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Regulators must act quickly to subject stablecoins to bank-like rules for transparency, liquidity and capital. Those failing to comply should be cut off from the financial system, to stop people drifting into an unregulated crypto-ecosystem. Policymakers are right to sound the alarm, but if stablecoins continue to grow, governments will need to move faster to contain the risks.But even The Economist gets taken in by the typical cryptocurrency hype, balancing current actual risks against future possible benefits:
Yet it is possible that regulated private-sector stablecoins will eventually bring benefits, such as making cross-border payments easier, or allowing self-executing “smart contracts”. Regulators should allow experiments whose goal is not merely to evade financial rules.They don't seem to understand that, just as the whole point of Uber is to evade the rules for taxis, the whole point of cryptocurrency is to "evade financial rules".
Below the fold I comment on the two articles.