So yes, it does matter if we let financial institutions disregard risk in the pursuit of profit, when they are gambling with other people’s money.

In the case of Tether though, it’s not a traditional bank that issues interest yielding loans based on the lender’s credit profile.

Rather, the suspicion has been that they are simply issuing USDT coins to buy up crypto, which causes the latter to increase in value, but the money to buy these assets were never there in the first place, and that is why today, they can only show a fraction of the cash they claim to have received.

"As announced on March 15, 2020, the Board reduced reserve requirement ratios to zero percent effective March 26, 2020. This action eliminated reserve requirements for all depository institutions."

I experienced time very differently the past year. I thought it was two years already. But I'm sure there was another announcement similar to that earlier.

Edit: another poster linked the actual Fed announcement and it is actually 1 year since the reserve requirement has been lifted.

Changing reserve requirements is part of conventional monetary policy, it is not QE.

Banks are still required to have reserves against risk-weighted assets (remember that deposits are a liability) and to cover liquidity and macroprudential risk. Here's the fed policy note https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reservereq.htm and here's an explanation of the "ample reserves" system https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/impl...

Tether cannot fall back to a central bank, so the cases are completely incomparable.

If a bank has 0% reserves, the books say 0% reserves. Tether has no books.