Christina Skinner on the Financial Stability Oversight Council and Central Bank Independence

David Beckworth (0:02)

Welcome to Macro Musings, where each week we pull back the curtain and take a closer look at the most important macroeconomic issues of the past, present and future. I am your host, David Beckworth, a senior research fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. And I'm glad you decided to join us.

David Beckworth (0:25)

Our guest today is Christina Skinner. Christina is a legal and financial scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, a former Bank of England official, and just recently stepped down from Treasury as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the FSOC office. She joins us today to talk about Financial Stability and FSOC. Christina, welcome back to the podcast.

Christina Skinner (0:45)

Well, thank you so much for having me back. I love coming on the show. I love our conversations. And at some point, maybe we'll get to the fact that you came to visit me at Treasury and were a guest speaker for me. So you return the favor at least one time.

David Beckworth (0:57)

Hey, it's great. And it's great to actually do this in person because up until now, we've always done it over Zoom, remotely. So it's great to be in person. And we're on your home turf. We're actually recording here at Wharton. So this is your place. Now, you just recently returned to Wharton. You've been at the US Department of Treasury. You worked with Secretary Besson. And as you mentioned, you actually invited me there to one of your meetings with the deputies.

And you put me in what I'll call the OK Corral of stable coin discussions. But it was a lot of fun. I had a good time talking about stable coins. And you know, Christina, what was interesting is when I presented to your group, there were a lot of bank regulators who were very sympathetic to the banking industry. And they were firing away, as you can remember. They had a hard time processing some of the points I was making.

So they were skeptical of stable coins from their perspective. Two weeks later, I go to a Bitcoin conference. I was asked to talk about stable coins. And I was attacked probably just as furiously from them as well, because that's a sellout. There's choked points. It's not real crypto. So I got it from both perspectives. It was a real growing experience.

Christina Skinner (2:00)

Well, we appreciated having you there to talk to us about your research. And you know, David, I should say at Treasury, we are not skeptical of stable coins.

David Beckworth (2:10)

And that's great. I mean, you guys were involved with the Genius Act. I mean, helping guide that through. That's huge. I think, you know, for generations to come, that would be an important anchor piece for financial stability, financial innovation moving forward.

Christina Skinner (2:22)

So yes, yeah. Well, I mean, that's a really interesting piece of work that was going on led by some of my wonderful colleagues in Treasury. And interestingly, you know, maybe we'll get to it at some point in this show, the Genius Act does have a lot of areas that intersect with financial stability. So there is still work to be done in terms of thinking about what financial stability means in the context of stable coins and how the various financial regulators are meant to coalesce around that understanding and sort of work together through the Genius framework. So I think, you know, that's a great piece of legislation. And stay tuned for what happens in the coming in the coming year. But I think I'm maybe putting the carpet for the horse a little bit here and talking about, hey, what do we mean by financial stability?

What was I doing at Treasury? And yeah, you mentioned I'm back at work now. This is actually my first day back on campus. So what a way to mark the date by doing a podcast show with you.

David Beckworth (3:12)

Yeah. Now, I also should mention you've been on the podcast multiple times. I believe this is your fourth or fifth appearance. So you get some kind of special gold jacket or something. We'll hand out to those of you who've been on many times. You also had an appearance, I think your last one with Andy Levin was really great. We'll provide a link to that on Central Bank Undersight. Yeah, you got it. Yeah, that was incredible play on words there. Instead of oversight, we have underside. In fact, time permitting today, we'll talk about a new book of yours. We'll tease the book because it's coming out I believe next year.

But I've seen, I've got a sneak peek at some of the early drafts. This is exciting stuff on Central Bank Independence 2.0. So you're very busy. You're doing financial stability work. We were a civil servant. You're a professor. You're writing a book on Central Bank Independence. I mean, you cover a lot of territory.