All eyes are on Wyoming this week as the Federal Reserve will be meeting for its annual Jackson Hole Symposium, hosted by the Kansas City Fed. Among the items on the menu: the latest research from top economists (which may sound like a snooze fest, but it’s worth paying attention to, as some of the central bank’s most relevant policy signals have come from this program). The marquee newsmaker, though, is likely to be Fed Chair Jay Powell’s speech on Thursday at 10:00 am Eastern, which is widely expected to send a signal on the future policy path.
Markets are playing a will-they-won’t-they-cut-rates game (pardon our hyphens) as the tariff tornado unleashed by the Trump administration is starting to take hold on the inflation front, and labor markets appear to be experiencing pockets of turbulence — though, for the latter, it’s anyone’s guess if this is being driven by AI or simply business uncertainty.
But before Thursday, we’ll also get some indication from the Fed about how they see digital technology changing monetary policy and the banking system. Fed Vice Chair Michelle Bowman and Governor Christopher Waller are speaking today at the Wyoming Blockchain Symposium — fresh off the heels of an announcement that the state is issuing its own stable token, the “Frontier” token, which the state hopes will enable “paying vendors in seconds [and enable providing] tax refunds and social benefits on-chain.”
While stablecoin proliferation appears inevitable — including, potentially, a chaotic state-level provision of digital currencies given an impending bank on the Fed issuing a central bank digital currency (CBDC) — our research out today highlights the systemic, infrastructure-level risks that may accompany this migration of financial and monetary systems onto the blockchain.
–The Editors
