The US Treasury and a number of senior US financial regulators proposed new rules to make it easier for the Federal Reserve to classify non-bank institutions as systemically significant, making supervision and regulation easier. In statements delivered at the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) Council Meeting on April 21, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen expressed concern about “nonbank” financial institutions’ existing lack of regulation and the risk of wider financial contagion. The new guiding will remove these barriers to major financial institutions obtaining nonbank status, a process that presently takes up to six years. The new guidance will also replace the 2019-era standards with an analytical process in which the council assesses if “material financial distress at the company or the company’s activities could pose a threat to U.S. financial stability.” Yellen emphasized that the recent banking crisis is a clear example of why the FSOC and the Fed should be given additional oversight and emergency provisions.
According to the Sunday mail, The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) intends to issue gold-backed digital money as legal tender in order to help stabilize the local currency, the Zim dollar. The tokens will be a type of electronic money backed by the country’s gold reserves, which will be held by the central bank. The RBZ wants citizens who own Zim dollars to be able to trade them for the gold-backed cryptocurrency, which will help them hedge against the volatility of the local currency. Other African countries have been considering CBDCs, such as Nigeria’s eNaira in October 2021.
