Jean Tirole, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, has warned about “insufficient supervision” of stablecoins and the possibility that governments will be forced into multibillion-dollar bailouts should the tokens unravel in a future financial crisis.
In an interview with the Financial Times, the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in economics said he was “very, very worried” about supervision of stablecoins and the possibility of a run by depositors if doubts materialised over the underlying reserve assets to which the digital tokens were pegged.
Stablecoins such as those issued by Tether and Circle — which are pegged to real-world assets — are expected to gain further popularity after the US government passed a law in July that paves the way for banks to launch their own digital assets linked to the US dollar and backed by securities such as US government bonds.