The federal authorities’s personal economists on the White House have thrown chilly water on one of many central justifications for limiting stablecoin returns — and their findings run counter to a provision already written into regulation.
The GENIUS Act, signed in July 2025, established the primary complete federal framework for stablecoins. The regulation requires issuers to carry reserves on a one-to-one foundation — that means each greenback in circulation is backed by an actual greenback in secure belongings like Treasury payments, money, or money-market funds. It additionally comprises a blunt prohibition: issuers can not pay holders any type of yield or curiosity on their cash.
The logic, a minimum of as its advocates have framed it, is easy. If stablecoins begin paying charges aggressive with financial savings accounts, households could transfer cash out of financial institution deposits and into tokens. Banks would lose that funding and, in flip, lend much less. Neighborhood banks — smaller establishments with out Wall Avenue’s wholesale funding choices — would take the toughest hit.
Some tutorial analyses put that lending contraction as excessive as $1.5 trillion. These numbers circulated in congressional testimony and within the press. They formed the talk.
The White House Council of Financial Advisers (CEA) constructed a mannequin to check the declare, and the outcomes are putting.
Merely put, “a yield prohibition would do very little to protect bank lending, while forgoing the consumer benefits of competitive returns on stablecoin holdings.”
White House assessments stablecoin yields
At present situations, banning stablecoin yield would improve financial institution lending by simply $2.1 billion — a 0.02% change in opposition to a $12 trillion mortgage e book. The welfare math runs within the different path: shoppers would lose $800 million extra in forgone returns than debtors would achieve from barely decrease charges.
The fee-benefit ratio the White House CEA calculated was 6.6 — that means the coverage prices greater than six occasions what it delivers.
The rationale the numbers are so small comes all the way down to how stablecoin reserves truly transfer by means of the monetary system. When a family converts {dollars} into stablecoins, the issuer doesn’t bury that cash in a vault.
Most of it will get reinvested — in Treasury payments, repo agreements, and money-market funds. These {dollars} stream again into the banking system by means of sellers and counterparties. The White House CEA traced three balance-sheet situations and located that in the commonest circumstances, mixture deposits throughout the banking system stay basically unchanged. The cash reshuffles; it doesn’t disappear.
The vital variable is what fraction of stablecoin reserves find yourself actually locked out of lending. The White House CEA calibrated that quantity — referred to as theta of their mannequin — at 12%, based mostly on Circle’s December 2025 reserve report for USDC. Tether holds even much less in financial institution deposits: $34 million in opposition to a $147 billion reserve pool. The opposite 88% of stablecoin reserves circulates by means of regular credit score channels. A prohibition on yield redirects a stream that, largely, was by no means blocked to start with.
The hole between idea and actuality
The sooner trillion-dollar estimates made a modeling selection that the White House CEA says distorts the image. They calculated what occurs to the financial institution that loses deposits when a buyer buys stablecoins — after which stopped. They didn’t mannequin what occurs to the financial institution or supplier that receives the cash when the stablecoin issuer invests its reserves. In a whole mannequin, the receiving financial institution expands. The web impact on system-wide lending is much smaller.
The White House CEA additionally discovered that present financial situations blunt the influence additional. Banks right this moment maintain greater than $1.1 trillion in extra liquidity above regulatory minimums. When deposits reshuffle between establishments, no financial institution is compelled to contract as a result of all of them have slack. If the Federal Reserve have been working with scarce reserves — because it did throughout earlier eras — the dynamic would shift.
Below that state of affairs, the mannequin produces $531 billion in extra lending from a yield ban. However reaching that quantity requires 4 situations to carry directly: the stablecoin market grows to 6 occasions its present relative dimension, all reserves shift into locked deposits, substitution between stablecoins and financial savings accounts is on the excessive finish of estimates, and the Fed abandons its present framework.
The White House CEA calls this mix “implausible.”
A loophole no person has closed…but
There’s a complication that the White House report addresses with some candor. The yield prohibition within the GENIUS Act could not totally bind. The regulation bars issuers from paying yield on to holders — nevertheless it doesn’t bar third events from doing so.
Coinbase, as an example, presents “USDC Rewards” to clients who maintain the coin in its wallets, funded by means of a revenue-sharing settlement with Circle. As of February 2026, these rewards match the charges on high-yield financial savings accounts, since each finally move by means of returns on Treasuries.
Some variations of the proposed CLARITY Act would shut this channel by banning intermediaries from passing yield alongside to holders. Whether or not that stricter strategy would survive the political and authorized scrutiny it will face stays an open query.
The White House CEA report nods towards a dimension the yield-prohibition debate has principally ignored: what stablecoins do outdoors the USA. More than 80% of stablecoin transactions happen internationally, pushed by customers in nations with weak currencies or restricted banking entry who maintain dollar-backed tokens as financial savings instruments.
Stablecoin issuers already maintain extra Treasury payments than sovereign nations like Saudi Arabia. Analysis from the Banokay for Worldwide Settlements discovered that stablecoin inflows compress short-term Treasury yields — a structural supply of low-cost U.S. authorities financing {that a} yield ban would suppress by lowering adoption.
The White House CEA didn’t quantify this foreign-demand channel. But it surely makes the arithmetic of the yield prohibition more durable to defend: no matter small positive aspects home financial institution lending may see may very well be offset by increased borrowing prices for the federal authorities itself.
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