Eric Trump Calls Bank Lobbying Against Stablecoins ‘Straight Up Anti-American’
In an X post on Tuesday, the president’s son and World Liberty Financial co-founder accused America’s biggest banks of running a coordinated lobbying effort to kill stablecoin yield, the provision that has stalled the CLARITY Act in the Senate for months.
“Big Banks are lobbying overtime to block Americans from getting higher yields on their savings,” he wrote, adding that the American Bankers Association was “spending millions” to restrict 4–5% stablecoin yields through legislative language in the bill. “This is anti-retail, anti-consumer, and straight-up anti-American.”
The argument Eric Trump is making isn’t new, but the messenger matters here. He pointed to a gap that banks have long exploited: major banks pay depositors between 0.01% and 0.05% APY on basic savings accounts while collecting roughly 4.4% interest on reserve balances parked at the Federal Reserve
According to the FDIC, the national average savings rate sits around 0.45%. The spread between what banks earn and what they pass on to customers is, in his framing, the entire reason they oppose stablecoin yield, because crypto platforms offering 4–5% returns on dollar-pegged tokens represent a direct competitive threat to that model.
A Coordinated Push From the Top
Eric Trump’s post didn’t land in isolation. Hours earlier, President Trump posted on Truth Social that banks “are hitting record profits” and warned he would not “allow them to undermine our powerful Crypto Agenda.”
He urged Congress to pass the CLARITY Act “ASAP” and said banks “need to make a good deal with the Crypto Industry because that’s what’s in best interest of the American People.”
CoinDesk confirmed that the president had met privately with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong shortly before that post went live, though the White House and Coinbase declined to comment on what was discussed.
Patrick Witt, the White House’s executive director for digital assets, piled on separately. After JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said Tuesday that stablecoin issuers paying interest should be regulated like banks.
Witt pushed back publicly, arguing that the GENIUS Act “explicitly forbids stablecoin issuers” from lending out or rehypothecating reserves which means, in his view, they aren’t functioning as banks and shouldn’t be regulated as such.
“Stablecoins ≠ Deposits,” Witt wrote. Dimon’s position was that rewards on transactions might be acceptable, but interest paid on stored balances is functionally a banking activity regardless of what the underlying instrument is called. Neither side has moved.
The Conflict of Interest Question Nobody Is Asking Loudly
Worth noting, World Liberty Financial, the crypto firm Eric Trump co-founded alongside his father and brother, launched its own stablecoin, USD1, last year and recently sought a trust charter under the OCC for an affiliated entity.
A banking source told The Block that representatives had sent red-lined text to the White House requesting changes to the stablecoin yield language and had “not heard a peep” before Trump’s Truth Social post went up Tuesday.
“It’s an interesting take. Obviously, it’s not something we want to see,” the source said. The ABA has not publicly responded to Eric Trump’s post. The Senate Banking Committee’s markup, last targeted for the second half of March, remains unscheduled.
