Eric Trump Accuses Big Banks of Blocking Crypto Yields, Sparking Regulatory Debate
As discussions around the CLARITY Act continue to heat up, Eric Trump, son of former President Donald Trump, publicly accused major financial institutions such as JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo on social platform X of lobbying Congress to restrict crypto platforms from offering high-yield services. He claimed that these banks are using "financial stability" as a pretext to protect their deposit monopolies and prevent customers from flowing to higher-yielding stablecoin investment channels.
According to data cited by Eric Trump, if high-yield stablecoins were to become fully adopted, traditional banks could lose as much as 30% to 35% of their deposits, potentially threatening a $6.6 trillion bank system funding pool. Currently, mainstream banks offer savings interest rates as low as 0.01% to 0.05% annually, while some crypto platforms claim their stablecoin products can provide returns of 4% to 5% or even higher, creating a significant interest rate differential. He pointed out that banks profit from this gap by absorbing deposits at extremely low costs and lending them out at higher rates, while depositors hardly share in the profits.
In response, banking groups countered that unregulated high-yield stablecoins could constitute deposit-like activities, bypassing capital reserve requirements and anti-money laundering reviews, thus posing systemic financial risks. They argue that stablecoins should be incorporated into the existing financial regulatory framework rather than becoming regulatory arbitrage tools.
Meanwhile, several key figures in the crypto industry, such as Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse and Senator Cynthia Lummis, have called for the establishment of clear and explicit legal rules for stablecoins to enable compliant innovation. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell stated that traditional banks are "perfectly capable of serving crypto-related customers," suggesting that the traditional financial system will continue to play a crucial role in the development of digital assets.
This game of yield rights versus financial control is pushing US crypto regulation towards a critical crossroads.