BankThink

If the Federal Reserve wants to keep the U.S. dollar competitive in the 21st century it must move boldly to declare dollar-backed stablecoins equivalent to other forms of money.

Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Paul Atkins' effort to rein in the agency's bureaucrats is a welcome move. However, hundreds of firms damaged by unconstitutional prosecutions deserve public exoneration.

The Fed chair attributed recent rising bond yields to a strong economy. However, investors are probably also responding to other factors, including Warsh's own comments about potential changes to inflation measures.

In a new paradigm of anti-money-laundering compliance, success increasingly depends not on obtaining information faster, but on recognizing when machine-generated intelligence should not be trusted.

Community banks have long been reliant on — and constrained by — a handful of core-banking technology vendors. But enterprise artificial intelligence licenses offer the chance to transcend those limitations.

Rather than replacing bankers, artificial intelligence is likely to amplify their impact: strengths as well as weaknesses. This makes investing in employee development more important than ever.

The policies most community banks rely on for cyber liability, fidelity bonds and directors and officers insurance are full of overlapping exclusions, restrictive coverage sublimits and vague specifications. That can become an expensive problem.

A primary criticism of stablecoins harks back to the era of free banking, when individual banks printed their own notes. But that era of private money bears little resemblance to the modern realities of stablecoin issuance.

As governors prepare to designate new "opportunity zones," lenders and investors should take advantage of the chance to target capital to communities where it will both do good and generate strong returns.

Banks can price in risk and manage their way around both left-wing and right-wing administrations. But the kind of uncertainty that arises from today's brand of politics is impossible to model.