The Breakdown - Fed Governor Miran on Why Inflation Fears Are Overstated | Forward Guidance

Episode Date: April 2, 2026

While The Breakdown is between seasons, we’re bringing some of our favorite conversations from across Blockworks onto the feed. In this episode of Forward Guidance, Felix Jauvin sits down with Fe...d Governor Stephen Miran at DAS to discuss why he believes inflation fears are overstated, why the Fed may still be too restrictive, and how AI, deregulation, and stablecoins could all shape the future of monetary policy. FOLLOW GUEST › Federal Reserve – https://x.com/federalreserve FOLLOW THE SHOW › Felix – https://x.com/fejau_inc › Forward Guidance – https://x.com/ForwardGuidance › Telegram – https://t.me/+CAoZQpC-i6BjYTEx › Blockworks – https://x.com/Blockworks ›David https://x.com/dcanellis TIMECODES (00:00) Introduction (02:36) Why Miran Dissented (05:10) Nexo Ad (05:44) Looking Through Oil Shocks (07:32) AI And Deregulation Disinflate (11:04) The Case For Neutral (13:26) What Sets Neutral Rates (17:03) Nexo Ad and Blockworks IR Promo (18:47) Where “Running It Hot” Narrative Fails (26:01) Skinny Master Accounts (28:00) Stablecoins And Dollar Demand SPONSORS › NEXO Nexo is the premier digital wealth platform. Receive interest on your crypto, borrow against it without selling, and trade a range of assets. Now available in the U.S with 30 days of exclusive privileges. Get started at http://nexo.com/breakdown DISCLAIMER Nothing said on Forward Guidance or The Breakdown is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Any views expressed are opinions, not financial advice. Hosts and guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Oil moving higher now has very little inflationary consequence 12 to 18 months out. All the inflation happens up front. And so that's part of why central bank should look through an oil shock, as the Federal Reserve has historically done. Forward inflation expectations, a year out, two years out, three years out, are all pretty much unaffected by what's been going on. And in fact, a lot of them are lower since the FOMC met in January. My view is that the economy can bear additional support for the labor market from monetary policy.
Starting point is 00:00:26 With the labor market very gradually cooling and declining wage pressures, you just are not going to get a wage price spiral that a central bank would normally respond to. When you sort of say something like running it hot, it's wildly and precise because it's a statement that sort of assumes that supply is constant, that you can't increase the horsepower of the car. I don't think the economy needs monetary policy to be slamming on the gas and accelerating the economy like it was in 2021 or 2022. But I also don't think it needs to be holding the economy back. And right now, it is modestly restrictive and it is holding the economy back. and I don't think that's consistent with the macroeconomic backdrop. What matters when you think about shocks to the supply side, whether they're AI, oil, regulation,
Starting point is 00:01:07 no matter what the shock is, what matters when you think about this is... Hello, breakdown listener, and welcome back. We're almost ready to roll out a new season of episodes with the first dropping next week. But for now, we have another great crossover edition, this time from the macro-focused forward guidance podcast. A very special conversation with Federal Reserve Governor Stephen Moran recorded live at Blockworks's Das New York event last week.
Starting point is 00:01:29 We hope you enjoy and we'll see you again soon. This episode is brought to you by NXO. Step into a new era of digital wealth. Earn interest on your digital assets. Borrow against them without selling and trade all in one platform. Get started at nexo.com slash breakdown. Nothing said on the breakdown is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only and any views expressed by anyone
Starting point is 00:01:51 on the show are opinions, not financial advice. Host and guests may hold positions in the company's funds or projects discussed. Governor Moran, great to have you to the Digital Summit. Welcome. Thanks for having me. And let me just clarify that I'm one member of a board of seven governors. There are seven of us.
Starting point is 00:02:11 I'm not a governor in the sense of the governor of the Bank of England or something. That's good, Claire. Hey, Governor. Governor Moran, would love to just start by unpacking the most recent FOMC meeting that occurred last week. You dissented in support of a 25-basin rate cut. So I'd just love for you to unpack your current framework and why you dissent there. Sure, thanks. Look, at the Federal Reserve, we have a dual mandate. We are tasked by Congress with paying attention to inflation, stable prices, and to the labor market. My view is that the
Starting point is 00:02:43 inflation side of the mandate has, despite high measured inflation, has not been so problematic because a lot of the inflation excess over target has been a result of some quirks of measurement of things like portfolio management services, which is basically just the stock market going up, biasing the way we measure inflation up by 30 to 40 basis points. Once you correct for those things, I did not view inflation as being overly problematic, whereas the labor market has been on a very gradual trend of weakening over the course of the last three years. That trend has been in place. It's been continual.
Starting point is 00:03:13 You see it in increasing difficulty of finding jobs for new insurance to the labor market. You see it in increasing length of time in people spend between jobs during unemployment. And so my view is that the economy can bear additional support for the labor market, from monetary policy. Now, a lot of what's been going on in the last few weeks has, of course, been tied to the war in Iran. And I think what's going on oil prices has spooked a lot of people.
Starting point is 00:03:39 And I understand from a trading perspective, from a market's perspective, things whip around wildly in both directions. You get headline ping pong and that pushes markets. And if you have levered positions, that can feel very, very, you know, sort of very intense. But from a monetary policy perspective, we have to make policy.
Starting point is 00:03:57 for 12 to 18 months from now because there are big lags with which monetary policy hits the economy. If we adjust interest rates, it doesn't feed through into actual economic growth into actual unemployment and inflation for at least a year. So we need to set policy for a year to a year and a half out. And the way that changes in oil prices affect the economy is actually much faster than that. When you get a spike up in oil prices, when you get a move higher in oil from something like what's going on in Iran, the oil price goes up and goes up and immediately and headline inflation goes up a lot in the short term. But as you look a year or two, a year and a half out, it's very unlikely that that causes subsequent effects that are
Starting point is 00:04:37 affecting the economy a year to a year and a half out, which is when monetary policy can affect the economy. And so that's part of why the classic reasoning of why a central bank should look through an oil shock as the Federal Reserve has historically done. So that idea of looking through in oil shock was something that's really come forth in terms of recent discussions here. It seems like every few years we have some sort of shock that we have to navigate through. And I'm curious if you could just unpack it. You know, the discussion seems to be that a lot of these supply shocks seem to go in one direction, one being higher inflation. How do you think about that? Step into a new era of digital wealth with Nexo, the premier digital assets wealth platform.
Starting point is 00:05:15 Earn interest on your digital assets. Borrow against them without selling. Trade a wide range of cryptocurrencies, all in one place. Nexo is now available again in the U.S. with an evolved product suite tailored to today's market. For a limited time, new U.S. clients can unlock 30 days of exclusive Wealth Club Premier benefits, including enhanced interest rates, reduce borrowing costs, and up to 0.5% crypto cashback on trades. Get started today at nexo.com slash breakdown. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk. Terms and conditions apply.
Starting point is 00:05:43 Do your own research. Yeah, so I'll say a couple things. One is, when you think about how these negative supply shocks are hitting the economy, things like oil prices moving higher, as I said before, It affects headline inflation very much in the short term, but as you look further at, it doesn't affect anything. And that is, if you were getting concerned about these negative supply shocks, that's what you would be looking for. You'd be looking for a rise in inflation expectations further out in time. And if you look at the inflation swap market, you see that forward inflation expectations a year out, two years out, three years out, are all pretty much unaffected by what's been going on.
Starting point is 00:06:18 And in fact, a lot of them are lower since the start of the, since, sorry, a lot of them are lower since we met in January, since the FMC. in January. And so there's been zero bleed-through of the negative supply shock of oil prices into inflation expectations further out, further out in time, which again is when monetary policy would be able to affect. The other thing you'd be concerned about is if there were a wage price spiral. If prices go higher and then wages go higher and that pushes prices higher again, you get a negative feedback loop that just creates a self-fulfilling inflationary spiral that requires tightening from the monetary authority to offset and to squash. That's not something that we see happening right now,
Starting point is 00:07:02 because the labor market, as I said before, has been on this very gradual cooling trend for about three years now. And with the labor market very gradually cooling and declining wage pressures, you just are not going to get a wage price spiral. That would be the type of thing that a central bank would normally respond to. Now, you said something else that I'd like to pick up on, which is that we've had a lot of negative supply shocks, you know, sort of over time. And I think that there's a tendency to think that they, that those are the only supply shocks that we've experienced. And that's not the case.
Starting point is 00:07:37 There are also positive supply shocks that are hitting the economy, too. And these get a lot of attention, too. So one of them is AI, right? AI is a positive supply shock. It increases the productive capacity of the economy. It lets people produce more with less inputs into production. That's a positive supply shock. Another very powerful positive supply shock that's been hitting the economy has been the trend in deregulation.
Starting point is 00:08:00 Now, I think this is a group of people who are focused on crypto. Regulations have probably played a large part in the number of your business models and having to deal with those regulations has probably for a number of people in this room at some point slowed you down, reduce the amount of things you can produce, increase the cost of production. And as those regulatory barriers recede, it becomes, it becomes easier for you to make products that people want to buy. And so as the regulatory backdrop becomes easier, that's a positive supply shock that hits the economy too.
Starting point is 00:08:30 Now, I gave a speech in January in Greece where I looked at the literature, the modern literature on regulation, and it's very difficult to sort of quantify the federal regulatory code and turn that into a number in a way that economists would like to do rigorous empirical studies. but I looked at the modern literature that sort of uses AI and machine learning tools to do so. And I calculated that the deregulatory wave that's been hitting the economy over the last 15 months or so would ultimately drag on inflation by about half a percent a year for the next few years, right? So that's that's that's that's quite chunky.
Starting point is 00:09:09 Now just a couple of weeks ago, there was a new Federal Reserve staff research paper released by two staff economists at the Fed. Danilo Cascalde Garcia and Mateo Yacobiello. And what this Fed research paper on deregulation found is they did an entirely different estimation method than the previous literature, and they did an entirely different measurement method for regulations in the previous literature. And when you apply their results to the scope of the deregulatory shock that we've seen over the last 15 months or so, it implies a roughly 0.3% drag on inflation, each year for the next two years.
Starting point is 00:09:48 That's not just a one-off effect. That's a persistent disinflationary effect from the receding regulatory backdrop. Now, using an entirely different literature, entirely different estimation methods, I calculated 0.5, they calculated 0.3. I think those are probably within noise of each other. They're certainly within confidence bands.
Starting point is 00:10:06 I wouldn't be able to reject one in favor of the other. But either of them are very big, and I think very substantial. And I think of the types of shocks that policymakers ought to take into account when we're thinking about the correct settings for monetary policies. So, yes, it is the case that we have had a number of negative supply shocks hit the economy, things like oil moving higher.
Starting point is 00:10:26 But it's also the case that we have very powerful positive supply shocks hitting the economy, too. And unlike oil, I expect some of these, like deregulation and AI, to be persistent in their disinflationary effects. So last week's meeting was a summary of economic projections update meeting. I would love to just hear about when he balanced out the context of either these positive or negative supply shocks. How does that characterize as your forecast for the federal funds rate for the next year? So in the last summary of projections, because of the oil shock, right, that hits the economy very
Starting point is 00:11:03 quickly, whereas I think some of these other shocks play out over time. I did raise my inflation projection for my headline inflation projection for this year to 2.7 percent, right? So I moved it a little bit higher because of the oil shock. However, as I said before, this is not the type of thing that policy should respond to, because that happens all up front and policy affects the economy 12 to 18 months out. It has very, oil moving higher now
Starting point is 00:11:26 has very little inflationary consequence 12 to 18 months out. All the inflation happens up front. What does happen 12 to 18 months out is the economy might be weaker because every dollar that people put into filling in their gas tanks is a dollar they're not spending on other goods and surfaces. And so that might put upward pressure on the unemployment rate. So in the March summary of economic projection,
Starting point is 00:11:49 I boosted my policy rate by half a percent, not due to oil and Iran, but due to the inflation data that we received in between the December summary projections and the March summary projections. That puts me at, that puts my, my projection at about neutral, right? So the neutral policy rate is the monetary policy interest rate that's neither stimulative nor accommodative. Right now, I think that's probably about two and a half percent, two and a half to two and three quarters percent.
Starting point is 00:12:19 we're about 75 basis points above that level. So, you know, I think it's, sorry, we're, yeah, we're about a, sorry, we're about a percentage point above that level right now. I think it's appropriate over the course of this year to just get back to neutral. I don't think the economy needs monetary policy to be slamming on the gas and accelerating the economy like it was in 2021 or 2022. But I also don't think it needs to be holding the economy back. And right now it is modestly restrictive and it is holding the economy back. and I don't think that's consistent with the macroeconomic backdrop. So earlier in there, you mentioned this idea of an AI potential productivity boom
Starting point is 00:12:56 and how it could be much more durable than something like a negative oil supply shock. And the first thing that comes to my mind there when I think about a durable shock like that is what does its potential impact on the long-term economic neutral rate or R-star? I'd be curious to hear about what's your perspective on the more long-term forecast of the neutral rate in light of such a potentially powerful shock, positive shock, such as the AI productivity boom? Yeah, so look, you know, I think that the AI productivity boom does unambiguously push the neutral rate higher.
Starting point is 00:13:31 However, I think there's a lot of other countervailing factors that have been weighing on the neutral rate. And so it is the case that if investing becomes more profitable over time, if investing becomes more productive over time, that raises the long-term, neutral, you know, neutral rate of interest that you get on capital on investing, and that boost that boost neutral. But there's other things that have been weighing on it. And one thing that I've been trying to draw attention to that's been weighing on it, I think quite powerfully, is the
Starting point is 00:14:00 change in population growth. We lived through the biggest shocks to the population growth rate in both directions, in certainly in my lifetime, probably in the lifetimes of many, many folks in this room, within the course of a few years, we had a period of massively growing population in 2021 to 23 or so. And then in 24 to 5, 6, that population growth plummeted pretty much to, you know, working-age population growth is probably, you know, pretty close to flat now. And so that was a huge spike up in growth and then a huge spike down. And just as the neutral interest rate is a function of the equilibrium returns in capital that are affected by productivity, It's also affected by the growth rate in the economy, which is affected by population growth.
Starting point is 00:14:47 And so that, in my view, is a very big thing weighing on interest rates. And you see that across the world. We spent many years before the pandemic discussing Japanization of global interest rates, declining fertility rates, declining, aging populations around the world, declining population growth, led to lower interest rates in a lot of countries. And there was a lot of time spent discussing as everybody going in this direction, right? I think that those channels, those pathways were always valid economic pathways, and maybe they were of primary importance sort of before the pandemic, and a lot of people
Starting point is 00:15:27 were talking about them. And then during the pandemic, a lot of other things started to matter, mostly related to the pandemic, and then the massive economic support programs that were launched after that. But those, the connection between population, aging, demographic growth, and interest rates didn't go away, right? It just, you know, other things occupy our attention, but those pathways are still valid. And I think that we'll see in coming years that they matter again because of the size of the shocks that we've experienced to population growth. The other thing that I think weighs in the interest rate is the improving
Starting point is 00:16:01 fiscal deficit. And so, you know, I think that if you look at the fiscal deficit in Q2 through Q4 of last year versus the fiscal deficit of Q through Q4 of the previous year. And of course, I think the major delta is, the biggest delta is tariffs. It's not all tariffs, but the biggest delta is tariffs. The fiscal deficit came in quite a bit. I think at an annualized rate, it's probably, if I remember correctly, about $450, but that, $450 billion, but that's at the top of my head. So that might not be correct. It's a significant decline if you look at Q2 through Q4 of 2025, calendar Q2 through Q4 of 2025 versus calendar Q2 through Q4 of 2024. And I think the major delta is tariffs, right? So that declining, the decline in fiscal borrowing is something
Starting point is 00:16:52 that pushes around the neutral rate too. And that is something that I think will also weigh on it. So, you know, so my view of the neutral rate is towards the bottom of the range of where my colleague's view is, if you look at the SEP, but I'm not outside of the range. Let's take a moment to talk about NXO. Nexo delivers a premier digital assets wealth platform designed to clients build, manage and preserve their wealth, earn interests on your digital assets, access crypto-back credit without selling your holdings, trade with advanced tools, all supported by 24-7 client care. Now back in the US, NXO offers new clients 30 days of exclusive Wealth Club Premier access, that means enhanced interest rates, reduce borrowing costs, and up to 0.5% crypto cashback on trades.
Starting point is 00:17:30 Benefits typically reserve for Wealth Club members and private clients. Nexo is also expanding its global presence, becoming the official crypto partner of Tennis Australia, of the organization behind the Australian Open and the digital asset partner of the Audi Revolut Formula One team. If you're ready to approach digital assets with a more structured wealth strategy, visit nexo.com slash breakdown to get started. Hey all, Blockworks co-founder Michael Apolito here.
Starting point is 00:17:51 Quick break to talk about something we've just launched, Blockworks investor relations. As the market shifts toward institutional capital, investors want more transparency, more standardization, and a higher level of professionalism. But the traditional IR model is slow, manual, and not built for how crypto works. If you're building on chain, your data is already live, your business is already transparent.
Starting point is 00:18:11 The challenge is turning that into a clear, credible story for investors. That's exactly what we're solving with Blockworks, IR. It's a single platform that brings together real-time analytics, branded investor portals, and hands-on advisory support so you can communicate what matters. If you're an on-chain business looking to level up your investor strategy, check out blockworks investor-relations at blockworks.com slash investor-dash relations. All right. Back to the episode.
Starting point is 00:18:36 As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk. Terms and conditions apply. Do your own research. So the other major durable trend you mentioned was this idea of deregulation. And just last week, the Federal Reserve put out some initial ask for consultation on this update to the Federal Reserve's perspective on how it contributes to that update on deregulation. I'm curious if you just provide your perspective on that and how are you thinking about it. So if you take an economics class, there's supply and demand.
Starting point is 00:19:12 And if you hold supply constant and you slam your foot on the gas for demand and you push demand out, you get inflation. And if you push supply out, then you don't get inflation. You can produce more with less. And I think, you know, one expression that people online use a lot is running it hot, right? I think that running it hot is you're sort of, if you use that expression, you're conditioning upon what the engine is. And if you're trying to go 60 miles an hour in a car with a handful of horsepower, you know, you're probably running it hot.
Starting point is 00:19:48 But if you're trying to go 60 miles an hour in a car with a large number of horsepower, hundreds of horsepower, you're not running it hot, right? That car can handle that speed. And this is the difference between pushing the supply side out versus restricting the supply side. If you push the supply side of the economy out and supply is growing quickly, then demand can grow quickly too and it's not inflationary. If you're holding the supply side in and the economy can't produce supply to meet demand, then you're getting inflation. And I think that's the difference. And that's where things like AI and things like deregulation come into play is because they allow the economy to produce more with less.
Starting point is 00:20:24 And that's also true of capital deepening. If you look at the incentives for investment that were in part, of the tax legislation last year, you know, the full expensing on equipment and full expensing in R&D. These incentivize investment in productive capital, and when you have more productive capital, you can produce more, right? And so I think it's all, it's all a function of, of, so when you sort of say something like running it hot, it's wildly and precise because it's a statement that sort of assumes that supply is constant, that you can't increase the horsepower of the car. But if you go through deregulation, if you go through AI, if you go through capital deepening, you're increasing the
Starting point is 00:21:04 horsepower of the car and you can produce more with less and therefore demand can grow faster and the engine doesn't heat up when you go fast. So I think that that metaphor needs some adjustment, but when I think about these supply side policies and their interaction with monetary policy, a lot of it flows through what we call. So there's two primary channels. One is what happens to prices, right? I talked a little bit about that with deregulation. If you can produce more with less, you lower the cost of production that feeds through into consumer prices. If you're removing barriers to entry, because regulations can serve as barriers to entry, and I talked a lot about this in my January regulation speech, you're creating more competition.
Starting point is 00:21:46 More competition will lower prices. It will lower markups. It will lower monopoly profits. The other channel through which I think a lot of the supply side of stuff affects things that we hear about from monetary policy, is through what we would call the output gap. And the output cap is the difference between potential growth, what the economy can produce with unemployment at its natural level, and where actual output is.
Starting point is 00:22:12 And so if you've got the unemployment rate at 8%, there's tons of unused slack in the economy. There's tons of unused resources. The economy is producing below potential. There's a lot more it can produce. If you've got the unemployment rate at 3%, you're above potential, because you're trying to produce more than the economy can produce in the non-inflationary way,
Starting point is 00:22:32 and you get price pressures as a result. Now, what matters when you think about shocks to the supply side, whether they're AI oil regulation, no matter what the shock is, what matters when you think about this, is it pushing out or pulling in actual supply, or actual GDP or potential GDP, but more or less? And so if you have a situation like, one assumption that a lot of people make is that actual and potential move out by roughly the same amount in response to a lot of these productivity shocks. There are times when I think that that's a good assumption. So, for example, if you think about the Greenspan productivity story in the 90s where, you know, former Chairman Greenspan was making the case that improvements in productivity,
Starting point is 00:23:22 were going to lead to high GDP growth that was non-inflationary, and therefore policy doesn't really need to respond. Now, I think that argument, I think, makes a lot of sense in the context of the telecoms revolution, because if you're building lots of telecom capacity, you have to tear up streets, lay telecom wire, put the streets back together. There's a lot of investment activity that occurs. And so you get the increase in demand because of the investment activity, and you get the increase in supply because you have a productivity. enhancement from the increased internet connectivity. The net change in the output gap, I think it's a fair assumption to assume it could be zero.
Starting point is 00:24:00 Sorry, it could be neutral. With other type of shocks, that might not be the case. Certainly with the case of a regulation shock, I think that actual GDP will move out by a lot less than potential GDP. So, for example, if you've got a smokestack that you can run eight hours a day with strict carbon regulations and then the carbon regulations ease and you can run at 16 hours, hours a day. You don't need to do additional investment because you've got the capital stock already there. You've got the smokestack. It's just that you can run the smoke stack more hours a day.
Starting point is 00:24:31 And so that's a case in which potential GDP goes up, I think, by a lot more than actual GDP. The amount of supply you can produce is gone up by a lot, but the amount of demand has not gone up by a lot because all you've done is ease production constraints. You haven't increased a lot of investment demand. AI, I don't know. AI could be somewhere in between. So certainly AI creates a huge amount of investment demand in the form of, you know, GPUs and data centers. A lot of the GPU demand, I think, gets leaked overseas. You know, a lot of the GPUs are not, they're not made in the United States, right? Certainly, data center demand does lead to investment activity in the United States.
Starting point is 00:25:13 Certainly, we pay a lot of employee compensation to people who are working on developing AI, integrating AI into existing company work streams. But where does it shake out on potential GDP versus actual GDP? I don't really have a firm view. So I want to shift gears here into the heart of what we're truly here for this conference, which is digital assets and your perspective on them. And I want to start with this introduction of these skinny master accounts that have been begun rolling out.
Starting point is 00:25:43 We've seen crack and get approved for one. And so I would just love to get your perspective on how you think about the role of these skinny master accounts with respect to where it sits in comparison to, you know, full-fledged master account. Sure. So this ties into the previous conversation nicely because we were talking about productivity growth and we were talking about technological advancements. And if you look over the very, very long term of human history, it is technological
Starting point is 00:26:07 advances that drive all of the growth in human prosperity that we've experienced. And I think that's true of a wide variety of technological advances. And I think that financial innovation is an important part of that. Because financial innovation and advances in financial technology and financial capabilities help to allocate capital to where it needs to be to make the economy produce efficiently, produce more, and just generally drive human prosperity. So I do think that financial innovation is important too. I think that introducing these skinny master accounts for stable coins will be an important step in the direction of allowing that type of innovation to occur. the Federal Reserve recently put out a request for information for comments on Skinny Master accounts. And we received a large volume of these comments.
Starting point is 00:26:57 The staff are going through the comments now. I've looked at a few of them, a few of the comments. Some of things that stuck out at me were things like ACH access and caps on, and caps on the size of the balance is the size of the Skinny Master accounts. but this is an area of this is an area of active examination and active rulemaking. And so, you know, it is something that is moving ahead. I'm excited for Governor Waller, who leads the payments committee to put to sort of to push this to next steps. And I think it's got a lot of potential. The other big trend that we're seeing is, of course, around stable coins.
Starting point is 00:27:38 You had a landmark speech about stable coins recently. And I would love to just hear about how you're evolving your thinking there. and its role within the broader financial system, where you see it being incorporated, where you see it complements what already exists there. And yeah, just how are you thinking about that? Thanks.
Starting point is 00:27:56 So I gave a speech in November, I think? Something like that, yeah. November about stable coins. And, you know, I made a couple of arguments about stable coins in that speech. The major argument that I made was that if you've got, genius acts compliance stable coins they help you they help facilitate digital payments but from a savings pool of capital perspective
Starting point is 00:28:28 in the United States in Europe in places that already have access to dollar denominated savings accounts dollar denominated money market funds treasury bills if you have a system with open capital in open capital markets from a savings perspective Stable coins don't, I think, add as much. From a payments perspective, they do, because they're facilitating digital payments. But if you've got a huge pool of capital, I don't know that stable coins are adding that much. Now, that's not true in places with capital controls, and it's not true in places where the banking system struggles to penetrate because of geography or development, right?
Starting point is 00:29:09 And so you've got large parts of the world where people are living behind capital controls, where, if they wanted access to dollar savings instruments, like dollar deposits, treasury bills, money market funds, they don't have the capacity to do so because the country they're living in, the law is, you just can't move your money into dollars. We're not going to let you. And it doesn't matter how bad the people want access to dollars,
Starting point is 00:29:31 they're just not allowed to. There are other parts of the world where it's very rural and there may not be banking surfaces. And maybe people have a cell phone, and so they have a satellite link on their cell phone, but they have no access to actual banking services, or the banking services in the country are too unreliable and volatile or there may be too much inflation,
Starting point is 00:29:54 and they don't want to use the banking services. So my perspective is that I'm very optimistic about stable coin growth, but I think that a lot of the stable coin uptake is actually going to come from large volumes of money that want to be denominated in dollars, that want to sit in dollars, and are currently unable to sit in dollars. right huge pools of savings that have no other way of getting into the into the dollar system suddenly
Starting point is 00:30:18 there's a way of doing it and of course you still need to get onto the crypto ecosystem to do that so there is sort of still an entry real issue but i think it makes that i think it makes the problem easier and i sort of think of it a bit like you know a ride share app sort of being a new technology that broke up the monopoly of a taxi cab medallion right it's that type of thing that sort of that creates that creates that ability to sort of start circumventing barriers to dollar deposits that people didn't have access to before. Now, of course, tying this back to neutral rate that we were discussing before, if you have huge inflows from the rest of the world into U.S. dollar-dominated savings, that's going to weigh in the neutral rate, right? This is what happened in the late 90s
Starting point is 00:30:59 in the early 2000s, what former chairman Ben Bernanke called the global savings glut. If we hit the more optimistic projections of stable coin growth, you could be looking at at magnitudes that are, that are, you know, maybe not quite as big as the global savings clot, but let's say half as big. So, you know, there is the scope for these to matter, you know, very substantially for monitor policy as well, which of course would be a very, you know, which would be a very powerful force weighing on interest rates, keeping them lower. Yeah, I completely agree that I think a lot about stable coins as being this, this huge tailwind for the rest of the world to be able to gain entry to the dollar system.
Starting point is 00:31:37 I'm curious, how do you think about the other side of the equation, which I think goes understated, which is tokenized deposits. What do you think about those? Yeah, so tokenized deposits strike me as a, and to be clear, I have not made an extensive study of tokenized deposits in particular, but what I know about them, which is probably less than you do, is that they strike me as an improvement on services that are already being offered by banks, right? Is that something that is that something that ultimately ends up revolutionizing the banking system? I don't know, but this tokenized deposits strike me as another step in a long line of improving the financial services that banks offer by utilizing technology.
Starting point is 00:32:27 But I haven't made an extensive study of it, and I would be open to changing my mind based on things you tell me. Yeah, we'll have to have you back again for another conversation. on that one, say, but not that. Just for the folks out there who are core to the crypto industry and, you know, potential founders, et cetera, that are working towards this, this huge, you know, tell when that is going on of financial innovation. We'd just love to hear any sort of parting words to those that are trying to build
Starting point is 00:32:52 and innovate in the space in the U.S. financial system of, yeah, just your final words to them. So I'll repeat what I said before, which is that innovation is the driver, is the main driver of long-run human prosperity. So if you are working on innovation, thank you for doing what you do. And with respect to issues in payments and payments technologies, you know, when the Federal Reserve makes policy, we follow the Administrative Procedure Act, which is what all regulatory agencies have to do.
Starting point is 00:33:22 And we issue, you know, sort of notices of proposed rulemaking. We issue requests for information. Respond to those. Give us comments. You know, we search for comments from industry, from stakeholders. or from innovators, so that we can know whether the regulations are doing the job that they are supposed to do or where they need to be pushed or pulled to get them into a place to make the economy more efficient. So, you know, we put out these notices, you know, sort of, you know, let us,
Starting point is 00:33:48 let us know what needs to change to make the economy more efficient. Incredible. Well, I can't take you enough for coming here and talking at the Digital Asset Summit, Governor Moran. That was incredible. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.