Washington’s stablecoin strategy could shore up the dollar by making U.S. Treasury bills the backing for a new digital currency. But who gets the interest, and who will make the loans?
For several years, “the death of the dollar” has been a persistent headline, with compelling data to back it up. The dollar’s share of global foreign exchange reserves has slipped from over 70% in 1999 to about 57% today. Last spring, gold overtook U.S. Treasuries as the largest asset in foreign central bank reserves for the first time since the mid-1990s. The BRICS nations are settling more of their trade in their own currencies, and the U.S. has used the dollar as a sanctions weapon so often that friendly nations as well as rivals are looking for a way out. A topic once confined to gold bugs and doomsday newsletters has gone mainstream.
At the Federal Reserve’s Jackson Hole symposium in August, however, a paper by Eswar Prasad and colleagues highlighted a different set of data. Yes, the dollar’s share of central bank reserves has fallen, and foreign central banks’ Treasury holdings have stayed flat at around $4 trillion. But foreign private holdings have risen from $1 trillion in 2010 to more than $5 trillion today. The world isn’t dumping the dollar so much as changing who holds it. And the authors expect stablecoins to accelerate that shift, by driving global demand for dollars into the U.S. Treasury bills needed to back them. The dollar may not be dying so much as being re-engineered.
According to financial strategist Matt Dines, who attended the recent G20 meeting of finance ministers and central bank governors in Asheville, a “dollar reset” is underway. His thesis is that Washington isn’t trying to prop up the old dollar so much as to build a new one on a different foundation – a foundation that is the very debt everyone is so worried about. In August the national debt passed $40 trillion, with annual interest of over $1 trillion.
The notion that government debt can be an asset isn’t new. A Treasury bond is a debt of the government, but it is an asset to whoever owns it. The idea goes back to Alexander Hamilton, the first U.S. Treasury Secretary. Faced with a crushing Revolutionary War debt, he turned it into an asset by accepting it as three-fourths of the payment for stock in the First Bank of the United States. The debt thus became the capital of a national bank that generated credit for the nation.
The new dollar reset would do something similar on a global scale: Treasury bills, a portion of the national debt, would become the assets backing the world’s digital trade currency.
The View from Asheville
The G20 meeting in late August was hosted by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and attended by new Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh. The official agenda was growth, deregulation, energy security and sovereign debt. But Dines came away with a bigger takeaway, which he laid out in a video titled “Quantitative Credit Guidance: G20 Says Growth Is the Only Way Out.”
His reading is that the officials now running U.S. monetary policy have concluded that the debt cannot simply be inflated away with another round of quantitative easing, as it was after the 2008 financial crisis, when the Fed created trillions of dollars that mainly inflated stock and bond prices on Wall Street. As a ZeroHedge summary of Dines’ thesis put it, “The QE period is over.” The way out is to “provide credit to those who have capacity (Main Street),” with credit steered into factories, infrastructure and productive investment rather than financial speculation.
Dines draws on economist Richard Werner, whose Princes of the Yen showed how Japan’s central bank used “window guidance” to steer bank credit into productive industry. What matters, Werner argues, is not just how much money is created but where it goes: credit for buying existing assets inflates prices, while credit for producing new goods and services creates growth without inflation.
Bessent said, “The only way for us to get out of this is to grow our way out of it.” Whether that kind of growth is achievable is debated. But supporting economic growth is only half of the new dollar plan. The other half concerns the plumbing of the dollar itself – what backs it in trade.
Your Dollars Are Your Bank’s IOUs
Most of the money we use today is not government-issued cash. It is bank deposits, and a deposit is a liability of the bank, its promise to pay dollars on demand. When a bank makes a loan, it doesn’t lend out someone else’s savings. It credits the borrower’s account with a new deposit. The loan is the bank’s asset; the deposit is its liability. That is how the money supply expands.
When the depositor asked for his money, historically the bank paid with gold or silver. Today it is Federal Reserve reserves – digital balances held by banks at the Fed, or the paper notes into which reserves can be converted. Deposits are only a promise to deliver that “real” money, and no bank holds enough of it to pay everyone at once. The system works because depositors don’t all ask for their money at once, and because deposit insurance and the Fed stand behind it.
When confidence fails, however, a bank can fail even if its assets look safe. Silicon Valley Bank held long-term Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities, about as safe as assets get. But when interest rates rose, those bonds lost market value. In March 2023, depositors tried to withdraw $42 billion in a single day, and SVB couldn’t sell its bonds quickly enough at a sufficient price to cover the demand. The bank was gone within 48 hours. The 2008 financial collapse was worse, because the assets were subprime mortgages that were hardly marketable at all.
Dines notes that the dollar traded globally has long been “liability-based.” The vast offshore “eurodollar” market runs on dollar IOUs created by banks in London and elsewhere, banks that lack reserve accounts with the U.S. central bank and are beyond the reach of U.S. regulators. When that market froze in 2008, the Fed had to open emergency swap lines to foreign central banks to keep it from collapsing. According to Dines, it is that “liability-based” system that is being left behind.
Changing What Backs the Dollar
The GENIUS Act, signed in July 2025, set up an alternative to liability-based dollars backed with bank IOUs. Regulated dollar stablecoins are backed one-for-one with cash and short-term Treasury bills. In a June podcast, Dines said the Act pulls the dollar toward “an asset-based definition,” a dollar that “anchors back and is reserved one to one with U.S. Treasury debt.” The old offshore dollar is “being left out to dry.”
When the GENIUS Act was signed, Treasury Secretary Bessent declared that “the dollar now has an internet-native payment rail that is fast, frictionless, and free of middlemen.” (A payment rail is the network that carries money from one account to another.) He predicted a “surge in demand for US Treasuries, which back stablecoins.” In November 2025, he projected that the stablecoin market, then about $300 billion, “could grow tenfold by the end of the decade.”
Most stablecoins are held overseas, many by people and businesses seeking a currency more stable than their own. A business in Argentina or Nigeria that wants dollars buys dollar stablecoins. The stablecoin issuer then takes that money and buys U.S. Treasury bills. The world’s appetite for dollars thus becomes an appetite for U.S. government debt. In the new stablecoin model, the Fed would no longer need to buy Treasuries with reserves newly created through QE, because a global network of digital dollars would be buying them instead.
An Asset-Backed Dollar? Not Quite, But Close
Technically, a stablecoin is also a liability: it is the issuer’s promise to redeem your token for a dollar. When you hand Circle, the issuer of USDC stablecoins, $100 for 100 USDC tokens, Circle owns the Treasury bills it buys with your money. You just own a claim on Circle for that sum. The shift then isn’t really from a liability to an asset. It’s from a liability backed by private loans to a liability backed by public debt.
But that is still a meaningful difference. Under the GENIUS Act, stablecoins must be backed one-for-one by cash, bank deposits, overnight repos or Treasury bills maturing in 93 days or less. The issuer can’t lend the money out or buy ten-year bonds that lose value when rates rise. There’s no “maturity mismatch” and no “fractional reserve” problem. If everyone redeems at once, the money is there. An SVB-style collapse from long-dated bonds losing value isn’t supposed to be possible.
But the safeguard isn’t perfect. In fact, the biggest scare in the regulated stablecoin world came from SVB itself. Even stablecoins need banks to hold their funds, and in March 2023, Circle had $3.3 billion of USDC’s reserves sitting on deposit in SVB. USDC broke its dollar peg, falling to about 87 cents, until regulators guaranteed the deposits. But with reserves held mostly in short-term Treasuries, the stablecoin structure is still sounder than the bank money it would replace.
There are, however, other problems with the new plan.
Who Gets the Interest?
Bessent promised a payment rail “free of middlemen,” but this isn’t actually true. The stablecoin issuer is the middleman, and it is enormously well-paid.
When you give the issuer a dollar, it gives you a token worth a dollar and puts your dollar into Treasury bills paying 3% to 4%. But you get no interest. In fact, the GENIUS Act prohibits issuers from paying interest to holders. In effect, the issuer has borrowed from you at zero interest and lent to the government at the market rate.
The results are spectacular – for the issuer. Tether, the largest issuer, reported more than $10 billion in net profit for 2025, with a staff of just over 100 in 2024. It holds over $120 billion in U.S. Treasuries, making it one of the largest holders of U.S. government debt in the world. Circle, the issuer of USDC, reported $2.7 billion in revenue for 2025, about 95% of it from interest on reserves.
Scaling that up to Bessent’s $3 trillion market, the reserves would earn more than $100 billion a year at 3.5%. And the interest is paid by U.S. taxpayers, through interest on the federal debt. The public pays interest to private companies, so that those companies can issue the public’s own currency and keep the spread.
That’s the privilege known as seigniorage, the profit from issuing money, and it would be handed to a few private firms. Hamilton’s American System used public credit to build the productive economy. The private stablecoin model looks more like the British System of speculation and rent collection that Hamilton was trying to escape.
Stablecoins Move Money, but We Need Banks to Create Credit.
There’s a second problem with the stablecoin plan, which works counter to the “growth through credit” part of the dollar reset proposal. Dollars moved into stablecoins typically come out of bank deposits, which banks need to back their loans. The stablecoin issuer can’t lend that dollar back out. By law, it can only park it in safe, short-term assets, mostly Treasury bills. Money that was supporting loans to local businesses ends up financing the federal government instead.
An economy that is growing needs a money supply that can grow with it, and in our system that expansion happens when banks lend into new production. Stablecoins can move existing money around the world at lightning speed, but they can’t finance factories, farms, water systems or small businesses.
The Treasury’s Borrowing Advisory Committee has flagged trillions of dollars in bank deposits as potentially at risk of migrating into stablecoins. Hardest hit would be community banks, which depend on ordinary deposits. According to the FDIC, community banks hold 36% of small business loans and 70% of agricultural loans, though they hold only 15% of all bank loans.
So far, most of this risk has been overseas. Tether, two-thirds of the stablecoin market, is generally not sold to Americans, and Circle’s CEO has estimated that 70% of USDC use is outside the United States. Ordinary American savers have had little reason to trade an insured bank account for a token that pays no interest. But a loophole could change that. The GENIUS Act bars issuers from paying interest, but it doesn’t stop crypto exchanges from paying “rewards.” The Coinbase exchange pays customers a rate on USDC close to what Treasury bills earn, funded by the share of reserve income Circle pays to it. A checking account paying next to nothing can’t compete. Banks are lobbying Congress hard to close the loophole, for good reason: it’s the channel through which local deposits could be drained away.
A full-reserve stablecoin can only recycle existing dollars into government debt. So the two halves of the dollar reset pull against each other: one wants credit steered to Main Street, while the other drains the deposits Main Street’s banks need in order to lend. Werner has long argued that the most productive credit comes from small, local banks lending to local businesses, the model behind Germany’s Sparkassen and its strong Mittelstand of mid-sized firms.
Is there a way to get the benefits of digital dollars without losing the interest to private issuers or the deposits to the Treasury market? Two states are already testing an answer.
The Public Option: Wyoming and North Dakota
In August 2025, Wyoming launched the Frontier Stable Token (FRNT), the first stable token issued by a U.S. state. Like USDC and Tether, it is backed by cash and short-term Treasuries, in this case 102% of the tokens outstanding. The difference is in where the interest goes. Instead of going to private stablecoin issuers, the income from FRNT’s reserves goes to Wyoming’s school foundation program.
North Dakota is also doing something interesting from a public banking perspective. The Bank of North Dakota, the nation’s only state-owned bank, has launched its own Roughrider Coin. The Coin isn’t for retail customers, and the public can’t buy it. It is designed for the state’s banks and credit unions for fast bank-to-bank payments.
According to Startup Fortune, the system is designed to serve more than 90 North Dakota banks and credit unions. The transactions are recorded on the Solana blockchain, and banks reach the coin through Fiserv, the financial technology company whose software many community banks already use for their accounts and payments.
What the coin is good for is speed. The older ACH (Automated Clearing House) system processes payments in batches that settle overnight. Solana was chosen, the article says, for the “sub-second finality that overnight ACH rails simply cannot offer.” Banks can thus settle with each other almost instantly instead of waiting for the batch to clear. Critics such as Catherine Austin Fitts warn that putting deposits on a programmable ledger could make accounts easier to freeze automatically. For that reason public and community banks, answerable to local oversight, are better placed than Wall Street to build in human review.
Plugging the Deposit Drain
Transaction speed is good, but the risk to deposits remains. When the coin was announced, North Dakota Bankers Association president Rick Clayburgh warned that a stablecoin “can possibly drain deposits from an institution,” noting that deposits are “what’s used to loan money out.” What the Roughrider Coin has going for it is who sponsors it: a public bank whose mission for more than a century has been to support local lenders, not compete with them. According to Startup Fortune, community banks that have “spent a decade losing deposit share and talent to bigger rivals” now have “a stablecoin product they didn’t have to write a line of code for.” A bank that can offer digital-dollar payments through its own channel gives its customers less reason to take their money elsewhere.
For keeping deposits in the local lending system, however, a different tool is needed – and there is one, the “tokenized deposit,” an ordinary bank deposit recorded on a blockchain. It moves as quickly as a stablecoin, but it remains a deposit the bank can lend against, and it is insured by the FDIC up to the usual limit. JPMorgan has launched one for its institutional clients, and five regional banks have formed a network to exchange tokenized deposits that “do not leave the insured banking perimeter.” At the Jackson Hole symposium where the Prasad paper was presented, Pablo Hernández de Cos, general manager of the Bank for International Settlements, said tokenized deposits “preserve the tight link between deposit-taking and credit provision.” But he warned that smaller banks “might struggle with high upfront implementation costs” to create the tokenized deposits, with “knock-on effects for small business and local lending.”
That is a gap a public bankers’ bank could fill. BND already provides North Dakota’s banks and credit unions with correspondent services, including wire transfers, ACH payments and Federal Reserve settlement. With Roughrider, it has made a shared digital platform accessible to more than 90 financial institutions. It could likewise give them shared tokenization infrastructure: digital dollars that remain local deposits, available for local loans.
Echoing Hamilton
Combining what Wyoming and North Dakota have done, states could issue stablecoins for making payments, and keep the interest for public purposes. And public and community banks could do what stablecoins can’t: lend, creating new money for local businesses, farms and housing.
Hamilton would have approved. His First U.S. Bank wasn’t just a place to park the national debt. It extended credit to commerce and built the productive base that made the debt’s repayment possible. That was the heart of what came to be called the American System, as opposed to the British System of finance serving finance.
If the current Administration is rebuilding the dollar on a foundation of Treasury debt, as Dines suggests, the result could be sturdier money than the eurodollar IOUs it replaces. But growth takes a credit engine, and that means local banks with deposits to lend.
If a few private issuers keep the interest and share it with exchanges as customer “rewards,” the reset will have produced a new generation of princes of the dollar. But if more states join the ranks of issuers, working through public banks in partnership with Main Street banks, the reset could echo Hamilton’s reforms. A growing share of the national debt would be absorbed as backing for the world’s digital dollars, while public and local banks supplied the credit to grow our way out of the debt.
Lincoln Breaks the Interest Trap – image by ScheerPost
In August 2026, the U.S. debt reached a gravity-defying $40 trillion, with an estimated fiscal year 2026 deficit of $2.1 trillion. Interest on the debt hit a record $1.4 trillion over the last 12 months and now consumes more than any federal program except Social Security and Medicare, eclipsing defense spending for the first time in U.S. history. Paid with borrowed money, interest compounds exponentially, making it the fastest-growing part of the budget, far outpacing economic growth. By 2036, the Congressional Budget Office projects that interest costs will double to $2.1 trillion, with debt held by the public reaching 120 percent of GDP. The CBO director has declared the trajectory to be “not sustainable.”
Increasingly, prominent analysts are saying the United States will have to “print” its way out. But using whose printing press, printing what?
Today, “printing” normally means Federal Reserve monetization (Quantitative Easing or QE). The Treasury first issues debt – bills, bonds and notes – which are sold by primary dealers on the open market. If there are insufficient buyers, the Fed as “lender of last resort” may buy the securities with “reserves” created with accounting entries in bank reserve accounts. But Fed Chair Kevin Warsh is trying to reduce the Fed’s balance sheet by selling federal securities, not buy them. And even if the Fed did engage in QE, it would not work today to reduce the debt or the interest. The Fed is required to return its profits to the Treasury after deducting its costs, but ever since 2008 it has paid the banks interest on their reserve balances (IORB) as a policy tool to control inflation; and since 2022, the total sum the Fed has paid in IORB has been higher than the interest it received from the Treasury on its securities. The net result is that instead of the Fed remitting profits to the Treasury, the Treasury now owes the Fed money to cover the gap in IORB, increasing the federal debt and the interest bill. The Fed printing press is running, but it is running in the wrong direction.
Discussions of artificial intelligence typically begin with the question, What happens when the machines take our jobs? For thousands of years, work has been the means by which we fed our families, earned our place in society, and gave structure to our lives. We have come to equate paid employment with identity.
That presumption may soon be obsolete.
When Elon Musk proposed replacing Universal Basic Income with what he calls a Universal High Income—a level of income sufficient for everyone to live comfortably while intelligent machines produce much of the goods and services society requires—critics warned that people would become lazy. They would stop pursuing college degrees, stop starting businesses, stop inventing, stop contributing. Without jobs, it was argued, life itself would lose meaning and purpose.
Interestingly, humanity’s oldest written history begins with the premise that the purpose of humans is to work. The earliest known writing was impressed into clay tablets in ancient Sumer more than five thousand years ago. The Sumerian Atrahasis tabletstell of sky-deities called Annunaki, cast in modern “ancient architect” scenarios as extraterrestrial engineers. The heavy labor required to maintain life on earth was delegated to junior gods called Igigi, who finally grew weary of the arduous work, laid down their tools and rebelled.
The remedy was to create a new being to carry their burden. This was done by genetic manipulation to upgrade the highest life form found here, creating the human species. Whether we read that as history, allegory, or mythology, its underlying message is that humanity was conceived as a labor force – and human civilization begins with a control system to manage the laborers.
As Americans prepare to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, few are paying attention to a bill moving through Congress that could seriously impinge on our financial independence.
The Clarity for Payment Stablecoins Act, H.R. 4766, is slated to make privately issued stablecoins a major component of the U.S. monetary system. Supporters see stablecoins as a way to strengthen the dollar’s global role while creating a vast new market for U.S. Treasury securities. Critics see the rise of programmable private money that can be monitored, frozen, or restricted by its issuers. Banks fear the loss of the deposits that are essential to advancing affordable credit. What appears to be a debate about digital tokens has thus become a battle over the future of banking itself and finance.
Why Stablecoins Matter
Stablecoins are privately issued digital tokens that can circulate on blockchain networks independently of the banking system. They are designed to maintain a stable value, typically one dollar per token. Unlike Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, whose values fluctuate wildly, stablecoins are usually backed by reserve assets such as cash and short-term U.S. Treasury securities.
Their growth has been explosive. The stablecoin market now measures in the hundreds of billions of dollars and continues to expand rapidly. Advocates see them as the next stage in the evolution of money: faster, cheaper, available around the clock, and capable of moving across borders without relying on traditional banking networks.
Project Hamilton, ECASH, and the Quest for a Privacy-Protected Digital Dollar
The firsttwo articles in this series explored the proposition that artificial intelligence and robotics will soon be ushering in an economy of unprecedented abundance, and examined the resource and energy constraints that could limit that voluminous growth. If machines eventually replace most of the workforce, society may need some form of Universal High Income (UHI), as Elon Musk and others have suggested, simply to keep purchasing power aligned with productive capacity. In a world where goods and services can be produced in abundance, the challenge may no longer be creating supply. It may be creating enough consumer demand (money) to purchase that potential supply.
A UHI or UBI (Universal Basic Income) would have to be issued digitally by the government. This third article addresses the fear that such a currency would come with strings attached – that it could be programmed to restrict purchases, limit movement, or enforce political conformity, imposing a “digital prison.”
The question posed here is, could a government-issued digital currency be created in a way that is privacy-protected, not programmable, and tradable like cash?
The answer is that it could. In fact, between 2020 and 2022, such a public digital‑dollar system was in development. Project Hamilton, a collaborative effort of the Boston Fed and MIT, created a digital dollar that stored no personal data or transaction history, was not programmable to control how the money was spent, could be used without an intermediary, and was also the fastest payment system ever built. It was a digital money design that made a financial control grid impossible.
Part 1 of this “Abundance Paradigm” series discussed predictions that artificial intelligence and robotics will in the relatively near future produce an economy of extraordinary abundance – one in which most labor is automated. The contention of Elon Musk is that this development will require some form of government-issued “Universal High Income” (UHI) to provide the consumer demand necessary to keep the economy functioning in a world where machines do most of the work.
Based on those projections, I argued that if a UHI were to become necessary, it could not realistically be financed through taxes or debt alone, but would require some form of debt-free sovereign money issuance — a modern version of Lincoln’s Greenbacks. The usual objection to government-issued money is that it would drive up prices and devalue the currency due to “too much money chasing too few goods.” But in this case, we would have too many goods and not enough money to provide the consumer demand to move them off the shelves. A source of abundant new money would actually be needed to keep trade flowing.
Objections came thick and fast. Some critics saw the AI revolution not as liberation but as a technocratic nightmare: AI surveillance, programmable digital money and “smart cities,” centralized control systems, and a future in which most people will own nothing while a tiny elite owns the machines, the data, and even the government. Others challenged the underlying premises: Would AI really generate such extraordinary abundance? Would productivity rise enough to justify something like a UHI? Or is this simply another round of Silicon Valley hype detached from economic reality?
Those are legitimate questions that deserve serious consideration, serious enough to require more than one sequel to address them. But whether or not we approve of Elon Musk, Sam Altman, or the AI industry itself, the AI revolution is already underway, driven by forces far larger than any individual actor. Businesses want AI because it lowers costs and increases productivity. Governments want it because they view it as strategically essential. Consumers increasingly rely on it because it saves time and improves convenience. The genie is out of the bottle.
A Universal Basic Income (UBI) has long been proposed as a way to cushion the blow of jobs lost to automation. Under that model, everyone receives a modest monthly payment – enough to cover basic needs and prevent extreme poverty.
But Elon Musk has gone further. On April 16, he posted on X:
Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI.
AI/robotics will produce goods & services far in excess of the increase in the money supply, so there will not be inflation.
Rather than a subsistence stipend, Universal High Income (UHI) would be a level of income allowing ordinary people to live well in a world where machines do most of the work. Musk has also said that AI and robotics are the only things that can solve the massive U.S. debt crisis.
That sounds promising, but where will the government get the money to pay the UHI? Critics say any government that tried it would go bankrupt. There are also other concerns, which will be addressed in Part 2 of this article. Here we will look at the financial underpinnings: why UHI is even thinkable, why AI forces a reexamination of how money enters the economy, why the current system cannot scale to meet what is coming, and the implicit transition needed to meet that challenge.
“The powers of financial capitalism had another far reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.” —Prof. Caroll Quigley, Georgetown University, Tragedy and Hope (1966)
In February 2026, the United States and Israel launched surprise airstrikes on Iran. The officially proffered reasons — preventing Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon and forestalling its aggression — have not held up under scrutiny. As James Corbett documented in recent Corbett Report episodes, the nuclear pretext appears to be recycled propaganda, and the scale and timing of the strikes raise deeper questions about motive.
The thesis that “All Wars Are Bankers’ Wars” was popularized by Michael Rivero in a 2013 documentary by that name. His accompanying article begins with a quote from Aristotle (384-322 BCE):
The most hated sort [of moneymaking], and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural use of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest.
Rivero then traces how private banking interests have financed and profited from conflicts on both sides for centuries — from the founding of the Bank of England in 1694 to fund William III’s wars to modern regime-change wars.
On January 30, when former Federal Reserve board member Kevin Warsh was nominated by President Trump as the central bank’s next chair, markets sold off and gold and silver plunged. Investors were positioned for a “dove,” someone inclined to cut rates aggressively and keep money loose; and Warsh has a long-standing reputation as a “hawk.”
So wrote Michael Nicoletos in an article titled “Everyone Is Focusing on the Wrong Thing.” But Nicoletos and some other commentators are seeing something else on the horizon – a rebalancing of the banking system through an overhaul of the Federal Reserve itself. In recent months, noted Nicoletos, Warsh has argued that the central bank’s “bloated balance sheet” has made borrowing “too easy” for Wall Street, while leaving “credit on Main Street too tight.” That contrast — abundant liquidity for the largest financial institutions, scarcity for the communities that actually generate economic activity — is a structural flaw that has unbalanced the American economy.
A Jan. 17 article on Quartz Markets by Catherine Baab reports that JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Bank of America returned nearly all of their 2025 profits to shareholders. Goldman Sachs returned $16.78 billion on $17.18 billion in earnings, meaning 97.7% of its earnings went to shareholders. Wells Fargo, Citigroup, JPMorgan, and Bank of America collectively returned tens of billions more. Across the six largest banks, roughly $100 billion flowed to shareholders in a single year.
They are currently paid 3.65% on their reserves (substantially more than the banks pay on their customers’ deposits), simply for holding them in reserve accounts rather than using them to capitalize new loans. Tens of billions of dollars that were once remitted to the Treasury now land on bank balance sheets with no public benefit attached.
We subsidize the banks’ safety, underwrite their liquidity, and reward them for sitting on assets, without requiring them to invest in communities, build public wealth, or serve any public purpose. It all seems pretty outrageous; but as it turns out, the banks are doing what U.S. corporate law requires them to do. If they don’t follow the “shareholder primacy rule,” they could actually be sued by their shareholders.
Albert Einstein is often quoted as saying that compound interest is “the most powerful force in the universe.” The quote is probably apocryphal, but it reflects a mathematical truth. Interest on earlier interest grows exponentially, outrunning the linear growth of revenue and eventually consuming everything.
That is where the United States now stands. The government does pay the interest on its debt every year, but it is having to pay it with borrowed money. The interest curve is rising exponentially, while the tax base is not.
Interest is now the fastest growing line item in the entire federal budget. The government paid $970 billion in net interest in FY2025, more than the Pentagon budget and rapidly closing in on Social Security. It already exceeds spending on Medicare and national defense and is second only to Social Security. The Congressional Budget Office projects that interest will reach nearly $1.8 trillion by 2035 and will cost taxpayers $13.8 trillion over the next decade. That is roughly what Social Security will pay out over the same decade (about $1.6 trillion a year). The Social Security Trust Fund is running dry, not because there are too many seniors, but because interest payments are consuming the federal budget that should be shoring it up.
We will build a city-owned bank — not to serve shareholders, but to serve you. A bank that invests in housing, in transit, in climate resilience. A bank that puts our money to work for our people.” — Zohran Mamdani, Victory Speech, Nov. 4, 2025
New York City has elected a mayor who dares to challenge the status quo. Zohran Mamdani swept into office on a platform of affordability, municipal ownership and economic justice. But Mamdani’s plan to fund his reforms through $9 billion in new taxes on corporations and high earners is already bumping up against political and fiscal realities.
Income taxes are the province of the state, not the city, and NY State Governor Kathy Hochul is standing firm in her resistance to raising them. Pres. Trump has vowed to “cut off the lifeline” to the city, pledging to reduce federal aid to the legal minimum. And Mamdani’s proposals are said to be triggering capital flight. Wall Street is mobilizing. The city’s budget is strained. So where will the money come from?
There has been considerable discussion in recent years about reforming, modifying, or even abolishing the Federal Reserve. Proposals range from ending its independence, to integrating its functions into the U.S. Treasury Department, to dismantling it and returning monetary policy to direct congressional or Treasury oversight.
The Federal Reserve Board Abolition Act (H.R. 1846 and S. 869, 119th Congress, 2025-2026), introduced by Rep. Thomas Massie in the House and Sen. Mike Lee in the Senate on March 4, 2025, calls for abolishing the Fed’s Board of Governors and regional banks within one year of enactment, liquidating Fed assets and transferring net proceeds to the Treasury. It echoes earlier efforts like Ron Paul’s 1999 bill to “end the Fed”, but the odds of its passing are slim.
Less radical are proposals to curb the independence of the Federal Reserve. Former Fed governor Kevin Warsh is considered one of five finalists to take over as chairman after Jerome Powell. In a July 17 CNBC interview, he called for sweeping changes in how the central bank conducts business, and suggested a policy alliance with the Treasury Department.
Substantial precedent exists for that approach, both in the United States and abroad. In the 1930s and 1940s, before the Fed officially became “independent,” it worked with the federal government to fund the most productive period in our country’s history. More on that shortly.
The Federal Reserve’s independence is currently being challenged by political forces seeking to reshape its mandate. The Fed has not always been independent of Congress and the Treasury. Its independence was formalized only in 1951, with a Treasury-Federal Reserve Accord that was not a law but a policy agreement redefining the relationship of the parties. In the 1930s and 1940s, before the Fed officially became “independent,” it worked with the federal government to fund the most productive period in our country’s history. We can and should do that again.
In a Sept. 1 Substack post titled “Fed Faces Biggest Direct Challenge by a President Since JFK – and This Is a Good Thing,” UK Prof. Richard Werner shows that there is no evidence that more independent central banks deliver lower inflation. In fact, per his findings, central bank independence has no measurable impact on real economic performance, and greater central bank independence has resulted in lower economic growth.
This two-part series will probe the forces in play now to overhaul the Fed, and the feasibility of redirecting it to use its tools, including “quantitative easing,” not just to save the banks but to save the economy. Part I looks at a particularly flawed Fed policy — Interest on Reserves (IOR) — which burdens the budget, stifles liquidity, and subsidizes banks. Then it suggests ways that eliminating IOR and reining in the Fed’s independence could solve the Treasury’s interest burden altogether.
The U.S. federal debt has now passed $37 trillion and is growing at the rate of $1 trillion every five months. Interest on the debt exceeds $1 trillion annually, second only to Social Security in the federal budget. The military outlay is also close to $1 trillion, consuming nearly half of the discretionary budget.
As a sovereign nation, the United States could avoid debt altogether by simply paying for the budget deficit with Treasury-issued “Greenbacks,” as Abraham Lincoln’s government did. But I have written on that before (see here and here), so this article will focus on that other elephant in the room, the Department of Defense.
No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.
As concerning today as the financial burden is the wielding of secret power. Pres. Dwight Eisenhower warned in his 1961 farewell address, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
This month Congress passed the GENIUS Act, an acronym for the “Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins of 2025.” Designed to regulate stablecoins, a category of cryptocurrency designed to maintain a stable value, the Act is highly controversial.
Critics variously argue that it anoints stablecoins as the equivalent of “programmable” central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), that it lacks strong consumer protections, and that government centralization destroys the independence of the cryptocurrency market. Proponents say the rapidly expanding stablecoin market not only provides a faster and cheaper payments system but can serve as a major funding source to help alleviate the federal debt crisis, which is poised to destroy the economy if not checked, and that the stablecoin market has gotten so large that without regulation, we may have to bail it out when it becomes a multitrillion dollar industry that is “too big to fail.”
For most people, however, the whole subject of stablecoins is a mystery, so this article will attempt to throw some light on it. It will also explore some historical use cases demonstrating how the government might incorporate stablecoins into a broader program for escaping the debt crisis altogether.
Credit to JustMoney.com for the image, editing and posting.
A thriving economy requires that credit flow freely for productive use. But today, a handful of giant banks diverts that flow into an exponentially-growing self-feeding pool of digital profits for themselves. Rather than allowing the free exchange of labor and materials for production, our system of banking and credit has acted as a tourniquet on production and a drain on resources.
Yet we cannot do without the functions banks perform; and one of these is the creation of “money” as dollar-denominated bank credit when they make loans. This advance of credit has taken the form of “fractional reserve” lending, which has been heavily criticized. But historically, it is this sort of credit created on the books of banks that has allowed the wheels of industry to turn. Employers need credit at each stage of production before they have finished products that can be sold on the market, and banks need to be able to create credit as needed to respond to this demand. Without the advance of credit, there will be no products or services to sell; and without products to sell, workers and suppliers cannot get paid.
Bank-created deposits are not actually “unbacked fiat” simply issued by banks. They can be created only when there is a borrower. In effect, the bank has monetized the borrower’s promise to repay, turning his promise to pay tomorrow into money that can be spent today — spent on the workers and materials necessary to create the products and services that will be sold to repay the loans. As Benjamin Franklin wrote, “many that understand Business very well, but have not a Stock sufficient of their own, will be encouraged to borrow Money; to trade with, when they have it at a moderate interest.”
If banks have an unfair edge in this game, it is because they have managed to get private control of the credit spigots. They have often used this control not to serve business, industry, and society’s needs but for their private advantage. They can turn credit on and off at will, direct it at very low interest to their cronies, or use it for their own speculative ventures; and they collect the interest as middlemen. This is not just a modest service fee covering costs. Interest has been calculated to compose a third of everything we buy.
In February, President Trump said that tariffs would generate so much income that Americans would no longer need to pay income taxes.
The latest plan, according to U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, is to abolish income taxes for people who earn less than $150,000 yearly. That move would affect roughly 75% of workers, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. On its face, this could narrow the wealth gap by boosting disposable income for low- and middle-income households without raising taxes on the wealthy — a politically clever alternative to progressive tax hikes.
Eliminating the burden of income taxes is an exciting proposition, due to savings not just in money but in man-hours — the time spent anguishing over ledgers, forms and receipts. In 2024, according to the Tax Foundation, Americans spent 7.9 billion hours complying with IRS tax filing and reporting requirements. That is equivalent to 3.8 million full-time workers—roughly the population of Los Angeles — doing nothing but tax paperwork for the full year.
The question is, can tariffs and DOGE replace income taxes? If not, how else could the government fund itself? Is a growing debt bubble that is now carrying a $1.2 trillion interest tab, which must continue to expand just to sustain itself, the only alternative?
President Trump has repeatedly expressed his admiration for Republican President William McKinley, highlighting his use of tariffs as a model for economic policy. But critics say Trump’s tariffs, which are intended to protect U.S. interests, have instead fueled a stock market nosedive, provoked tit-for-tat tariffs from key partners, risk a broader trade withdrawal, and could increase the federal debt by reducing GDP and tax income.
The federal debt has reached $36.2 trillion, the annual interest on it is $1.2 trillion, and the projected 2025 budget deficit is $1.9 trillion – meaning $1.9 trillion will be added to the debt this year. It’s an unsustainable debt bubble doomed to pop on its present trajectory.
The goal of Elon Musk’s DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) is to reduce the deficit by reducing budget expenditures. But Musk now acknowledges that the DOGE team’s efforts will probably cut expenses by only $1 trillion, not the $2 trillion originally projected. That will leave a nearly $1 trillion deficit that will have to be covered by more borrowing, and the debt tsunami will continue to grow.
Rather than modeling the economy on McKinley, President Trump might do well to model it on our first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, whose debt-free Greenbacks saved the country from a crippling war debt to British-backed bankers, and whose policies laid the foundation for national economic resilience in the coming decades. Just “printing the money” can be and has been done sustainably, by directing the new funds into generating new GDP; and there are compelling historical examples of that approach. In fact, it may be our only way out of the debt crisis. But first a look at the tariff issue.
China went from one of the poorest countries in the world to global economic powerhouse in a mere four decades. Currently featured in the news is DeepSeek, the free, open source A.I. built by innovative Chinese entrepreneurs which just pricked the massive U.S. A.I. bubble.
Even more impressive, however, is the infrastructure China has built, including 26,000 miles of high speed rail, the world’s largest hydroelectric power station, the longest sea-crossing bridge in the world, 100,000 miles of expressway, the world’s first commercial magnetic levitation train, the world’s largest urban metro network, seven of the world’s 10 busiest ports, and solar and wind power generation accounting for over 35% of global renewable energy capacity. Topping the list is the Belt and Road Initiative, an infrastructure development program involving 140 countries, through which China has invested in ports, railways, highways and energy projects worldwide.
All that takes money. Where did it come from? Numerous funding sources are named in mainstream references, but the one explored here is a rarely mentioned form of quantitative easing — the central bank just “prints the money.” (That’s the term often used, though printing presses aren’t necessarily involved.)
1176. 10-22-23, 10:45 am, speaker, The Weston A. Price Foundation’s 23rd Annual Conference, Kansas City, Missouri.
1175. 10-19-23, The Final Banking Solution, with Simon Thorpe and Colin Maxwell on The Vinny Eastwood Show, YouTube, Australia.
1174. 8-22-23, 10 am, Claremont, CA, Cobb Institute Center for Process, power point presentation: “Restoring Prosperity with a Financial Transaction Tax and Publicly Owned Banks.“ Zoom link is here.
1173. 6-15-23, NIB Zoom town hall, National Infrastructure Bank Coalition.
1172. 5-22-23: Radio interview, 9:30 am est, The Power Hour.
1171. 5-17-23: TV interview, CGTN America, Global Business: “Banking industry in hot seat during Congressional hearings.”
1170. Apr 27, National Infrastructure Bank Coalition webinar, “How to Build the Nation: National Banking vs. Privatization”
1160. 3-16-23, 5 pm pst, National Infrastructure Bank Coalition Town Hall, “Restructuring the American Workforce in a Time of Financial and Economic Turbulence.”
1156. 2-25-23, 15:00-17:00 GMT (Ireland), Think Local Conference 2023, Panel 3 – Money & Economics – New Paradigms
1155. 2-16-23, 5 pm pst, National Infrastructure Bank Coalition, “Washington, Hamilton, Lincoln: National Banking and the Economic Demands of Today’s Crisis,” NIB Zoom Town Hall
1130. Mar. 31, Power Point presentation on youtube, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Invita: Debates Ensayos de Economia Coordina: Guillermo Maya — Profesor adscrito al Departamento de Economia
1115. Feb. 23, 7 pm est, Eco Justice Collaborative Webinar, “Why the Crises We Face Make Financial Reform Essential,” Religious Society of Friends, Philadelphia
1114. Feb. 17, 11 am, Steff Overbeck, Pod of Gold radio interview
1113. Feb. 18, radio interview, Phil Mikan, wlis1420
1112. Feb. 16, National Infrastructure Bank Coalition Presidents’ Day Webinar 2021 – “National Infrastructure Bank: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants”
1111. Feb. 6, radio interview, Sylvia Richardson, Latin Waves
1097. Oct. 26, Phil Mikan Show, WLIS/WMRD Radio, Conn., pre-recorded for Friday at 10 est or Saturday at 9-11 est
1096. Oct. 22, 1:15 pm EST, power point presentation, “Public Banking, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and the National Debt,” Carolina Hills Community, Chapel Hill, NC
1088. July 15, 6 pm EST, Connecticut Public Banking Town Hall, livestream here
1087. July 13, Webinar, Center for Global Justice, “Why Public Banking Needs to Be Run as a Public Utility,” San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, 11am-1pm PDT
1086. Interview with Susan Johnson on public banking for Connecticut, WILI’s Let’s Talk About It Show, 5 pm EST
1044. Nov. 12, interview in New York with Max Keiser, Keiser Report, “Repo Markets and UBI”
1043. Nov. 6, 5 pm EST, The CivicLab Show with Tom Tresser, live@www.facebook.com/tomtree
1042. Oct. 23, 11:30 am-1:30 pm, luncheon presentation on public banking, League of Women Voters of San Diego, Tom Ham’s Lighthouse Restaurant, 2150 Harbor Island Dr., San Diego
1041. Oct. 22, Presentation on public banking, DSA San Diego, Unite Here Union Hall, 2436 Market Street, San Diego, 6-7:30 pm.
1006. Oct. 22, speaker with Gar Alperovitz at Praxis Peace Institute, “Changing the System: California’s Strategic Role in National Strategic Change,” Sonoma, CA, 276 E. Napa St, Sonoma. 7:00 pm.
1005. Oct 19-21, Bioneers Conference, panelist on Oct 20, 2:45 pm, Marin Center, San Rafael, CA.997.
999. Oct. 7, panel, Americans for Democratic Action of Southern California Annual Garden Party, 2-5:30 pm, Santa Monica, CA
998. Oct. 4, 7:30 pm, Living Economy Salon, panelist, Public Bank LA: “Solutions for Social and Environmental Justice”, 3110 Main St., Annex Building C 2nd Floor, Santa Monica, CA 90405
997. Oct. 3, interview on Unmediated, podcast of Reader Magazine, episode title: Making Money The Public’s Slave (The Public Banking Solution), 10 a.m. PT
Dollar Reset 2.0: Stablecoins, Treasury Bills and the Case for Public Banks
The Digital Dollar Drain, image by ScheerPost
Washington’s stablecoin strategy could shore up the dollar by making U.S. Treasury bills the backing for a new digital currency. But who gets the interest, and who will make the loans?
For several years, “the death of the dollar” has been a persistent headline, with compelling data to back it up. The dollar’s share of global foreign exchange reserves has slipped from over 70% in 1999 to about 57% today. Last spring, gold overtook U.S. Treasuries as the largest asset in foreign central bank reserves for the first time since the mid-1990s. The BRICS nations are settling more of their trade in their own currencies, and the U.S. has used the dollar as a sanctions weapon so often that friendly nations as well as rivals are looking for a way out. A topic once confined to gold bugs and doomsday newsletters has gone mainstream.
At the Federal Reserve’s Jackson Hole symposium in August, however, a paper by Eswar Prasad and colleagues highlighted a different set of data. Yes, the dollar’s share of central bank reserves has fallen, and foreign central banks’ Treasury holdings have stayed flat at around $4 trillion. But foreign private holdings have risen from $1 trillion in 2010 to more than $5 trillion today. The world isn’t dumping the dollar so much as changing who holds it. And the authors expect stablecoins to accelerate that shift, by driving global demand for dollars into the U.S. Treasury bills needed to back them. The dollar may not be dying so much as being re-engineered.
According to financial strategist Matt Dines, who attended the recent G20 meeting of finance ministers and central bank governors in Asheville, a “dollar reset” is underway. His thesis is that Washington isn’t trying to prop up the old dollar so much as to build a new one on a different foundation – a foundation that is the very debt everyone is so worried about. In August the national debt passed $40 trillion, with annual interest of over $1 trillion.
The notion that government debt can be an asset isn’t new. A Treasury bond is a debt of the government, but it is an asset to whoever owns it. The idea goes back to Alexander Hamilton, the first U.S. Treasury Secretary. Faced with a crushing Revolutionary War debt, he turned it into an asset by accepting it as three-fourths of the payment for stock in the First Bank of the United States. The debt thus became the capital of a national bank that generated credit for the nation.
The new dollar reset would do something similar on a global scale: Treasury bills, a portion of the national debt, would become the assets backing the world’s digital trade currency.
The View from Asheville
The G20 meeting in late August was hosted by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and attended by new Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh. The official agenda was growth, deregulation, energy security and sovereign debt. But Dines came away with a bigger takeaway, which he laid out in a video titled “Quantitative Credit Guidance: G20 Says Growth Is the Only Way Out.”
His reading is that the officials now running U.S. monetary policy have concluded that the debt cannot simply be inflated away with another round of quantitative easing, as it was after the 2008 financial crisis, when the Fed created trillions of dollars that mainly inflated stock and bond prices on Wall Street. As a ZeroHedge summary of Dines’ thesis put it, “The QE period is over.” The way out is to “provide credit to those who have capacity (Main Street),” with credit steered into factories, infrastructure and productive investment rather than financial speculation.
Dines draws on economist Richard Werner, whose Princes of the Yen showed how Japan’s central bank used “window guidance” to steer bank credit into productive industry. What matters, Werner argues, is not just how much money is created but where it goes: credit for buying existing assets inflates prices, while credit for producing new goods and services creates growth without inflation.
Bessent said, “The only way for us to get out of this is to grow our way out of it.” Whether that kind of growth is achievable is debated. But supporting economic growth is only half of the new dollar plan. The other half concerns the plumbing of the dollar itself – what backs it in trade.
Your Dollars Are Your Bank’s IOUs
Most of the money we use today is not government-issued cash. It is bank deposits, and a deposit is a liability of the bank, its promise to pay dollars on demand. When a bank makes a loan, it doesn’t lend out someone else’s savings. It credits the borrower’s account with a new deposit. The loan is the bank’s asset; the deposit is its liability. That is how the money supply expands.
When the depositor asked for his money, historically the bank paid with gold or silver. Today it is Federal Reserve reserves – digital balances held by banks at the Fed, or the paper notes into which reserves can be converted. Deposits are only a promise to deliver that “real” money, and no bank holds enough of it to pay everyone at once. The system works because depositors don’t all ask for their money at once, and because deposit insurance and the Fed stand behind it.
When confidence fails, however, a bank can fail even if its assets look safe. Silicon Valley Bank held long-term Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities, about as safe as assets get. But when interest rates rose, those bonds lost market value. In March 2023, depositors tried to withdraw $42 billion in a single day, and SVB couldn’t sell its bonds quickly enough at a sufficient price to cover the demand. The bank was gone within 48 hours. The 2008 financial collapse was worse, because the assets were subprime mortgages that were hardly marketable at all.
Dines notes that the dollar traded globally has long been “liability-based.” The vast offshore “eurodollar” market runs on dollar IOUs created by banks in London and elsewhere, banks that lack reserve accounts with the U.S. central bank and are beyond the reach of U.S. regulators. When that market froze in 2008, the Fed had to open emergency swap lines to foreign central banks to keep it from collapsing. According to Dines, it is that “liability-based” system that is being left behind.
Changing What Backs the Dollar
The GENIUS Act, signed in July 2025, set up an alternative to liability-based dollars backed with bank IOUs. Regulated dollar stablecoins are backed one-for-one with cash and short-term Treasury bills. In a June podcast, Dines said the Act pulls the dollar toward “an asset-based definition,” a dollar that “anchors back and is reserved one to one with U.S. Treasury debt.” The old offshore dollar is “being left out to dry.”
When the GENIUS Act was signed, Treasury Secretary Bessent declared that “the dollar now has an internet-native payment rail that is fast, frictionless, and free of middlemen.” (A payment rail is the network that carries money from one account to another.) He predicted a “surge in demand for US Treasuries, which back stablecoins.” In November 2025, he projected that the stablecoin market, then about $300 billion, “could grow tenfold by the end of the decade.”
Most stablecoins are held overseas, many by people and businesses seeking a currency more stable than their own. A business in Argentina or Nigeria that wants dollars buys dollar stablecoins. The stablecoin issuer then takes that money and buys U.S. Treasury bills. The world’s appetite for dollars thus becomes an appetite for U.S. government debt. In the new stablecoin model, the Fed would no longer need to buy Treasuries with reserves newly created through QE, because a global network of digital dollars would be buying them instead.
An Asset-Backed Dollar? Not Quite, But Close
Technically, a stablecoin is also a liability: it is the issuer’s promise to redeem your token for a dollar. When you hand Circle, the issuer of USDC stablecoins, $100 for 100 USDC tokens, Circle owns the Treasury bills it buys with your money. You just own a claim on Circle for that sum. The shift then isn’t really from a liability to an asset. It’s from a liability backed by private loans to a liability backed by public debt.
But that is still a meaningful difference. Under the GENIUS Act, stablecoins must be backed one-for-one by cash, bank deposits, overnight repos or Treasury bills maturing in 93 days or less. The issuer can’t lend the money out or buy ten-year bonds that lose value when rates rise. There’s no “maturity mismatch” and no “fractional reserve” problem. If everyone redeems at once, the money is there. An SVB-style collapse from long-dated bonds losing value isn’t supposed to be possible.
But the safeguard isn’t perfect. In fact, the biggest scare in the regulated stablecoin world came from SVB itself. Even stablecoins need banks to hold their funds, and in March 2023, Circle had $3.3 billion of USDC’s reserves sitting on deposit in SVB. USDC broke its dollar peg, falling to about 87 cents, until regulators guaranteed the deposits. But with reserves held mostly in short-term Treasuries, the stablecoin structure is still sounder than the bank money it would replace.
There are, however, other problems with the new plan.
Who Gets the Interest?
Bessent promised a payment rail “free of middlemen,” but this isn’t actually true. The stablecoin issuer is the middleman, and it is enormously well-paid.
When you give the issuer a dollar, it gives you a token worth a dollar and puts your dollar into Treasury bills paying 3% to 4%. But you get no interest. In fact, the GENIUS Act prohibits issuers from paying interest to holders. In effect, the issuer has borrowed from you at zero interest and lent to the government at the market rate.
The results are spectacular – for the issuer. Tether, the largest issuer, reported more than $10 billion in net profit for 2025, with a staff of just over 100 in 2024. It holds over $120 billion in U.S. Treasuries, making it one of the largest holders of U.S. government debt in the world. Circle, the issuer of USDC, reported $2.7 billion in revenue for 2025, about 95% of it from interest on reserves.
Scaling that up to Bessent’s $3 trillion market, the reserves would earn more than $100 billion a year at 3.5%. And the interest is paid by U.S. taxpayers, through interest on the federal debt. The public pays interest to private companies, so that those companies can issue the public’s own currency and keep the spread.
That’s the privilege known as seigniorage, the profit from issuing money, and it would be handed to a few private firms. Hamilton’s American System used public credit to build the productive economy. The private stablecoin model looks more like the British System of speculation and rent collection that Hamilton was trying to escape.
Stablecoins Move Money, but We Need Banks to Create Credit.
There’s a second problem with the stablecoin plan, which works counter to the “growth through credit” part of the dollar reset proposal. Dollars moved into stablecoins typically come out of bank deposits, which banks need to back their loans. The stablecoin issuer can’t lend that dollar back out. By law, it can only park it in safe, short-term assets, mostly Treasury bills. Money that was supporting loans to local businesses ends up financing the federal government instead.
An economy that is growing needs a money supply that can grow with it, and in our system that expansion happens when banks lend into new production. Stablecoins can move existing money around the world at lightning speed, but they can’t finance factories, farms, water systems or small businesses.
The Treasury’s Borrowing Advisory Committee has flagged trillions of dollars in bank deposits as potentially at risk of migrating into stablecoins. Hardest hit would be community banks, which depend on ordinary deposits. According to the FDIC, community banks hold 36% of small business loans and 70% of agricultural loans, though they hold only 15% of all bank loans.
So far, most of this risk has been overseas. Tether, two-thirds of the stablecoin market, is generally not sold to Americans, and Circle’s CEO has estimated that 70% of USDC use is outside the United States. Ordinary American savers have had little reason to trade an insured bank account for a token that pays no interest. But a loophole could change that. The GENIUS Act bars issuers from paying interest, but it doesn’t stop crypto exchanges from paying “rewards.” The Coinbase exchange pays customers a rate on USDC close to what Treasury bills earn, funded by the share of reserve income Circle pays to it. A checking account paying next to nothing can’t compete. Banks are lobbying Congress hard to close the loophole, for good reason: it’s the channel through which local deposits could be drained away.
A full-reserve stablecoin can only recycle existing dollars into government debt. So the two halves of the dollar reset pull against each other: one wants credit steered to Main Street, while the other drains the deposits Main Street’s banks need in order to lend. Werner has long argued that the most productive credit comes from small, local banks lending to local businesses, the model behind Germany’s Sparkassen and its strong Mittelstand of mid-sized firms.
Is there a way to get the benefits of digital dollars without losing the interest to private issuers or the deposits to the Treasury market? Two states are already testing an answer.
The Public Option: Wyoming and North Dakota
In August 2025, Wyoming launched the Frontier Stable Token (FRNT), the first stable token issued by a U.S. state. Like USDC and Tether, it is backed by cash and short-term Treasuries, in this case 102% of the tokens outstanding. The difference is in where the interest goes. Instead of going to private stablecoin issuers, the income from FRNT’s reserves goes to Wyoming’s school foundation program.
North Dakota is also doing something interesting from a public banking perspective. The Bank of North Dakota, the nation’s only state-owned bank, has launched its own Roughrider Coin. The Coin isn’t for retail customers, and the public can’t buy it. It is designed for the state’s banks and credit unions for fast bank-to-bank payments.
According to Startup Fortune, the system is designed to serve more than 90 North Dakota banks and credit unions. The transactions are recorded on the Solana blockchain, and banks reach the coin through Fiserv, the financial technology company whose software many community banks already use for their accounts and payments.
What the coin is good for is speed. The older ACH (Automated Clearing House) system processes payments in batches that settle overnight. Solana was chosen, the article says, for the “sub-second finality that overnight ACH rails simply cannot offer.” Banks can thus settle with each other almost instantly instead of waiting for the batch to clear. Critics such as Catherine Austin Fitts warn that putting deposits on a programmable ledger could make accounts easier to freeze automatically. For that reason public and community banks, answerable to local oversight, are better placed than Wall Street to build in human review.
Plugging the Deposit Drain
Transaction speed is good, but the risk to deposits remains. When the coin was announced, North Dakota Bankers Association president Rick Clayburgh warned that a stablecoin “can possibly drain deposits from an institution,” noting that deposits are “what’s used to loan money out.” What the Roughrider Coin has going for it is who sponsors it: a public bank whose mission for more than a century has been to support local lenders, not compete with them. According to Startup Fortune, community banks that have “spent a decade losing deposit share and talent to bigger rivals” now have “a stablecoin product they didn’t have to write a line of code for.” A bank that can offer digital-dollar payments through its own channel gives its customers less reason to take their money elsewhere.
For keeping deposits in the local lending system, however, a different tool is needed – and there is one, the “tokenized deposit,” an ordinary bank deposit recorded on a blockchain. It moves as quickly as a stablecoin, but it remains a deposit the bank can lend against, and it is insured by the FDIC up to the usual limit. JPMorgan has launched one for its institutional clients, and five regional banks have formed a network to exchange tokenized deposits that “do not leave the insured banking perimeter.” At the Jackson Hole symposium where the Prasad paper was presented, Pablo Hernández de Cos, general manager of the Bank for International Settlements, said tokenized deposits “preserve the tight link between deposit-taking and credit provision.” But he warned that smaller banks “might struggle with high upfront implementation costs” to create the tokenized deposits, with “knock-on effects for small business and local lending.”
That is a gap a public bankers’ bank could fill. BND already provides North Dakota’s banks and credit unions with correspondent services, including wire transfers, ACH payments and Federal Reserve settlement. With Roughrider, it has made a shared digital platform accessible to more than 90 financial institutions. It could likewise give them shared tokenization infrastructure: digital dollars that remain local deposits, available for local loans.
Echoing Hamilton
Combining what Wyoming and North Dakota have done, states could issue stablecoins for making payments, and keep the interest for public purposes. And public and community banks could do what stablecoins can’t: lend, creating new money for local businesses, farms and housing.
Hamilton would have approved. His First U.S. Bank wasn’t just a place to park the national debt. It extended credit to commerce and built the productive base that made the debt’s repayment possible. That was the heart of what came to be called the American System, as opposed to the British System of finance serving finance.
If the current Administration is rebuilding the dollar on a foundation of Treasury debt, as Dines suggests, the result could be sturdier money than the eurodollar IOUs it replaces. But growth takes a credit engine, and that means local banks with deposits to lend.
If a few private issuers keep the interest and share it with exchanges as customer “rewards,” the reset will have produced a new generation of princes of the dollar. But if more states join the ranks of issuers, working through public banks in partnership with Main Street banks, the reset could echo Hamilton’s reforms. A growing share of the national debt would be absorbed as backing for the world’s digital dollars, while public and local banks supplied the credit to grow our way out of the debt.
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This article was first posted as an original to ScheerPost.com. Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and author of thirteen books including Web of Debt, The Public Bank Solution, and Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age. Her 500+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com.
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