Even though it’s mid-August, it was a busy week for the Fed.

As my colleague Mercedes Tunstall writes, the Fed took aim at “novel activities conducted by supervised banking organizations,” essentially cautioning banking organizations that the Fed would be closely watching all the hot-button areas, including crypto-asset related activities, banking services to fintechs and distributed ledger technology.

There was more. Mercedes notes that the Fed this week also focused on stablecoins, requiring that state member banks receive “supervisory nonobjection” from the Fed prior to “issuing, holding, or transacting in dollar tokens to facilitate payments.” As Mercedes points out, the Fed’s actions suggest that the Lummis-Gillibrand crypto bill is gaining traction – an interesting but perhaps somewhat unexpected development. 

Moody’s was also busy this week with credit ratings downgrades of some regional banks and putting some larger banks on watch. We have an article on the downgrades and the possible transactional implications the downgrades can bring. My colleagues Peter Malyshev, Stu Goldstein and Lary Stromfeld took the laboring oar on our brief article on the downgrades, but as you will see in the article, it truly was a team effort amongst our Capital Markets, Finance, and Financial Services practices to highlight what Moody’s actions can mean going forward.   

Be sure to also take a look at important updates from my UK colleagues Alix Prentice and Sukhvir Basran. 

Daniel Meade 
Partner and Editor, Cabinet News and Views