On April 8, the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) released a report analyzing whether prohibiting stablecoin yield protects bank lending. The GENIUS Act, signed into law in July 2025 (covered by InfoBytes here), requires stablecoin issuers to maintain one-to-one reserve backing and prohibits them from paying interest or yield to holders; however, the statutory language does not expressly bar intermediaries from offering yield-like rewards funded by revenue-sharing arrangements with issuers. Some variants of the proposed CLARITY Act would prohibit yield payments through intermediaries.

According to the report, one rationale for prohibiting yield is that if stablecoins were to offer returns, holders may shift dollars out of traditional bank deposits and into stablecoins – potentially impacting banks’ ability to engage in the same volume of fractional lending. CEA’s report challenges prior research estimating the impact of stablecoin yield on bank lending to be in the trillions of dollars, concluding that prohibiting stablecoin yield would have only a minimal impact on bank lending overall. The report contends that, at baseline calibration, eliminating stablecoin yield would increase bank lending by only $2.1 billion, a 0.02 percent gain, while imposing a net welfare cost of $800 million from pushing households into conventional deposits they would not otherwise hold.

Under CEA’s analysis, community banks would see just $500 million in additional lending by prohibiting yield on stablecoins, a 0.026 percent increase. The report attributes these limited effects to reserve composition: according to the model, only the fraction of stablecoin reserves held as cash, approximately 12 percent based on one issuer’s reserve report, would be locked out of the credit multiplier, while the remaining 88 percent invested in Treasury bills would recirculate through the banking system as ordinary deposits. CEA asserted that even under “worst-case assumption[s],” the model would produce only $531 billion in additional aggregate lending, a 4.4 percent increase. The report concludes that concerns about stablecoin yield draining deposits from the banking system are “quantitatively small” and that a yield prohibition “would do very little to protect bank lending, while forgoing the consumer benefits of competitive returns on stablecoin holdings.”