Blockchain-based assets could be to finance what Voice of America has been to U.S. diplomacy. Stablecoins, blockchain-based assets backed by bank deposits and Treasury securities, are at the heart of a dollar-based revolution happening throughout the developing world. Their price is supposed to stay steady, often at $1. Think of them as ...

Losses at SVB, Signature and other banks reflect the risk from borrowing short and lending long. It’s natural to look to the 2008 subprime crisis for insights about why our banking system is at risk. But that crisis was a housing finance collapse driven by government policies encouraging banks to take enormous default risk in the mortgage ...

Informed customers used to monitor banks’ risk management. Now they skirt the $250,000 limit. Silicon Valley Bank’s failure makes many Americans grateful for deposit insurance, which protects accounts holding $250,000 or less. But the SVB episode also illustrates the dangers of deposit insurance. A banking system dominated by government ...

A new rule aims to make sure all legal businesses can get loans, including unpopular ones. Everyone deserves fair access to banking services. Over the past decade there have been too many allegations of banks cutting off vital services, credit and capital that legal businesses rely on to create jobs, meet community needs and support the ...

Firms that make loans and process payments should be chartered and regulated as national banks. If it lends like a bank and processes payments like a bank, is it a bank? Maybe not, depending on the outcome of a case pending in the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In the lawsuit, New York financial-services superintendent Linda Lacewell ...

The Fed was politicized long before Donald Trump got to the White House or even started tweeting. What to make of the current battle over the politicization of the Federal Reserve? The past year has featured an unprecedented attack by President Trump on Fed leaders and their independence. Mr. Trump not only questioned the board governors’ ...

What are the long-term consequences of the last several years of experimentation with unconventional monetary policy? The most important long-term impact of the experiment will be its influence on future policy makers’ beliefs about the desirability of such actions. I believe the aggressive use of quantitative easing (QE) in recent years will ...

In Rome this year, its mayor ended a centuries-old tradition of hosting a Christmas fair in the Piazza Ravona. Daniel Henninger’s December 23rd Wall Street Journal column, “The Year Christmas Died,” points to a similar loss in New York of celebrations of Christmas. Turning Christmas into an amorphous “holiday” is a bad idea. The Christmas story ...

U.S. monetary policy makers today are wrongly arguing that there is little cause for concern about inflation risk. Their arguments focus on unreliable indicators from the recent past, and they are myopic in their focus on short-term rather than medium term inflation. What are the causes for concern about medium-term inflation? If there ...

Attacks on free trade these days frequently take the form of accusations about "currency manipulation." According to Senator Chuck Schumer, countries like China, which buy and sell their currency in the market to control the rate at which their currency is exchanged for dollars, purposely cause their currencies to be undervalued in order to ...

Clear rules, and having to explain deviations from them, would make for better monetary policy. Should the Federal Reserve conduct monetary policy using a monetary policy rule? This question, a classic one in economics, was raised again during Chair Janet Yellen's recent Congressional testimony and has become the subject of intense debate ...

Markets don’t seem to believe the central bank will follow through on its midyear rate hike. With more than one million jobs added in the past three months, the unemployment rate nearly one full percentage point lower than a year ago, and rising consumer confidence, the economy is clearly on the uptick. Yet there is a worrisome disconnect ...

Depositors continue to flee the banks, and Greek 10-year bond yields rose roughly two percentage points this week. Greece’s newly elected prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, has had a busy week. He’s pledged to boost public spending, despite his country’s insolvency. He’s also promised to raise the minimum wage, despite youth unemployment of ...

Some observers of the Fed were complaining Wednesday that the FOMC statement should have rolled back plans for a mid-2015 rate increase. In their view, reduced rates of inflation observed currently, along with the strong dollar and weak nominal wage growth, should lead the Fed to postpone any rate increases. Such concerns are dead wrong. ...

Central bankers – we are told – must battle deflation risk today at all costs because deflation slows growth, and may cause recessions and financial system collapses. I agree with the view that the Fed should be targeting an announced long-run rate of inflation. And so, I agree that monetary policy should seek to avoid sustained deflation or ...

Two major flaws mean that the act doesn't address problems that led to the financial crisis of 2008. The Dodd-Frank Act, passed in 2010, mandated hundreds of major regulations to control bank risk-taking, with the aim of preventing a repeat of the taxpayer bailouts of "too big to fail" financial institutions. These regulations are on top of ...