Pod Insights Odd Lots Why US Banks Are Trying to Turn Themselves Into Super Apps About this episode Rohit Chopra is a former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was created in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. In this episode, we speak with him about the current status of the CFPB under the Trump administration, and Rohit's experience while working at the bureau, including decisions made by regulators during the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and others. Rohit frames his experience as one where he was often dealing with the convergence of old-fashioned banking with lightning-fast technological development. In this context, we also talk about stablecoins (which Rohit says aren't really "crypto," per se), why US banks are now trying to turn themselves into "super apps," and the massive growth of "Buy Now, Pay Later" platforms. Only Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox — now delivered every weekday — plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript 9,707 words · 11 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Finance is increasingly being built on digital rails. But as the adoption of virtual assets, tokenization and stable coins grows, can regulation not only keep pace but help accelerate it? Find out more later in the podcast.
0:16 Speaker 01 This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Business Week's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting
0:58 Speaker 01 and hiring practices, but according to recruiters, advisors and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company and Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at chatgpt.com.
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2:18 Speaker 01 Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news.
2:34 Tracy Alloway? Hello and welcome to another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.
2:38 Joe Weisenthal? And I'm Joe Weisenthal.
2:40 Tracy Alloway? Joe, if I had said to you a few years ago that there's a bank and the bank is taking deposits, you know, checking accounts, and it's putting that money into US Treasuries and that business model is going to completely fail, the bank is going to collapse, what would you have said?
3:01 Joe Weisenthal? I would have said, let's short the stock. That's what I would have said. I would have said, if you told me that and you knew the only insight, the only actionable thing there, I said, all right, let's short it.
3:10 Tracy Alloway? All right, that's the right answer, clearly. If you were a banking regulator, what would you have done?
3:15 Joe Weisenthal? Well, I don't know anything about being a banking regulator. It seems really hard. And regulators in general often get criticized in various ways. And they're like, oh, you busted this really small-time ticky-tack insider trading ring. It's not that big of a deal. Or, oh, here is this thing that collapsed and why didn't you catch it before? They're always going to get upset about that. But I have to say, I have a lot of sympathy for the regulators because for the most part, my impression is that the US has one of the most robust, transparent, high-depth capital markets and financial systems in the entire world, which for the most part, does not collapse. And so I feel like when it comes to regulatory issues, there's a lot of unseen where what we see is like, if they're in the news, it's
3:59 Joe Weisenthal? not good. But most of the time, things aren't in the news.
4:02 Tracy Alloway? That should be the tagline for America's financial system. Most of the time does not collapse.
4:07 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah, unironically.
4:09 Tracy Alloway? Well, I'm talking, of course, or I was talking about Silicon Valley Bank and the collapse there. And I think it's still very surprising to me. In one sense, it was an old-fashioned bank run. But in another sense, it's very surprising that here's a bank that's basically buying a bunch of ultra-safe assets, US Treasuries. And still, it ran into trouble. And banks, of course, are mandated to buy Treasuries as well. We've talked about this on the show any number of times now. But I want to talk more about it.
4:39 Joe Weisenthal? Sure. You know, the one thing I'll say too, that I've been thinking a lot with SVB is, I think in the wake of the 2008, 2009 financial crisis, we got very... Focused on the asset side of the balance sheet, right? And so it's like, oh, what do they hit? What kind of subprime loans do they have? And how good are their all of that, et cetera? But one of the things, you know, like Josh Younger talked about recently and others, Stephen Kelly had a note in our newsletter, you know, a lot of it is the difficulty in modeling the liability side and the slipperiness of the deposit base and how hard that is to know because you can have long duration deposits that suddenly become overnight deposits. It's really tricky and I still think these are difficult things to understand.
5:19 Tracy Alloway? Yeah, it feels like we're always fighting the last bank battle or the last bond battle. Okay, well, on that note, we do in fact have the perfect guest. We are going to be speaking with Rohit Chopra. He is, of course, the former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, also a former FTC commissioner. So really the perfect person to talk to if we want to dig into what happened to SVB, what it means for bank regulation, and then also what banks are doing right now.
5:47 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah.
5:48 Tracy Alloway? Rohit, thank you so much for coming on All Lots.
5:50 Speaker 05 Thanks for having me.
5:51 Tracy Alloway? Here's my first question. Maybe it's a little pointed, but does the CFPB still exist? So we just got the one big, beautiful bill that's been passed and it looks like it slashes funding for the bureau. And of course, we know that Trump isn't exactly a fan of federal agencies. So I'm curious, is it still functioning?
6:09 Joe Weisenthal? And it was already kind of good.
6:10 Tracy Alloway? Yeah.
6:11 Speaker 05 It's a good question and it seems by every single piece of evidence that it's just maybe there technically, but not doing a damn thing. We are hearing nearly every day about another financial institution that is being released from obligations. It has been months since there has been an enforcement action and many are estimating that this means billions and billions of dollars that consumers are not getting back in refunds. And frankly, a big disadvantage to all of those financial companies that follow the rules.
6:48 Joe Weisenthal? When it was working, when it or when it was operating. Describe to me what the remit of the CFPB is. And one of the criticisms of the that people leveled is they didn't know what the scope was, et cetera. What is the formal scope of the CFPB?
7:04 Speaker 05 Well, essentially, we saw decades ago that there weren't just banks in the business of offering consumer loans and products. It was all sorts of other companies, payday lenders, auto lenders. And in fact, now, the bulk of mortgages are originated outside of banks, the bulk of auto loans. And so after the subprime mortgage crisis, there was broad agreement that the Federal Reserve Board and other agencies just didn't focus and have the attention on making sure that existing consumer law was being followed. So the CFPB is responsible for inspecting the largest financial institutions and taking
7:49 Speaker 05 them to court when they break the law. Of course, also administering all sorts of rules that keep the mortgage markets, the credit report, credit reporting companies, and so many others in line.
8:02 Tracy Alloway? How does the CFPB interact with all the other bank policy stakeholders? Because there there seems to be quite a few.
8:10 Speaker 05 You mean the other regulators?
8:11 Tracy Alloway? Other regulators, yeah.
8:12 Speaker 05 Well, certainly, the CFPB is the only regulator that oversees that gigantic, non-bank, consumer lending apparatus. And also, it has primary and exclusive jurisdiction over all banks and credit unions, over 10 billion in assets. That means every credit card company, every big player in the market is primarily overseen by the CFPB. So the fact that it is now functionally a dead fish is leaving a very, very big gap that no one can even legally fill in.
8:49 Joe Weisenthal? Where do you see the biggest gap manifesting right now? When you look at the consumer financial landscape, what isn't being enforced or what isn't being examined that, in your view, merits enforcement or examination?
9:02 Speaker 05 Well, I think the top priority is always trying to understand the linkage between the biggest markets and the broader economy. We saw That that linkage with the mortgage market was pretty damn big. And its failure really crashed not just the US financial system, but the entire global marketplace. So of course, making sure that mortgages are fair and transparent, that key rules like the qualified mortgage rule, which sets some of the core standards to make sure there is not predatory mortgage lending, but also, Joe, the nuts and bolts. Most of the issues that come in are people who have errors on their credit report.
9:45 Speaker 05 They say, that's not even my name. Or people whose bank accounts were illegally debited or cleaned out due to fraud. There's all sorts of issues that protect specific populations, military members, and so many other pieces that keep the markets working. So I don't want to pinpoint anything other than to say that when I took office, it was after another few years where there really wasn't much going on there. And we saw how financial firms not just pushed the envelope, but sometimes outright took advantage of people without any accountability.
10:26 Tracy Alloway? Well, speaking of accountability, you know, we mentioned SVB at the top of the show. And one thing I've heard, there's a little bit of a chicken and egg situation when people are analyzing the root cause of that particular bank collapse. So some people say, well, interest rates went up and that led to paper losses on the bank's bond holdings. And so people got nervous and started pulling their money. And then other people say, well, people started pulling their money even though the bond losses didn't necessarily need to be crystallized anytime soon. So I'm curious, can you pinpoint the spark that set off the latest bank crisis?
11:07 Speaker 05 Well, for me, it really was March 8th, 2023. Two things happened that day. One was the wind down of a bank called Silvergate Bank, which was heavily involved in banking some of the major crypto trading platforms. There was a flight of deposits out of that bank after the crypto winter and the collapse of FTX. We had been tracking, I serve on the FDIC board. And we were tracking Silvergate Bank and on that day, they announced that they were not going to need to be put into receivership. They would be self liquidating. And simultaneously,
11:49 Speaker 05 on that same day, we had an announcement by Silicon Valley Bank, which was a little bit of a goofy press release they issued, saying they're experiencing some real losses on their securities portfolio and they're going to be looking for capital. It raised a lot of red flags and suspicions about whether they were viable. And this is something that is just so fundamental about banking and deposit taking is that it really is based on a belief that your money is going to be there. And the truth is, is with federal deposit insurance and Federal Reserve discount window lending,
12:34 Speaker 05 it always is, except when you have a bank that is over 90% uninsured deposits. This is something that is really unusual and some would argue is not even really a bank, when you are that dependent on very, very large depositors that you grew so quickly. And so then the run began.
13:00 Joe Weisenthal? How much would you ascribe it to the high percentage of non insured deposits versus the concentration? So in very specific industries. So you mentioned the crypto one, but also here are all of these startups that had raised a ton of money in 2020 and 2021. A bunch of them apparently just put their money in a bank, which is kind of weird to me, a non insured. And then we had the stock market plunge in 2022, funding dried up. There was no, very little new VC fundraising. So new dry powder to be put into the bank, startups drawing down their own deposits just to make payroll or whatever else. And so you have two things going on. One is the high level of uninsured deposits, but also the
13:45 Joe Weisenthal? concentration so that there was this one specific sector that was all going through the cycle at the same time.
13:51 Speaker 05 So let me just push on that because even though it is one sector, and I agree with you, the concentration. Was an important factor in this. But let's remember that the individual firms that were funded by venture capital, many of them were doing fine. There was not necessarily something specifically or systemically wrong with those businesses. But I think, and I agree with every small and midsize business out there. If I am launching a startup, whether it is an AI company or a dry cleaner, it doesn't rank in the top 20 reasons of my business failing that my bank is going to fail. Sure.
14:35 Speaker 05 And so what you start hearing is that these businesses, which are highly networked, as well as much faster communication. Yeah. You get the advice from your funders and others that you need to run. And it was very clear that it was not just happening at SVB. It then was happening all over the system.
14:59 Tracy Alloway? I was on a train to Connecticut around that time and someone was sitting kind of close to me and it turned out they were banking with SVB, their company was. And I could hear the panic in their voice as they tried to like digest the news of what was happening. But on that note, why did corporate treasurers, why did they put all their deposits in a single bank when presumably they know that there's a cap on FDIC insurance?
15:25 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's a good question. I think there are some practical issues for some small and midsize businesses about when you're running payroll or when you're getting in a lot of receipts. I don't have as much sympathy for some of the very large companies that we have learned through public reporting, put a whole lot of funds in that bank, including really their entire cash reserves. So at the end of the day, though, the regulators, we had, we saw an active run that was occurring. And of course, those insured depositors, the insured depositors really through the entire crisis, did not really run. It was those uninsured.
16:08 Speaker 05 It started at Silicon Valley Bank. After that Wednesday release, by Friday morning.
16:17 Speaker 05 They were dead. We had actually voted the night before, or maybe at the predawn hours, to accept it into receivership. And I believe by the time it was closed, it had roughly $100 billion queued up of outbound wires. So this was an enormous and fast run. And many of those techno libertarians that we often hear about who want no regulation, they were actively beating the drum online, asking for a bailout.
16:50 Joe Weisenthal? Well, this is actually interesting point. And I was gonna go there next. And I think, again, it was a thing that Stephen Kelly wrote for us. But one of the things about 2023, I think he said, it wasn't a crisis of regional banks. It was a regional bank crisis, as in specifically the region of California, because then there were other parts of, there were other banks that got into a lot of trouble. And the all thing they had in common was that they were all sort of in some way connected to California. I think I remember, like, people were going out looking for any bank that had California in the title in some way and betting against them. But talk to us about regulating banks and monitoring runs in a world of these networks, whether they're the public networks on social
17:32 Joe Weisenthal? media, or just the sort of networks of like minded individuals who are all in the same WhatsApp group.
17:38 Speaker 05 Yeah, I'm a believer that we can never fight, and we shouldn't want to fight the speed of communication. We want markets to have live information. I will say this, we saw the run start first at Silicon Valley Bank. And then, I think because of the confluence of factors with Silvergate, it wasn't just California as anything that seemed to have any crypto or tech adjacency. Of course, the second bank that we closed that Sunday was Signature Bank, which operated a crypto network, but also had a very real business. It is a New York City bank that was deeply involved in New York City multifamily real
18:23 Speaker 05 estate. You, at the same time, Joe, had people worried about commercial real estate. But what we were seeing was that the banks with the highest percentage of uninsured deposits, they were being Badly battered almost immediately.
18:56 Speaker 00 What's next for virtual assets? I'm Jacob Grease, host of Economy Scale, a series exploring growth in key global sectors. And in this episode, we're diving into the digital forces shaping finance. Shaun McHugh from Dubai-based Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority has this to say.
19:12 Speaker 06 We're seeing a lot of insocial players come in, digital asset dedicated hedge funds, high frequency traders and that sort of thing, and folks who service insocial clients.
19:21 Speaker 00 As more capital enters the market, adaptive regulation is likely to become increasingly key. Reece Merrick of Ripple says.
19:29 Speaker 07 A lot of regulators globally would like to keep the industry at arm's length. That's the opposite here. I think also what you'll find is that regulation and frameworks can come out, but some of them are maybe a slight iteration on some 80-year-old policy and not actually in line with what the technology can do and offer. And again, that's very different in Dubai.
19:48 Speaker 00 Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts. This series is brought to you by Bloomberg Media Studios and the Dubai Department of Economy and Tourism.
19:58 Speaker 01 This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Businessweek's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting
20:40 Speaker 01 and hiring practices, but according to recruiters, advisors and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company. And Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates, quote, "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute, brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at ChatGPT.com.
21:21 Tracy Alloway? So ultimately, a decision was made to expand the deposit insurance net and basically bail out SVB customers and others. What was the decision-making process like building up to that? And how big a deal is that? Is there like a legacy from that decision?
21:38 Speaker 05 It's a very big deal, and it's one that, in many ways, is still hard to live with the decision, even though it was the right decision, I think. Here's how it works. The federal law basically directs the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the FDIC, to resolve a failed bank at the least cost to the deposit insurance fund. That's the fund that everyone pays into with their bank deposits, and it builds up a fund to pay for certain bank failures and make sure deposits are made whole. And here's what was interesting about Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, and then later First Republic.
22:21 Speaker 05 It was a supermajority of uninsured deposits. That means a bank failure is not that expensive to resolve. The cost to the deposit insurance fund for a bank that is 90% plus uninsured is going to be pretty low.
22:42 Speaker 05 If the law says, resolve it at the least cost, in many ways, the best case is sometimes to liquidate it, make as many people whole as possible and top them up with the deposit insurance fund. But there is a proviso in the law, which says that if a failure is likely to lead to systemic effects, or to threaten the viability of the US financial system, there's a process of key turning that a series of regulators must go through to recommend to the Treasury Secretary, who must consult with the President, to
23:25 Speaker 05 authorize the FDIC to take a different path. So, over the weekend, the Sunday after the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, and Sunday morning, roughly Signature Bank, was taken into receivership. First Republic was a zombie and basically dead already. There was a decision where the FDIC Board, we voted to turn that key, and the Federal Reserve Board had voted to turn that key. And ultimately, the Treasury Secretary discussed it with the President and activated that authority. The authority, essentially, led to the backstopping of
24:09 Speaker 05 all uninsured deposits. That meant that everyone would be made whole in the case of the failure. And it was a tough decision. I think there was a question. I was arguing and questioning, should we be maybe raising the limit dramatically, perhaps to $25 or $50 million? What we were seeing in the system was active movement of uninsured deposits everywhere. And ultimately, the decision to invoke that exception really did calm the system, for the most part, with the big exception of First Republic Bank.
24:53 Tracy Alloway? So, the other thing that happened, other than the expanded deposit insurance, was the creation of a new Fed lending facility, another acronym, the BTFP. How big a deal was that one?
25:07 Speaker 05 That one was weird. All banks have the ability to access the discount window through the Federal Reserve.
25:13 Tracy Alloway? Right.
25:14 Speaker 05 But the Federal Reserve used some bailout authorities to launch this bank term funding program. This allowed banks to pledge their treasury securities at par and draw, draw funds from the Federal Reserve. I think there were a lot of us who raised our eyebrows at this. If the banks already had access to the discount window, why did they need this special program? I worried about the precedent setting of this. It was justified on the basis that there is stigma of going to the discount window. Ultimately, we saw
25:53 Speaker 05 some financial institutions game and arbitrage the program by drawing on it, but then earning interest on reserves. I think we just have to be really careful when the Fed engages in lots of bailout programs because it sends a signal to the market that they can expect it the next time around.
26:16 Joe Weisenthal? As a regulator, and there are many people who say this, and I, you had a high level of scrutiny towards companies that banked crypto companies, and many of them claimed that they were treated unfairly. What is it, just from a high level, I'll start there, from a high level, what issues emerge when, if any issues emerge, from a bank that tries to build up a business among crypto companies?
26:39 Speaker 05 I think this is a bit of a conspiracy theory, to be honest.
26:43 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah, no, look, I'm a, but I'm just from a regulatory person. Okay, go on.
26:46 Speaker 05 Because, because the truth is, is that the issues with Silicon Valley Bank, as you know, and described earlier, was really about being so deeply underwater on their treasury securities.
26:58 Joe Weisenthal? Sure. But there's, whether we're talking about Signature Bank, which did have a pretty big crypto book, but also you just get all these crypto companies like, oh, we don't have, it's so difficult for us to find a bank account. Is it difficult for them to do banking?
27:12 Speaker 05 Yeah, so let's see what we mean about banking.
27:14 Joe Weisenthal? Okay, yeah.
27:15 Speaker 05 For, for crypto. Lending. Certainly, there are going to be some banks who feel they have no expertise in this. I think the really interesting question is about deposit.
27:27 Joe Weisenthal? Yes, definitely. I'm not talking about crypto. I'm talking about the deposit taking from crypto native company.
27:32 Speaker 05 Deposit taking, there are a set of issues that banks always are going to want to look at when it comes to taking very, very large deposits with a lot of in and out activity. And much of that is related to their own obligations for money laundering as well as what was mentioned before, deposit concentration. So when you are a bank that has a couple of depositors who are the super majority of your deposit base, you are obviously going to take some steps to be careful around that. And I would say that the crypto issues in this run were fairly muted.
28:13 Speaker 05 It was really the perception about the potential exposures that we saw through the market. Though I feel that within a few days, the fixation again was on uninsured deposits.
28:28 Tracy Alloway? When it comes to the bond losses, it strikes me that the Fed is kind of in a difficult position because on the one hand, it has to conduct monetary policy. If inflation is high, it has to raise benchmark rates. But on the other hand, it also has a financial stability mandate. It's not part of the dual mandate, but it is a regulator. And raising interest rates in this case sparked a bank run, it seems. How is the Fed supposed to balance these two goals?
28:57 Speaker 05 I don't see that as a balance at all.
28:59 Tracy Alloway? Okay.
28:59 Speaker 05 I think there is a lot that the Federal Reserve has really missed in many of the situations involving financial stability.
29:12 Speaker 05 Around Lehman Brothers, as well as even including COVID. But certainly, this one was a more clear linkage where when you have high concentrations of bond portfolios that are underwater, you need to be extra careful to not make sure that they are undercapitalized, that they lack liquidity, and frankly, that you are not turning a blind eye when you are supervising that institution. The warning signs with Silicon Valley Bank were there for months, and I do think there
29:51 Speaker 05 was a bit of a culture at the Federal Reserve of really taking a light touch in the years leading up to the crisis that I think has proven to be costly.
30:20 Speaker 01 This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute, brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Businessweek's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk, and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs, and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw, innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting
31:02 Speaker 01 and hiring practices, but according to recruiters, advisors, and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company. And Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates, quote, "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute, brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at ChatGPT.com.
31:43 Joe Weisenthal? I want to go back to crypto because I want to talk not just, I understand the obligations that a bank has in terms of money laundering, in terms of lots of in and out transactions, et cetera. However, from a regulatory perspective, were banks that built up a crypto book of business, did they get extra scrutiny in some way? Or does that merit extra scrutiny?
32:06 Speaker 05 I think you always want to make sure that rules are as clear as possible. And I do think bank regulation has turned into really a messy set of rules. Frankly, I think to accommodate the largest players rather than simple, bright line rules. When it comes to new types of activities, there's no question that novel activities are going to need a little bit more look than, say, a straightforward mortgage or a straightforward small business loan. So when you have particularly a bank that doesn't have experience in a product that may pose some real risks to them,
32:52 Speaker 05 I don't think it's unreasonable for a bank regulator to kick the tires.
32:56 Joe Weisenthal? What does kicking the tires look like specifically?
32:59 Speaker 05 I think it can take a wide range of activities. It really depends on what type of new business that that bank is offering. But at the core, making sure that that bank is well capitalized and liquid is always the top priority. But if, you know, banks play a major role in the financial statecraft of America. And one of the big reasons and benefits of the reserve currency is the role in detecting and deterring terrorism, finance, drug cartels, and more. And federal law puts some real obligations on them for that.
33:37 Tracy Alloway? Okay, so speaking of novel businesses, I want to widen the net a little bit and maybe talk about fintech and what banks are doing right now. And here, I have to issue a disclaimer, which is, I'm very jaded about fintech in general. I used to cover it at the FT, and I heard the same stories, the same themes over and over again, like, "Big tech is coming for the banks," or "Retail is coming for the banks," like Walmart starting a financial product and things like that. Fast forward to today, I mean, it does seem like this is something that is actually happening. What's the ultimate ambition there in the payment space?
34:16 Speaker 05 Well, payments is really something that has so rapidly changed. Many of it is very good. It's easier to move money, particularly with mobile devices. It's faster than it used to be. I do think that we have some real concerns about the playbook, that many of the firms who are moving money, how are they monetizing it? A lot of our payments companies and big tech companies, I think, are really drooling over what they see in China, where Alipay and WeChat Pay are trafficking almost all of the consumer payments, non-cash payments.
34:59 Tracy Alloway? You can't pay in cash at a Starbucks in Beijing. I know from personal experience. You have to have an app.
35:05 Speaker 05 There's a lot of questions about, what is the monetization scheme there? When I was at the CFPB, we led a study that looked at all of these major payment platforms. And I think there was a desire to monetize a lot of that payments information through surveillance, being able to know exactly, not just the amount someone is paying, but the SKU-level data in their basket, ultimately feeding a foundational algorithm that ultimately could serve up personalized prices. There was lots of issues we dealt with when it comes to fraud
35:47 Speaker 05 and identity theft. There were certainly issues when it comes to the shift of where money was being stored. Many people believed that the app they were using to send money had money in a bank account somewhere, but in fact, maybe it was in an uninsured account. So I think that we should be looking at payments in terms of what is the ambitions of those companies and why do they want it? We worked hard with global central banks and regulators to inject more competition. Apple, for example, had a real chokehold over iOS devices, only allowing Apple Pay to be used.
36:32 Speaker 05 Europe has banned that practice. Other countries are looking to restrict it as well. So I think that stablecoin, and once stablecoin becomes part of the broader ecosystem, which it may, it will open up some additional issues about how payments in America will ultimately work.
36:54 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah, I was just gonna ask about that, actually, because to some extent, that seems like a potentially good thing. If I'm worried about, okay, there's a handful of internet giants and a handful of commerce giants who want to have more and more skew level data about myself and what I buy, to my mind, it seems possible that stablecoins and having your own distributed wallet on your phone or something like that could change the architecture of the internet such that there isn't such an information bottleneck that only a few giant companies have access to.
37:30 Speaker 05 Yeah, it depends on who's issuing them. When I was at the Federal Trade Commission, Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, others, announced the Libra project, which I think was completely a way to cement more of a moat of Facebook and now Meta's empire of being able to track and trace the flow of money and ultimately to be able to ensure that merchants operating in their ecosystem would use their currency of choice. So I think it's really important. That we do not have payments and money controlled by any real big commercial player.
38:14 Speaker 05 It is, if there is a stablecoin that is issued completely separately, that is not affiliated with one of those companies. But I worry that the market could easily tip toward an existing big tech network. And ultimately, that might provide huge advantages to that firm, but not necessarily the whole economy.
38:39 Joe Weisenthal? Tracy, you know, it's funny to me is, you know, you have all the crypto people and a lot of them got really upset about Libra again and how that thing all failed. But to my mind, if you think about it, many of those same tech people hated the speech regulations that existed on the big social networks in the early 2020s and the late 10s and the idea of shadow banning and all of this stuff. And it's like, imagine if they did that to payments, right? Like, do you really want to invest that same power that they have to decide what is appropriate speech and not appropriate speech into the realm of, okay, now they also have the ability to regulate what is appropriate payments and inappropriate payments? That's a lot of investiture of power.
39:19 Tracy Alloway? This is the issue that came up in the UK, right? There was already some drama about, who was it? Nigel Farage's bank account being taken away because of his politics. So, yeah, that concern is definitely there.
39:31 Speaker 05 And we had that here where PayPal had sent out some terms and conditions that allowed PayPal to fine people for their speech, presumably off platform. And I think we need to be really careful about giving any of those firms the ability to really have a big footprint.
40:00 Speaker 05 Either on speech or on commerce, and that is part of the reason why most developed countries have separated banking and commerce. But we are now potentially in a new era, and I would argue stablecoin is not really about crypto. That might certainly be the technology, but it is essentially a new type of payments and banking charter.
40:23 Tracy Alloway? Wait, talk more about that because most people, when they think of stablecoins, they probably think of a money market fund. But as you point out, there's a huge overlap with banking in the sense that stablecoin issuers are taking in people's money and for the most part, supposedly, putting it into things like US Treasuries, maybe gold, ultra-safe assets. And the whole business is built on the premise that depositors are always going to get their money back, right? That seems like an echo of a bank.
40:53 Speaker 05 That's right, and I think over time, we have seen how the line has blurred between a bank and other types of deposit instruments. You know, essentially, the Federal Reserve has multiple times needed to stabilize money market funds and in fact, has a facility at the New York Federal Reserve, the Overnight Reverse Repo Program, that one could consider a sort of daily bailout program to keep it stable and transmit monetary policy. I really worry that if we keep having enormous flows from banks to these money funds,
41:37 Speaker 05 we are essentially going to create problems with how we transmit and intermediate credit to the real economy. I would argue that a stablecoin, if it was a tokenized bank deposit versus a tokenized money market fund, has a lot of different effects long term. Most of us know that banks are still the key to lend to small businesses, to lend to farms, and to lend to the real economy. If you are essentially putting a thumb on the scale toward money market funds or tokenized money market funds, the beneficiaries are very large firms, sovereigns, and others who can access those money markets.
42:21 Speaker 05 So we should really want to make sure that banks... Or there is some, something that takes the place of filling in the gap for small businesses, farmers and others who depend on bank credit.
42:35 Joe Weisenthal? So the Senate in June passed the Genius Act to, you know, to start creating a more robust set of stablecoin regulations, but it did not allow for yield-bearing stablecoins. So it's a great business if you're in the stablecoin business, collect all that yield, but you don't have to pass it on, unlike a bank. What's your perspective on that? Is this about preserving the importance of deposit-taking bank institutions so that they're not disintermediated into this way? Or is this just a sop to the banks so that normal deposits are still a good business?
43:08 Speaker 05 It's a very messy piece of legislation. I think there is some arguments that yield chasing of an uninsured product is probably a recipe for more bailouts and more mess. On the other hand, we can't be setting federal laws to advantage banks. They often get what they want anyway. I would argue that one of the best ways to pursue some tokenized payment systems that could potentially disintermediate the incumbent payment networks would be to use tokenized bank deposits. And just like we could have paper cash each issued by a different
43:51 Speaker 05 regional Federal Reserve Bank, our digital wallets could host tokenized bank deposits that are sitting in banks across the country and being intermediated into credit to the real economy. I think what we see is largely a legislative framework that is going to benefit the big crypto incumbents.
44:14 Tracy Alloway? Well, speaking of benefiting the big, another large-ish trend in the banking system is consolidation, of course. And post the financial crisis, I think we saw the number of small banks, regional banks out there absolutely plunge. And I think it took a few years before we actually got a new bank set up, a de novo bank, and it was, I think, in Pennsylvania, Amish country, which was kind of funny. I guess my question is, presumably, you want a diverse network of lenders out there because you want to avoid the too-big-to-fail problem and you want people to have access to credit, to your point earlier. How do you encourage a more diverse or dynamic banking system and avoid
44:56 Tracy Alloway? the outcome where, you know, Joe and I always like to throw up the charts of how JP Morgan or Wells Fargo came into being and it's just a story of them snapping up lots and lots of companies?
45:09 Speaker 05 Decades ago, there was a Supreme Court case that was very prescient that warned that consolidation in the banking system would ultimately contribute to mass consolidation in the real economy. And you're right, the number of small community banks has dwindled. And there's all sorts of reasons for this, including changing technology, consumer preferences, so much more. But I think one of the real big reasons is that there is a perception that the very largest banks, as you mentioned, will be protected. When Silicon Valley Bank was failing, where was all the money flowing to?
45:53 Speaker 05 They were taking their money out of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and others. It went to the very big guys because every investor believes that these banks are essentially always going to be protected. They are able to raise money with that implicit guarantee. And that means they are able to outcompete on so many dimensions, unfairly, I think, their smaller counterparts. So I really think we need to be careful about giving benefits and picking winners and losers. And that's what we have been doing, is essentially picking
46:38 Speaker 05 the very largest banks as the winners and others as the losers.
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48:24 Joe Weisenthal? We recently had the Robinhood CEO on the podcast, and they're very excited about tokenization of all kinds of things, including a tokenization of stock, for that matter. And due to crypto technology of some sorts, there's enforcing borders in terms of defining what a regulatory perimeter even is from a geographical standpoint is really hard. And due to smart contracts and stable coins, et cetera, it's very plausible that you could somewhere in the world, maybe in an offshore or a lightly regulated country, create some token that tracks some regulated instrument and it trades like a regulated instrument
49:04 Joe Weisenthal? up until maybe something goes bust. Is there a danger that regulating consumer-facing financial products? That law won't be able to keep up, that there is this sort of like technological explosion of things and that to some extent, because anyone who has access to a stablecoin wallet and access to the internet can theoretically trade anything, anywhere, that it would just be a crisis from the regulatory perspective and keeping a handle on everything that's going on.
49:30 Speaker 05 Well, I think we do have a jump ball right now on the future of the dollar. We do see the Trump administration very interested, I think, in fundamentally rethinking the role of the dollar in the system. You raise this example of technology, but for years, we have seen, I believe it's a $14 trillion market of offshore dollars, Euro dollars, which poses very serious and significant issues for the entire regulatory system.
50:03 Joe Weisenthal? It seems like now we could have Euro stocks, like literally not the Euro stocks index, but something that resembles in trading a US listed regulated stock, except it's on some digital exchange. It's a decentralized exchange, but it moves in the same way. And how do you even like begin to wrap your head around?
50:22 Speaker 05 Yeah, well, I think the way in which you want to is constantly to figure out, how do we solve real problems in the economy? And how do you build for that rather than allowing for products, services to create it purely based on arbitrage? I also think we want to make sure that we don't try and create something so complex that it will always be arbitrage around. And we need a lot more simple, bright lines that investors, consumers, everyone can really easily understand and easily follow. Ultimately, the US is going
51:04 Speaker 05 to be the place where people want to do business because of strong rule of law and a good legal system and all of those things. And that's one of the most important things to safeguard.
51:17 Tracy Alloway? Speaking of novel businesses and I guess the idea of policy kind of chasing after new tech. I'm just going to go all Seinfeld on this question and ask, what's the deal with buy now, pay later? Because that is everywhere nowadays. And obviously, the question, the wider question it poses is whether or not consumers are just taking on a load of credit in a new way that possibly isn't accounted for very well.
51:44 Speaker 05 Well, it's always interesting. There's a table published by the Federal Reserve about consumer credit outstanding, and it is always missing many things, including buy now, pay later, which we have seen surge through the pandemic, growing more than 10x. It has really changed quite a bit, Tracy. Buy now, pay later strangely was not really homegrown in America. It came from other jurisdictions. It was popular in Sweden, Australia, and now it is a major form of credit. Just so everyone understands what it is. You take out a loan, often pay in four.
52:28 Speaker 05 It does not have an interest rate, but the buy now, pay later lender takes a cut from the merchant, just like a credit card company does. So you have seen a lot of consumers believe that this is a better way because it is no interest. But the CFPB did extensive study on it and found that there's very significant issues when it comes to people returning goods and not necessarily getting it credited. There's issues of people having multiple buy now, pay later loans across different lenders and are levered up. I would hear actually complaints from auto lenders who would say to me, how am I supposed to write this auto loan if I don't know what the buy now, pay later
53:13 Speaker 05 loans are because they're not on the credit report often?
53:16 Joe Weisenthal? This strikes me as super interesting. I mean, just like, how inadequate right now is our tracking, both in terms of the scale of it? Just when we think about, okay, we want to have aggregate sense of consumer indebtedness. And then how much of a struggle is it for actual lenders to judge the creditworthiness of consumers because of the lack of visibility into the BNPLs?
53:40 Speaker 05 The faster it grows, the more difficult it will be. And I think a key piece of this is, we are seeing all sorts of buy now, pay later-like products.
53:52 Speaker 05 Go beyond the traditional lenders. We're seeing banks and credit card companies saying, use my card and then go online and you can convert it to buy now, pay later. Or some people thinking about how to connect it to community bank debit cards. So I do believe it is a big blind spot about consumer credit outstanding. Right now, obviously, it is a relatively modest piece of the overall unsecured debt. But if it continues its trajectory, even if it slows its growth, it will be a big piece of that pie.
54:30 Tracy Alloway? I mean, presumably, buy now, pay later would fall or could fall under the remit of the CFPB, but.
54:38 Speaker 05 Well, it does.
54:39 Tracy Alloway? It does, but, I mean, the CFPB is not really functioning anymore. That seems like an issue.
54:46 Speaker 05 Well, what we are seeing is that the protections that the CFPB tried to put in place for buy now, pay later borrowers, some basic ones. You can get some statements that you're able to return goods and get it credited. It looks like a lot of that is just being thrown in the trash or just not enforced. We are seeing states all over the country, though, looking to beef up protections because they see how this could create a treadmill of debt for people.
55:18 Tracy Alloway? Just one more question from me. So you were head of the CFPB under the Biden administration and you were at the FTC under the first Trump administration and you got to experience some, some of the second Trump administration. What's your sense of the difference between Trump I and Trump 2.0 and how that administration is operating and thinking about things like regulation?
55:45 Speaker 05 Yeah, I think that there is, when it comes to finance, a real sense of.
55:53 Speaker 05 Concern about how they want to think about the dollar and how they want to think of the future of Treasury securities. I see Secretary Besen talk very deliberately about wanting stablecoin, for example, to be a way to boost demand for Treasuries. Of course, there's lots of issues with that. But I think more broadly, the first Trump administration was a lot less organized. And now there is a clearly a plan that they are executing on, even if it seems chaotic. So I think for those who have concerns about
56:33 Speaker 05 it, I don't think they should write it off as just chaos or craziness. I think there is a lot of things that are being done that will have lasting effects on the financial system.
56:47 Tracy Alloway? All right, Rohit Chopra, thank you so much for coming on Off Lots. That was so interesting and really good to get a regulator's actual perspective.
56:56 Speaker 05 Thanks for having me.
56:57 Joe Weisenthal? Thank you so much.
57:10 Tracy Alloway? Joe, that was really interesting, and I'm so glad we could have Rohit on to give a sort of fly-on-the-wall perspective of a regulator during, you know, what was a pretty dramatic time.
57:20 Joe Weisenthal? There's so many interesting things happening in FINRA right now in general. Just obviously, the sort of like turning of the dial. You know, I think like a really big-picture story that doesn't get a lot of attention because we focus a lot on the changing administrations. Because the financial crisis was a really long time ago, these things always ebb and flow, right? So you have a crisis and everyone cracks down and you sort of, you know, you do the max. And then memories fade. You're like, why do we have to... Like, this is... I feel like it's human nature. As the 2009, 2010 reforms go further into the past... We're just going to have this sort of natural loosening until the financial crisis of 2045 or whatever it is.
58:03 Tracy Alloway? Well, I mean, why do we have the CFPB? The whole answer is it was created after the 2008 financial crisis. The other thing I thought was really interesting, and this gets to the consolidation point, which I think is a massive, massive story in the US financial industry. But it's just that idea of, okay, if you're worried about your deposit at a smaller bank, the natural thing is to move it into a too big to fail bank because you know that the US government, based on precedent, is not going to let them go. And so that, again, seems to give the big banks a sort of unnatural edge, perhaps, in terms of deposit taking.
58:39 Joe Weisenthal? I mean, I know we talked about this after SVB in multiple episodes, but the sheer number of banks in the United States that still exist, like, boggles the mind, right? There is no other country in the world that has as many, Canada's like six banks. We're so heavily banked in this country, and still today, the random...
59:00 Tracy Alloway? There used to be a lot more, a lot more.
59:02 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah, but I mean, it's staggering, the number of community banks and regional banks that exist in the United States, even with all the consolidation.
59:10 Tracy Alloway? Do you want to be like Canada, Joe? That's the question.
59:13 Joe Weisenthal? No, I don't know. I mean, I genuinely don't know like what the optimal distribution is or anything. But given the advantages that the big banks have, the perception of safety, their technological capabilities that they can invest in, that a community bank will never be able to replicate, brand, et cetera, the proliferation of banks is still like a sort of interesting phenomenon of our financial system.
59:36 Tracy Alloway? The other thing that struck me from that conversation was the buy now, pay later stuff, which, you know...
59:42 Joe Weisenthal? We've got to do more on that period.
59:43 Tracy Alloway? Absolutely. It's becoming a really interesting story, but it just kind of blows my mind that no one is actually tracking that credit because the whole thing is supposed to be technology-driven. It's plugged in to the checkout process of a website. It's really easy to do. It seems insane to me that like the credit bureaus can't track it at the same time, and it seems like a huge, huge data hole for the US economy.
1:00:06 Joe Weisenthal? That's a huge story. I completely agree. And then, you know, we sort of talked about at the end, I mean, I think... It's such an interesting question, the degree to which, if it happens, we'll see, stable coins become part of the payments landscape in a meaningful way, rather than just a way to get money onto cryptocurrency trading websites, which is where they began. And then all of the things around tokenization of equity. I mean, it's just a fact that Robin Hood, who's CEO we had on, unilaterally announced that at some point, there's going to be some version of tokenized equity, or tokens that correspond to equity in private companies
1:00:48 Joe Weisenthal? doing it unilaterally. How regulators are going to actually get their handle on this? I have no idea.
1:00:54 Tracy Alloway? Yeah, tokens, tokens everywhere, and not a bank to lend. I think that was Rohit's point, right? All right. Shall we leave it there?
1:01:01 Joe Weisenthal? Let's leave it there.
1:01:01 Tracy Alloway? This has been another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
1:01:07 Joe Weisenthal? And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at the stalwart. Follow our guest Rohit Chopra. He's at Chopra USA. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Arman, Dashal Bennett at Dashbot, and Kel Brooks at Kel Brooks. For more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com/oddlots. We have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all of these topics 24/7 in our Discord, discord.gg/oddlots.
1:01:31 Tracy Alloway? And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you like it when we do autopsies of failed banks with regulators, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.
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