I'm thrilled to share the announcement of @RashidaTlaib's new "Stablecoin Tethering & Bank Licensing Enforcement (STABLE) Act", (#STABLEAct) cosponsored by @ChuyForCongress & Chair of the House Financial Services Committee's Fintech Task Force, @RepLynch.

tlaib.house.gov/media/press-re…
The full text can be found here:

tlaib.house.gov/sites/tlaib.ho…

A big shoutout to @RaulACarrillo & @jason_vtf, who also worked on the bill, & most of all, to the fantastic @chastitycmurphy, who has led the effort on this & other fintech bills such as the #ABCAct and #PublicBankingAct.
A big thanks also to @RealBankReform, @ConsumerReports, and @LPE_Project for their endorsement and input on the bill. This is a complex and technical area of financial regulation, and it's critical to ensure consumer voices and interests are represented in the lawmaking process.
The #STABLEAct builds on the work and insights of law & finance scholars such as @MorganRicks1, @rch371, @STOmarova, @KatharinaPistor, @DanAwrey, and Arthur Wilmarth, and seeks to clarify and affirm the relationship between stablecoins and existing banking/depository law.
I will share a detailed explanation soon, but in the meantime, the bill has two primary purposes: 1) unequivocally defining stablecoins as deposits under federal law, and 2) requiring any entity seeking to issue stablecoins to obtain a banking license & prior regulatory approval.
In this respect, it aims to address a longstanding gap in banking law with respect to the definition of 'deposits', which as @MorganRicks1 has argued in his book 'The Money Problem', is a major factor contributing to shadow-money instability:

corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2016/03/15/the…
One last note: while this bill is aimed squarely at efforts by tech companies like Facebook to enter the digital payments space with its formerly-Libra-now-Diem project (see: ft.com/content/cfe4ca…), as well as acting Comptroller of the @USOCC, @BrianBrooksOCC's recent moves to
unilaterally extend special-purpose 'payments charters' to non-bank financial institutions without first obtaining Congressional approval, it is written such as to apply to a wide range of monetary activities currently undertaken by actors with insufficient regulatory supervision
and in that respect sets a clear marker for progressives in how to think about a broad range of financial regulatory issues, including how best to prevent the kinds of systemic 'shadow banking' risks that led to the global financial crisis of 2007-2008.
I'd also note that while proper regulation of privately-issued stablecoins is critical to preserve systemic stability and avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, it is no substitute for a genuine public digital payments system, as I argued here:

thenation.com/article/archiv…
As @AyannaPressley noted in a hearing with Libra's head, David Marcus, last July, the only reason Facebook is even entering this space is because the federal government has failed to provide a safe, secure digital payments system that the public trusts.

Apologies, that should be @demandprogress, not @LPE_Project!

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More from @rohangrey

22 Nov
A brief (critical) thread on the new IMF paper on the law of CBDC:

imf.org/en/Publication…

1. From the outset, it commits original sin of CBDC discourse: naturalizing the CB as the sole monetary institution of relevance to the analysis. Where is Tsy?
The paper is structured around the premise that CBs are the only govt entities responsible for public money. There is only one reference to Tsy's money power in the whole paper, & it is buried in a footnote, where they begrudgingly acknowledge this premise is not, in fact, true.
2. The paper also displays its bias from the outset - asserting, without justification, that digital public currency *must* be designed in compliance with existing AML/CFT laws. If you were hoping for a more balanced analysis of privacy/law enforcement tensions, look elsewhere.
Read 18 tweets
3 Nov
Oh alright then I guess that's settled

--

"If the bond has been issued in the last week, we will steer clear of that bond," Dr Lowe said, "We are doing this partly because we want to avoid any possibility that people see us as financing the government."

afr.com/policy/economy…
How stupid do you have to be to find this remotely credible?

--

"Dr Lowe drew a distinction between "providing finance" and "affecting the cost of that finance".

"The RBA is not providing finance to the government, but our actions are lowering the cost of government finance.""
I can think of, oh, I dunno, one pretty big difference in what happens to those payments.

--

"He said the bonds purchased by the RBA will have to be repaid by the government at maturity "in exactly the same way as would occur if the bonds were held by others".
Read 4 tweets
4 Aug
After thinking more about @TheStalwart's argument that Microsoft should pay a fee to govt to offset the undue benefits it gets from a govt-induced acquisition, I've decided I think it's a bad idea (no shade at Joe, the motivation is sound). The reason is that the real benefit to
Microsoft long term is not in acquiring a specific product or business but in expanding its already vast data empire. The problem is that the social harms and risks posed by that kind of expansion can't be offset by "paying money". Once the data is collected and consolidated the
Damage is done. In this sense, making Microsoft pay a fee is the firm-level equivalent to trying to impose a tax on data-gathering as a solution to the threat of surveillance capitalism. It's a category error to think this risk can be stripped from larger social context, priced
Read 6 tweets
24 Jul
One of the bait-and-switches that JG opponents make, in addition to pretending a JG and UI are competing rather than complementary policies, is to claim in one breath that unconditional income is necessary to recognize and reward all the forms of informal labor not captured by a
JG, and then in the next claim that there simply cannot be enough productive work for everyone to be employed. It allows them to claim that they are truly committed to remunerating labor, even as they are, regrettably, concluding some people are just too unproductive and useless
To ever work. And of course, hidden underneath it all is a theory of "productivity" that has no problem with the private sector employing people in all sorts of socially handful jobs, and no problem with the human costs of unemployment beyond merely the lack of income. Ultimately
Read 5 tweets
15 May
@jasonfurman Jason, this is wrong on several levels.

1) As @NathanTankus notes here (), the Fed is ultimately responsible for determining the distribution of long vs short-term govt liabilities in circulation, regardless of what Treasury issues in the first instance.
@jasonfurman @NathanTankus So financing deficits by issuing long-term bonds does not “lock in” low long-term rates for Tsy, since the Fed can and will always ‘sterilize’ that action by purchasing those bonds and replacing them with short-term reserves to meet its preferred maturity distribution curve,
@jasonfurman @NathanTankus which leaves us back in the exact same position from a consolidated govt perspective.

2) This also ignores the significant psychological and practical effects of transitioning from the current budget process to using overt monetary financing. Presently huge swaths of the public
Read 17 tweets

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