“Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin…Take away from them the power to create money and all the great fortunes…would disappear…But, if you wish to remain the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create money.” – Josiah Stamp
We may be on the verge of a revolution in monetary economics and finance that is the century-long dream of many prominent economists. Now, financial innovation is laying the foundation for their dream just as the US political economy is shifting to support it. This revolution, if it proceeds, has major implications for global finance, economic development, and geopolitics, and will create many winners and losers. The financial insurrection I’m referring to is a shift to “narrow banking” built on stablecoins. If those are unfamiliar concepts to you, let me review 800 years of financial innovation in 500 words.
The origins of fractional reserve banking
Our current financial system is built on the concept of fractional-reserve banking. In the 13th and 14th centuries, Italian money-changers-cum-bankers began to figure out that because depositors rarely demand their money back at the same time, they could hold only a fraction of the coin needed to back their deposits.11 Not only was this more profitable but it also facilitated payments across great distances: rather than send gold coins over dangerous roads, a Medici in Florence needed only sent a letter to his agent in Venice instructing him to debit one account and credit another.
Though highly profitable and effective for payments in normal circumstances, fractional reserve banking has a downside. Its inherent leverage makes the system unstable. A downturn in the economy might cause more depositors to withdraw savings at once, or worse, generate rumors that the loans backing banks’ deposits are going to default, causing a “run” on the bank. A bank unable to meet its depositors’ demands collapses into bankruptcy. But more than just depositors’ wealth is lost when banks fail in a fractional reserve system. Because banks both generate credit and facilitate payment, economic activity is severely constricted when banks fail since payments for goods and services are impaired and lending isn’t available for new investment.
Governments attempt to fix the problems
Over the centuries, as banks became simultaneously more leveraged and more critical to economic functioning, governments stepped in to try to reduce the risks of banking crises. In 1668, Sweden chartered the first central bank, the Riksbank, to lend to other banks experiencing runs. The Bank of England followed 26 years later. While that helped solve liquidity problems (banks with good assets but insufficient cash), it didn’t stop solvency crises (banks with bad loans). The US created deposit insurance in 1933 to help stop solvency-based bank runs,22 but as illustrated by the many banking crises since, including the US subprime mortgage crisis in 2008, neither deposit insurance nor bank capital regulations solved fractional reserve banking’s endemic fragility. Government intervention only reduced the frequency of crises and shifted their costs from depositors to taxpayers.
Economists build a better mousetrap
Around the time that the Roosevelt Administration was introducing deposit insurance, some of the era’s top names in Economics at the University of Chicago were hatching a different solution: the so-called Chicago Plan, or “narrow banking.”33 During the US savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and ‘90s the idea had a resurgence among economists.44 I was first introduced to narrow banking around that time in a Money and Banking class taught by my undergraduate thesis advisor, Roger Craine.55 (I wrote my thesis on the hidden dangers to banks of nationalizing a localized US mortgage market through securitization; too bad only Roger read it.)
Narrow banking solves the central problem of fractional reserve banking by separating the critical functions of payments and money creation from credit creation. If you studied economics, you may have been taught that central banks create money. But that’s not true in a fractional reserve system: banks do. Central banks manage the rate at which banks manufacture money (by controlling their access to reserves), but money is created by banks whenever they lend money, magically generating corresponding deposits in the process. This system – and its chaotic unwind – ties money growth to credit growth, and through banks’ network effects, to payments.
Splitting banks in two
The Chicago Plan separates the critical functions of money creation and payments from credit by splitting banking functions into two. “Narrow” banks that accept deposits and facilitate payments are required to back their deposits one for one with safe instruments like T-bills or central bank reserves. Think of them as a money market fund with a debit card. Lending is done by “broad” or “merchant” banks that fund themselves with equity capital or long-term bonds, hence aren’t subject to runs.
This segmentation of banking makes each function safe from the others. Deposit runs are eliminated because they are fully backed by high-quality assets (as well as access to the central bank). Since narrow banks facilitate payments, their safety removes the risk to the payments system. Because money is no longer created by credit creation, bad lending decisions at merchant banks don’t affect the money supply, deposits, or payments. Conversely, neither natural fluctuations in the economy’s demand for money – booms or recessions – nor concerns over loan quality affect merchant banks’ lending because it is funded with long-term debt and equity.
But why didn’t we adopt this wonderful solution?
You may be asking yourself now, “If narrow banking is so wonderful, why don’t we have it today?” The answer is twofold: the transition is painful and there has never been a political economy to support legislation to make the change.
Because narrow banking requires 100% backing of deposits by either T-bills or central bank reserves, the transition to narrow banking would require existing banks to either call in their loans, shrinking the money supply dramatically, or if they could find non-bank buyers, sell off their loan portfolios to buy short-term government paper. Both would precipitate a massive credit crunch, and the former would create liquidity shortages and payments problems.
As to the political economy, fractional reserve banking is extremely profitable – “a license to steal” as my father calls it (admiringly) – and generates a lot of jobs. Economists, in contrast, are a small group who are themselves questionably employed. As anyone in Washington, DC will tell you, the American Bankers Association (ABA) is among the most powerful lobbies in town. The same play with different actors runs in London, Brussels, Zürich, Tokyo, et cetera. Hence the continuance of fractional reserve banking is not a banking conspiracy; it’s just been good politics and cautious economics.
Financial innovation meets shifting politics
Yet, that may no longer be so. Both the costs of transition and the political economy have changed, particularly in the US. Developments in decentralized finance – aka “DeFi” or “crypto” – and the coincident evolution of the US political economy, national interests, and financial structure have generated conditions that make a shift to narrow banking in America not only feasible, but increasingly likely in my view.
Stablecoins to the rescue!
Let’s start with the critical DeFi development: the rapid growth of stablecoins. Stablecoins are decentralized “digital dollars” (or euros, yen, et cetera). Unlike central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) that are issued, cleared, and settled centrally by central banks, stablecoins are privately created “digital tokens” (electronic records). Like cryptocurrencies, ownership and transactions are stored and cleared through blockchain technology on distributed ledgers (decentralized registries). The combination of blockchain immutability and universally replicated registries facilitates trust between unknown parties without a government guarantee.
Stablecoins differ from cryptocurrencies in that they are pegged to fiat currencies, gold, or other stores of value that are more “stable” than Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. They were designed to be on- and off-ramps between the traditional world of fiat money and the blockchain-based world of DeFi and cryptocurrencies, and to provide a steady “on-blockchain” unit of account to facilitate DeFi trading. But stablecoins’ use case has evolved significantly amid spectacular growth in acceptance and usage. Stablecoin annual transaction volumes through March totaled $35 trillion, more than doubling the prior 12-month period, while users have increased more than 50% to over 30 million, and the outstanding value of stablecoins has hit $250 billion.66
Over 90% of stablecoin transactions still involve either on/off-ramping or DeFi trading, but an increasing share of transaction growth involves “real world” uses.77 Person-to-person and business transactions in countries with unstable local currencies, like Argentina, Nigeria and Venezuela, have been a key source of growth, but one of the largest has been increasing use in global remittances by migrant labor, over a quarter of the total according to one estimate.88
With Congressional backing
Stablecoins’ increasingly rapid acceptance and growth as an alternative payments system is coming just as the Trump Administration and the US Congress are moving to institutionalize them. The Trump Administration is vocally proclaiming its desire to be a “world leader” in DeFi. Concurrently, two bills are moving through the House of Representatives (the STABLE Act) and the Senate (the GENIUS Act) that would establish regulatory approval for stablecoins provided they meet certain criteria related to maintaining their value versus a currency like the US dollar and protecting depositors.
How do stablecoins maintain their value versus a particular currency like the dollar? In theory each stablecoin unit is backed one for one with the currency it is pegged to.99 In practice, this hasn’t always been the case.1010 But the US legislation: defines what are acceptable high-quality liquid assets (HQLA); mandates one-for-one backing; and requires regular audits to establish compliance. Thus, the US Congress is creating the legal basis for entities that (1) take deposits; (2) are required to fully back deposits by HQLA; and (3) facilitate payments in the economy.
Déjà vu?
Hmmm…does that sound familiar to you? Isn’t that a narrow bank?
There are a few missing pieces. Most notably that neither the GENIUS nor STABLE Acts grant stablecoin issuers access to the Federal Reserve and neither Act defines stablecoins as money for tax purposes.1111 The omission of access to the Fed likely reflects both necessary prudence to avoid undermining the fractional reserve banking system (too quickly) with a direct competitor and the ABA’s lobbying efforts to protect banks’ monopoly. But even here there are intriguing breadcrumbs that hint banks’ protection may be temporary and only long enough to transition to a narrow banking model: among the approved HQLA for stablecoin issuers in both bills are reserves at the Federal Reserve, currently accessible only by banks.1212 I should also note that I’m not the only person thinking this: hats off to Charles Calomiris at Columbia University for seeing stablecoins as a narrow-banking future as early as 2020 (and to Kathleen Hays for bringing it to my attention before I published this).1313
Shifting political sands
Both the Trump campaign’s pivot to crypto last year and bipartisan Congressional support to normalize stablecoins reflect a profound shift in America’s domestic political economy and its sense of national interests. Bipartisan populist anger at banks and their relationship with Washington hasn’t dissipated since the Global Financial Crisis. The Fed’s QE and recent inflationary policy errors have only increased populist fury. This is just as much a part of the crypto phenomenon as FOMO.
But crypto also has generated immense new wealth and opportunities for business, creating a well financed rival to the ABA. Even institutional asset managers now are diverging from their traditional allies in banking, salivating at the opportunities they see in DeFi. The combination of popular base and economic muscle is creating, for the first time, a political economy supportive of narrow banking.
Coincide in national interests
Further, the US now has compelling national interests in developing stablecoins. The first is the one that I described earlier this year at Thematic Markets in Leitmotif 8: The geopolitics of crypto (payments): in a world where China (and other US rivals) increasingly seek to displace US payment systems like SWIFT with their own, an independent, third-party payment system that prevents countries from being “trapped” in a Chinese payments system is appealing. The other national interest is the one that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent keeps mentioning: a systemic shift towards stablecoin-based narrow banking creates “one of the largest buyers of US T-bills.”
And the new financial architecture
Finally, the financial structure of the US has become far more conducive to a non-disruptive transition relative to any time in its history, or relative to other countries today, giving the US an advantage over rivals. While the US has long been less bank dependent for credit than other major economies due to its greater use of corporate bond markets and securitized mortgages, the growth of so-called “shadow” banking in the last two decades has made it even more so. Bank credit in the US is little more than a third of total credit to the private nonfinancial sector. The rest is provided by bond markets and the shadow sector that are in fact the broad or merchant banks envisioned under the Chicago Plan.
To deliver a revolution in finance
The economic, geopolitical and financial implications of a shift to stablecoin-based narrow banking in the United States are huge. It would create significant winners and losers both within the US and around the world. Subscribers to Thematic Markets can read about those effects in my new research, Revolutionary money & banking, publishing Wednesday.
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