White House Says Banning Stablecoin Yield Would Hurt Consumers More Than It Helps Banks

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White House Says Banning Stablecoin Yield Would Hurt Consumers More Than It Helps Banks

The federal government’s own economists at the White House have thrown cold water on one of the central justifications for restricting stablecoin returns — and their findings run counter to a provision already written into law.

The GENIUS Act, signed in July 2025, established the first comprehensive federal framework for stablecoins. The law requires issuers to hold reserves on a one-to-one basis — meaning every dollar in circulation is backed by a real dollar in safe assets like Treasury bills, cash, or money-market funds. It also contains a blunt prohibition: issuers cannot pay holders any form of yield or interest on their coins.

The logic, at least as its advocates have framed it, is straightforward. If stablecoins start paying rates competitive with savings accounts, households may move money out of bank deposits and into tokens. Banks would lose that funding and, in turn, lend less. Community banks — smaller institutions without Wall Street’s wholesale funding options — would take the hardest hit.

Some academic analyses put that lending contraction as high as $1.5 trillion. Those numbers circulated in congressional testimony and in the press. They shaped the debate.

The White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) built a model to test the claim, and the results are striking.

Simply 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 tests stablecoin yields

At current conditions, banning stablecoin yield would increase bank lending by just $2.1 billion — a 0.02% change against a $12 trillion loan book. The welfare math runs in the other direction: consumers would lose $800 million more in forgone returns than borrowers would gain from slightly lower rates. 

The cost-benefit ratio the White House CEA calculated was 6.6 — meaning the policy costs more than six times what it delivers.

The reason the numbers are so small comes down to how stablecoin reserves actually move through the financial system. When a household converts dollars into stablecoins, the issuer doesn’t bury that money in a vault. 

Most of it gets reinvested — in Treasury bills, repo agreements, and money-market funds. Those dollars flow back into the banking system through dealers and counterparties. The White House CEA traced three balance-sheet scenarios and found that in the most common cases, aggregate deposits across the banking system remain essentially unchanged. The money reshuffles; it doesn’t disappear.

The critical variable is what fraction of stablecoin reserves end up truly locked out of lending. The White House CEA calibrated that number — called theta in their model — at 12%, based on Circle’s December 2025 reserve report for USDC. Tether holds even less in bank deposits: $34 million against a $147 billion reserve pool. The other 88% of stablecoin reserves circulates through normal credit channels. A prohibition on yield redirects a flow that, in large part, was never blocked to begin with.

The gap between theory and reality

The earlier trillion-dollar estimates made a modeling choice that the White House CEA says distorts the picture. They calculated what happens to the bank that loses deposits when a customer buys stablecoins — and then stopped. They didn’t model what happens to the bank or dealer that receives the money when the stablecoin issuer invests its reserves. In a complete model, the receiving bank expands. The net effect on system-wide lending is far smaller.

The White House CEA also found that current monetary conditions blunt the impact further. Banks today hold more than $1.1 trillion in excess liquidity above regulatory minimums. When deposits reshuffle between institutions, no bank is forced to contract because they all have slack. If the Federal Reserve were operating with scarce reserves — as it did during earlier eras — the dynamic would shift. 

Under that scenario, the model produces $531 billion in additional lending from a yield ban. But reaching that number requires four conditions to hold at once: the stablecoin market grows to six times its current relative size, all reserves shift into locked deposits, substitution between stablecoins and savings accounts is at the high end of estimates, and the Fed abandons its current framework.

The White House CEA calls this combination “implausible.”

A loophole nobody has closed…yet 

There is a complication that the White House report addresses with some candor. The yield prohibition in the GENIUS Act may not fully bind. The law bars issuers from paying yield directly to holders — but it does not bar third parties from doing so. 

Coinbase, for instance, offers “USDC Rewards” to customers who hold the coin in its wallets, funded through a revenue-sharing agreement with Circle. As of February 2026, those rewards match the rates on high-yield savings accounts, since both ultimately pass through returns on Treasuries.

Some versions of the proposed CLARITY Act would close this channel by banning intermediaries from passing yield along to holders. Whether that stricter approach would survive the political and legal scrutiny it would face remains an open question.

The White House CEA report nods toward a dimension the yield-prohibition debate has mostly ignored: what stablecoins do outside the United States. More than 80% of stablecoin transactions occur internationally, driven by users in countries with weak currencies or limited banking access who hold dollar-backed tokens as savings tools. 

Stablecoin issuers already hold more Treasury bills than sovereign nations like Saudi Arabia. Research from the Bank for International Settlements found that stablecoin inflows compress short-term Treasury yields — a structural source of cheap U.S. government financing that a yield ban would suppress by reducing adoption.

The White House CEA did not quantify this foreign-demand channel. But it makes the arithmetic of the yield prohibition harder to defend: whatever small gains domestic bank lending might see could be offset by higher borrowing costs for the federal government itself.

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This post White House Says Banning Stablecoin Yield Would Hurt Consumers More Than It Helps Banks first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.