Matt Levine, Columnist

Tether Keeps Lending Tethers

Also Splunk trades, Credit Suisse AT1 claims, insider gambling, NFT prices and don’t put it in email.

September 21, 2023 at 6:33 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Programming note: Money Stuff will be off tomorrow, back on Monday.

I know I say this a lot but I really can’t stress enough what a good business Tether, the big stablecoin issuer, is. It is an unregulated bank that does not pay interest, rates are going up, and its depositor base is quite stable. As of the end of June, Tether reported assets of about $86.5 billion, a majority of it in US Treasury bills, to back about $83.2 billion of Tethers. That’s up slightly from the previous quarter: In last year’s crypto winter there was a bit of a run on Tether, but not that much, and it has recovered well; crypto people continue to want to keep their money in Tether.