A few months ago, the father-in-law of one of my sons, who lives in New York state, sent what was, for him, a significant sum of money to his family in England. The money never arrived. Worse, it was impossible to discover what had happened to it. His bank contacted the intermediary it used, but was told that the destination bank in the UK, one of the country’s largest, would not respond to queries. I asked colleagues what might have happened and was advised that it might have something to do with money laundering. Meanwhile, my in-law was distraught. Then, after two months, the money suddenly reappeared in his account. He remains entirely ignorant of what happened in between.
Such an event is utterly remote from anything I have experienced when transferring money between the UK and the EU. On this side of the pond, transfers have been uniformly reliable and fast. This might be a reason for Americans to welcome the use of “stablecoins” as an alternative to their banking system. Daniel Davies has noted two others: the relatively high cost of payments made via credit cards (which are around five times those in Europe!) and the extortionate cost of cross-border remittances. Both reflect the failure to regulate powerful US oligopolies.
The FT’s Gillian Tett suggested a different motivation for the Trump administration’s welcoming stance on stablecoins in an article last month. Scott Bessent, US Treasury secretary, has a problem: the enormous volume of US Treasury debt the US needs the world to hold at modest interest rates. One solution, she notes, is to promote the widespread use of dollar-denominated stablecoins, not so much domestically, but everywhere else. This, as Tett notes, would be good for the US government.