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Re:Legal expert says Tether and Binance Coin are likely pick... by jbverschoor on Wednesday June 16, 2021 @12:28PM (#27530376)
They're not "backed". It's simply not there. They're backed by the law that if you arrange a "run on the bank", YOU will go to jail.
Re:Legal expert says Tether and Binance Coin are likely pick... by notahacker on Wednesday June 16, 2021 @01:21PM (#27531028)
They're not backed by an imaginary law, they are backed by an outstanding portfolio of expected loan repayments, the ability to borrow all the short term cash they need at lower rates, and ultimately you're backed by the FDIC even the people the bank loaned out to all default.
Re:Legal expert says Tether and Binance Coin are likely pick... by jcranmer on Wednesday June 16, 2021 @01:42PM (#27531302)
How do you go to jail if "arrange a 'run on the bank'"? There's no law against it, so far as I'm aware.

As for the backing, let me go through this in more detail (see https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-06-10/maybe-... for a decent coverage of how this works). There are three categories to keep in mind here: assets (which include loans, cash, precious metals, etc.), liabilities (i.e., the value of all of your deposits), and capital (which is money to support the assets that's actually the bank's owner's).

Regulation requires liabilities to hit no more than about 90% of assets. They also require the bank to stake about 8% of its own capital to support the assets, on a risk-weighted basis. The risk weighting reflects the likelihood of assets crashing in value: a typical loan might have a 100% weight, so $100 in loans requires $8 in capital. Safer loans (e.g., residential mortgages) would require less capital. Stuff like cash or T-bills have a risk weighting of 0%. Riskier things include stocks (which tend to go down big when they go down), requiring maybe $24 per $100 of stocks, or cryptocurrencies... which require $100 of capital per $100 of cryptocurrency.

What this actually means, when you combine stuff together, is that you really do have something like $100 in safe things for every $100 in deposits a bank has.