to the thousands of banks that never consciously debanked a dollar’s worth of deposits. One of the thorniest debanking problems derives from the fact that banks and other financial companies quite properly make business decisions based on qualitative factors, not just the quantitative ones on which anti-debanking efforts relied. Some of these qualitative factors are quite simply what makes some bankers better bankers than other bankers when it comes to decisions about whom to serve how based on expectations of future profitability. As history all too often proves, strategic insights are often at least as subjective as quantifiable.

Banks have also long chosen not to serve complex businesses that require costly underwriting and risk-management capacity unless they have the economies of scope and scale …