The American Bankers Association is escalating its campaign against interest‑bearing payment stablecoins, arguing they could drain deposits from community banks and cut local lending by billions of dollars even if a White House study downplays the risk. In an article for the ABA Banking Journal, the association’s chief economist writes that “the live policy concern is not whether prohibiting yield on payment stablecoins would impact bank lending,” but “whether allowing yield on payment stablecoins would encourage deposit flight — especially from community banks — thus raising banks’ funding costs and reducing local lending.”

The ABA’s critique targets a recent report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers, which modeled the effects of banning yield on payment stablecoins and found that eliminating interest would increase total U.S. bank loans by only $2.1 billion, or 0.02%, at the cost of about $800 million a year in lost consumer welfare. “Policymakers should not take comfort from a study showing that prohibiting stablecoin yield might have a small, near-term effect on aggregate lending,” the ABA article says, calling that “not the contested scenario.”

ABA’s Iowa numbers and the community‑bank argument

In its own work, the association asks what happens if yield‑bearing payment stablecoins reach 5–10% of U.S. bank deposits and become genuine competitors to insured savings. A one‑pager on “Implications for Community Banks in Iowa” estimates that if $5.3–$10.6 billion of deposits move from Iowa banks into payment stablecoins, lending in the state could fall by $4.4–$8.7 billion as institutions are forced to shrink balance sheets or replace deposits with more expensive wholesale funding.

The ABA Journal piece stresses that when a community bank loses deposits, “it must replace funding quickly — often through higher-cost wholesale borrowing,” while also raising deposit rates to keep remaining customers, pushing up the cost of funds and “translat[ing] into less lending and higher borrowing costs for households and small businesses.” That concern echoes earlier research cited by the National Law Review, which highlighted Independent Community Bankers of America data suggesting that allowing interest on payment stablecoins could ultimately reduce community bank lending by as much as $850 billion off an estimated $1.3 trillion in deposit losses.

By contrast, the CEA’s baseline assumes today’s “immature” stablecoin market of roughly $300 billion and focuses on how much extra lending a yield ban might generate, concluding that fears about stablecoins draining deposits are “quantitatively small” even under worst‑case scenarios. The ABA flips that framing on its head, warning that in a future $1–2 trillion stablecoin market, yield would be “the mechanism that would accelerate migration out of bank deposits,” particularly from smaller banks into large institutions and into stablecoin reserves backed largely by U.S. Treasuries.

As Congress hammers out legislation like the GENIUS Act and CLARITY Act to regulate payment stablecoins and, in some drafts, ban or tightly constrain yield, the ABA’s numbers are likely to be wielded as political ammunition against “stablecoin as a savings product.” For community bankers, the stakes are stark: either stablecoins remain payment tools with no interest, or they become high‑yield competitors that risk redirecting local savings away from small‑town loans and into digital dollars parked in custodial wallets and Treasury portfolios.