I enjoy reading Arthur Hayes' newsletter. It's full of all kinds of wild shitcoinery and often it feels like he has an ulterior motive, but there is usually one or two chunks that are pretty on the money. This edition is no different.
Stablecoins are gonna buy all the treasuries nobody wants (blah blah blah)
Bessent can’t really do much to convince central bank reserve managers to buy more treasuries. However, there is a large under-banked, from a dollar perspective, cohort that exists in the Global South who would love nothing more than to have a positively yielding dollar currency account. As you know, all fiat is trash when compared to Bitcoin and gold. That being said, if you are within the fiat system, the best fiat is the dollar. Domestic regulators that rule most of the world’s population force their plebes to own shitty currencies beset with high inflation and limit access to the dollar financial system. These plebes would buy treasury bills at whatever yield Bessent offers, if only to escape their shitty government bond markets. Is there a way Bessent can bank these folks?
Would Trump like to bail out the EU (if the EU were to need bailing out)?
Before the emergence of stablecoins, the US Federal Reserve and the US Treasury Department always bailed out Eurodollar banking institutions when they got into trouble. A well-functioning Eurodollar market was essential to the health of the empire. But now, there is a new tool that allows Bessent to soak up those flows. At the macro level, Bessent must provide a reason for Eurodollar deposits to shift on-chain.
For example, during the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, the Fed secretly lent billions of dollars to foreign banks who were short dollars because of the knock-on effects of the collapse of subprime mortgages and their associated derivatives.[2] As a result, Eurodollar depositors believe that the US government implicitly guarantees their money even though technically they are outside of the US-regulated financial system. Declaring that non-US bank branches will not receive any help from the Fed or Treasury should another financial crisis occur will redirect Eurodollar deposits into the loving hands of stablecoin issuers. If you think this is far-fetched, a strategist at Deutsche Bank wrote a piece openly questioning whether the US would weaponize dollar swap lines to force the Europeans to do what the Trump administration requires of them. You better believe Trump would love nothing more than to castrate the Eurodollar market by effectively debanking it. These same institutions debanked his family after his first term; it’s time for payback. Karma is a bitch.
A man is never so optimistic on a TAM than when he's trying to sell it (but still, stablecoins might eat a large part of the the world)
Without the guarantee, Eurodollar depositors would act in their own best interest by moving funds into dollar-pegged stablecoins like USDT. Tether holds all of its assets as US bank deposits and or T-bills. By law, the US government guarantees all deposits held at the eight Too Big to Fail (TBTF) banks; post the 2023 Regional Banking Crisis, the Fed and Treasury effectively guaranteed all deposits at any US bank or branch. The default risk of T-bills is nil as well because the US government will never voluntarily go bankrupt because it can always print dollars to repay T-bill holders. Therefore, stablecoin deposits are risk-free in nominal dollar terms, but now Eurodollar deposits are not.Quickly, dollar-pegged stablecoin issuers will face an influx of $10 to $13 trillion, and subsequently purchase T-bills. The stablecoin issuer becomes a price-insensitive buyer of Buffalo Bill Bessent’s dogshit paper in FUCKING SIZE!
There's a lot of speculation here, assumptions built on assumptions, but it's not implausible...
Hayes has a whole second half of the piece where he posits that social media companies will be the way stablecoins get delivered to everybody living outside the US and EU (and he also does a hard shill for several companies Hayes' fund is backing), but it you have the time, it's an interesting read.
I put this post in econ because like it or not, stablecoins seem to be becoming a mainstream part of how our economy works.