Your bank did not lend out somebody's savings. On its own books, it wrote the money into your account.

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37 more stories on this beat.

Each with its own sources. None of these is a link to the story above.

1. 02

   UK deposit cover rises to 120,000 pounds

   Since 1 December 2025 the amount protected if a British bank goes out of business has been 120,000 pounds per person, per firm, up from 85,000 pounds. The protection comes from the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, which pays out when a bank cannot. The Bank of England sets the figure. [4]

   Why it matters — For most British households the new number is larger than everything they own in cash, which is exactly what lets a bank account feel like a box rather than a company's promise.

2. 03

   US bill would insure $10m at smaller banks

   Two US senators, Bill Hagerty and Angela Alsobrooks, have proposed the Main Street Depositor Protection Act, which would raise deposit insurance from $250,000 to $10 million on accounts that pay no interest. It would apply only at midsize and community banks, not at the largest ones. The US Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, has endorsed it. The Wall Street Journal's editorial page puts the cost at about $42 billion, charged mostly to the biggest banks, with banks under $10 billion in assets paying nothing extra. [25]

   Why it matters — Business current accounts are the ones that most often hold more than $250,000, so this is a fight over who carries the risk on a payroll account.

3. 04

   Deposit insurance was built out of a collapse

   US deposit insurance was created in 1933. In the four years before that, about 40% of all American banks disappeared - they failed, closed, or were absorbed by others - after runs in which depositors pulled their money out. Ben Bernanke, who later ran the US central bank, described the aftermath in his 2022 Nobel lecture: the closed banks could not lend at all, and the survivors turned extremely cautious. The IMF last set out its full staff view on deposit insurance in 2006, before the global financial crisis, and has now updated it. [22][26]

   Why it matters — Bank runs on that scale stopped after 1933. What people argue about now is how large the guarantee should be.

4. 05

   One US bank has failed this year

   Metropolitan Capital Bank and Trust, based in Chicago, was closed by regulators on 30 January 2026. It held about $261.1 million in assets and $212.1 million in deposits. A bank fails when regulators shut it because it can no longer meet what it owes, usually after its assets fall below its liabilities. [24] It is the only US bank failure so far in 2026; 2025 and 2024 each had two. Five failed in 2023, including Silicon Valley Bank on 10 March, which ended a stretch of more than 800 days without a single US bank closing. [23]

   Why it matters — In most years at least one American bank fails, so the insurance limit is not a theoretical number.

5. 06

   What the $250,000 actually covers

   US deposit insurance is $250,000 per depositor, per insured bank, per ownership category - so a single account and a joint account at the same bank are counted separately. Hold $300,000 in one account in one name and $50,000 of it is uninsured. Deposit networks such as IntraFi spread a large balance across many insured banks so that all of it stays inside the limit. Shares and funds held through a bank are not covered at all. [19][20]

   Why it matters — The rule is per bank and per category rather than per person, which is why two people can have the same money and different protection.

6. 07

   Credit unions get the same cover from a different agency

   Money held at a US credit union is insured by the National Credit Union Administration rather than the FDIC, to the same $250,000 per person, per institution, per ownership category. The agency covers more than 143 million account holders. A married couple's joint account is covered to $500,000, because each owner gets the full amount. New rules on trust accounts start on 1 December 2026, with a maximum of $1,250,000 per owner. [21]

   Why it matters — A credit union is owned by its members rather than shareholders, and the protection on the money is identical either way.

7. 08

   The US reserve requirement has been zero since 2020

   The rule that a bank must hold back a fixed share of its deposits was set at 13%, 10% and 7% for different US banks in 1917. It ran as high as 17.5% for some in the 1950s and 1960s, and sat between 8% and 10% for most of the following four decades. On 26 March 2020 the Federal Reserve cut it to zero for every bank. In its place the Fed pays banks interest on whatever reserves they choose to keep. [3]

   Why it matters — The brake that most people picture on bank lending was removed six years ago, and almost nobody outside banking noticed.

8. 09

   Britain caps each stablecoin at 40bn pounds

   A stablecoin is a digital token that promises always to be worth the same as one pound or one dollar. The Bank of England had proposed limiting how much any one person could hold. After consultation it dropped that and set a temporary cap of 40 billion pounds on the total issued of any single systemic stablecoin instead, to be reviewed regularly. Its stated reason is to safeguard the continued supply of credit to households and businesses while the change beds in. [10][11]

   Why it matters — Britain's central bank is saying plainly that money leaving bank accounts leaves less for banks to lend, which is the chain this edition leads on.

9. 10

   The US central bank is working out what counts as money

   On 4 September 2026 two Federal Reserve researchers, Kristen Payne and Mary-Frances Styczynski, published a method for deciding whether new digital assets belong in the official count of how much money exists. They look at tokenized bank deposits, tokenized money funds and payment stablecoins, and ask of each whether it is used to pay for things or to hold value. Tokenized deposits, they conclude, are legally still bank deposits and are already inside the count. The note is research, not policy. [9]

   Why it matters — The official money figures are what governments and economists steer by, so what is in the count changes what everyone thinks is happening.

10. 11

    A US law gave stablecoin issuers a route in

    The GENIUS Act - short for Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins - was passed by the US Congress and gives issuers a set of rules to fit inside. Michael Barr, a governor of the US Federal Reserve, said in remarks on 31 March 2026 that the agencies still have most of the detail to write, but that greater certainty could speed the coins up. Today they are used mostly to settle crypto trades and, second, as a way to hold dollars in countries where dollars are hard to get. [13]

    Why it matters — Rules are what turn a private token into something a payroll or a shop will accept, which is how a promise becomes money.

11. 12

    A Fed governor calls it a global stablecoin glut

    Stephen Miran, a governor of the US Federal Reserve, argued in a speech on 7 November 2025 that stablecoins are now an established, fast-growing part of the financial system and that economic research has not caught up. People outside the United States use them to hold dollars and move them across borders quickly, whatever the rules where they live. Demand for dollars is strong, he said, so a cheaper way of getting hold of them spreads fast. [14]

    Why it matters — Dollars issued outside the United States are dollars nobody in the United States lent into existence, which is a different kind of money entirely.

12. 13

    Stablecoin issuers would have to check who their customers are

    On 18 June 2026 the US Federal Reserve asked for public comment on a proposal requiring certain payment stablecoin issuers to run a customer identification programme - the same kind of check banks and credit unions already do. Five agencies issued the proposal jointly. Comments were due 60 days after it appeared in the Federal Register. It is one of the rules the GENIUS Act left the agencies to fill in. [15]

    Why it matters — Identity checks are one of the main practical differences between a bank account and a token, and this narrows it.

13. 14

    The Fed's own research: tokens could shrink bank lending

    A Federal Reserve note published on 17 December 2025 by Jessie Jiaxu Wang works through what happens to banks if payment stablecoins keep growing. Money that leaves a bank account for a token changes what the bank is funded by, which in turn changes how much it can lend and to whom. The note says stablecoins could reduce, recycle or restructure deposits rather than simply drain them, and that the outcome depends on who is buying them and what issuers hold in reserve. [12]

    Why it matters — It is the same chain the Bank of England named, worked out by the other big central bank, and neither of them can say yet which way it goes.

14. 15

    Britain has not decided on a digital pound

    The Bank of England is still weighing whether to issue a digital pound - central bank money held in a wallet app and spent in shops, issued directly by the Bank of England rather than by a commercial bank. Ten digital pounds would always be worth a ten pound note. The Bank says it would not replace cash and that notes will keep being printed for as long as people want to use them. No decision has been announced. [17]

    Why it matters — Cash is the only money a British person can hold today that no company owes them. A digital pound would be the second.

15. 16

    The IMF lists six ways public digital money could shake banks

    The International Monetary Fund, which lends to countries in financial trouble and advises them on money, has set out six routes by which a retail central bank digital currency could affect financial stability. They run through bank funding and lending, fee income, the risk of runs, information flows and the resilience of the payment system. The effects can go either way, positive or negative. The paper is a guide for officials weighing whether to issue one. [18]

    Why it matters — Every one of the six routes starts with money moving out of a commercial bank, which is the one thing all these proposals have in common.

16. 17

    US card balances are back near their record

    Credit card debt in the United States reached $1.26 trillion between April and June 2026, according to the household debt report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That is $21 billion, or 1.7%, above the first three months of the year, and just under the record $1.28 trillion set in 2025. Mortgage and student loan balances fell slightly over the same period, while other kinds of borrowing rose. [27]

    Why it matters — Every one of those balances is the other half of money that has already landed in a shop's bank account.

17. 18

    Record share of Americans clearing the card in full

    The share of US credit card accounts paid off in full each month has reached a new high, narrowly beating the record set in early 2021, on figures from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. The share paying only the minimum fell to 10.24%, down from more than 11% at the end of 2024, which was itself a record in data going back to 2012. The figures cover large banks holding at least $100 billion in assets. [28]

    Why it matters — Paying in full is what stops interest starting, and the two ends of the market - those clearing it and those paying only the minimum - are both growing.

18. 19

    The official US consumer credit count

    The US Federal Reserve's own monthly release, G.19, puts total consumer credit outstanding at $5,166.9 billion in June 2026. Of that, $1,351.1 billion is revolving credit, mostly card balances, and $3,815.8 billion is non-revolving, which is largely car and student loans. Revolving credit grew at an annual rate of 6.0% in June, after shrinking 4.7% in May. This is a different survey from the New York bank's household debt report, and it gives a different number. [29]

    Why it matters — Two arms of the same central bank publish two counts of the same thing, and neither is wrong.

19. 20

    Late payments settled above where they were before 2020

    Four Federal Reserve researchers examined credit records in a note published on 24 November 2025. Late payments on US credit cards and car loans fell to record lows during the pandemic, when government support arrived and households paid debt down. They then climbed back, passing pre-pandemic levels by early 2023. Card performance has since held steady across income groups and credit scores; car loan late payments picked up again for lower-income households in the third quarter. [30]

    Why it matters — A missed payment is where a written promise stops being honoured, and car loans are cracking before cards.

20. 21

    Britain's central bank is watching US household debt

    The Bank of England's Financial Stability Report of December 2025 says American households look resilient in aggregate: mortgage arrears are low by historical standards and household debt measured against the size of the economy has kept falling. Underneath that, it says, borrowers at the lower end of the income range are stretched. The share of US consumer credit balances more than 90 days late has risen markedly over three years. [31]

    Why it matters — Consumer credit is usually the first thing to break when an economy turns, which is why a central bank on another continent tracks it.

21. 22

    Fewer than half of Americans could cover a $1,000 bill

    Bankrate's 2026 emergency savings survey found that 47% of Americans have enough cash or access to funds to cover an unexpected $1,000 expense. Twenty-nine percent said they carry more credit card debt than emergency savings, against 44% who said the reverse. Compared with a year earlier, 58% have the same amount of emergency savings or less, 21% have more, and 17% had none then and have none now. [32]

    Why it matters — The same household can hold a deposit at one bank and a card balance at another, and the interest runs far faster on the second.

22. 23

    The average US savings account pays 0.38%

    The FDIC publishes national average rates for US deposit accounts. From mid-August to mid-September 2026 they were 0.38% on a regular savings account and 0.07% on an interest-paying current account. A one-year fixed-term account paid 1.71%, a three-year one 1.34%, and a money market account 0.63%. The spread between institutions is wide, with some paying many times the average and others far below it. The averages are drifting downwards. [33]

    Why it matters — The money a bank pays for its funding and the money it charges for lending are the same money, seen from two sides.

23. 24

    A rival count puts the average savings rate at 0.63%

    Bankrate's own survey of institutions, taken on 12 August 2026, puts the US national average savings rate at 0.63% - nearly double the FDIC's 0.38% for roughly the same period. The two are counting different sets of banks. Bankrate separately forecasts that the 2026 average will finish near 0.48% APY, with a low of 0.45%, the weakest for savings accounts since June 2023. [34][35]

    Why it matters — Two respectable sources give a number that differs by two thirds, and neither publishes alongside the other.

24. 25

    UK Bank Rate held at 3.75%

    The Bank of England has held Bank Rate at 3.75%. Bank Rate is the interest the Bank of England pays commercial banks on money they hold with it, and charges on money it lends them, which is why it pulls every other British rate along with it. UK inflation has fallen faster than the Bank expected, to 2.6% against a 2% target, but it expects energy prices to push it up again later this year. The next decision is on 17 September 2026. [36]

    Why it matters — It is the rate against which every British savings account and mortgage is priced, set by nine people eight times a year.

25. 26

    The 895bn pounds Britain created, and is now unwinding

    Between March 2009 and November 2020 the Bank of England bought 895 billion pounds of bonds - 875 billion issued by the UK government and 20 billion by companies. It did not raise that money through taxes or borrowing. It created the money digitally, as central bank reserves, and used it to buy. Since February 2022 it has been reversing the process, letting bonds mature and selling others, and it says the money it made disappears when they go. [6]

    Why it matters — A central bank doing openly what commercial banks do quietly every day: writing money into existence, and cancelling it.

26. 27

    The Bank of England's first accounts show the same two lines

    The Bank of England was founded in 1694 and its main ledgers survive almost intact. A balance sheet drawn up for Parliament on 10 November 1696 lists notes for running cash of 764,196 pounds as a liability - money the Bank owed to whoever was holding the notes. On the other side of the same sheet sits a loan to the state of 1,200,000 pounds. The notes people spent as money existed because the Bank had lent to England's government. [7]

    Why it matters — The arrangement people are told is a modern trick is written into the oldest surviving central bank accounts there are.

27. 28

    In 1685 a governor turned playing cards into money

    Shipments of coin from France to its North American colonies took months, and the colonies kept running out of cash. Rather than go back to swapping goods directly, colonial governments issued IOUs that circulated as currency. The first was in 1685 in what is now Canada, when soldiers were paid in playing cards marked with an amount and signed by the governor. Money has existed in some form for at least 5,000 years, and paper money began in China under the Yuan dynasty. [38]

    Why it matters — A playing card was worth something because the governor's signature made it a debt somebody would honour, and nothing else.

28. 29

    The number of US banks has fallen by almost 70%

    A Federal Reserve working paper counts the shrinkage: 14,417 US banks and thrifts in 1985, down to 4,379 by 2020. The number of institutions holding half of all US banking assets fell from 91 to just 10 over the same period. Locally, though, the paper finds competition is not thin - a typical county still hosts more than 130 active lenders and the median lender holds 0.4% of its market. When a large bank buys a community bank, the number of active lenders in that county often rises. [37]

    Why it matters — The national picture and the local one point in opposite directions, which is why the merger argument never settles.

29. 30

    US senators want to stop the Fed paying interest on reserves

    Reserves are deposits that banks keep at the US central bank, which they need in order to make payments for themselves and for their customers. The Federal Reserve pays interest on them. Senators Rick Scott and Ted Cruz have introduced a bill to repeal that authority, framed as stopping the Fed wasting $1 trillion. Two former Fed officials, William English and Donald Kohn, writing for the Brookings Institution, say the concerns behind the bill are wrong and set out why the payments are made. [41]

    Why it matters — Interest on reserves is how the US central bank steers every other interest rate now that the reserve requirement is gone.

30. 31

    The last-resort desk that keeps banks open

    When a US bank runs short of cash it can borrow from other banks, and if that fails it can borrow from the Federal Reserve's discount window. There are three kinds of credit there - primary, secondary and seasonal - each with its own rate, set by each regional Reserve Bank's board and reviewed by the Board of Governors. The stated point is to stop a squeezed bank withdrawing credit from its own customers. Lending of this kind is one of the original purposes of a central bank. [40]

    Why it matters — A bank that has lent for thirty years and owes money on demand needs somewhere to go on a bad afternoon.

31. 32

    The 2026 stress test asks what would break the big banks

    Each year the US Federal Reserve puts large banks through an imagined economic disaster to see whether they would still have enough capital left standing. The 2026 scenarios were published for public comment, with responses due by 1 December 2025, and are run against banks' balance sheets as they stood on 31 December 2025. The exercise is required by the Dodd-Frank Act, the law passed after the 2008 financial crisis. [39]

    Why it matters — Capital, not the reserve requirement, is what limits US lending now, so this test decides how much banks may lend.

32. 33

    Bank capital is not a pile of cash

    The Bank of England has spent years correcting a common picture. Capital is not money a bank holds back or sets aside, and it is not an asset at all. It is a source of funding, mostly shareholders' money, that can absorb losses without the bank becoming insolvent. Liquidity is a separate problem: not having enough cash on hand to pay depositors and other creditors who all ask at once. A bank can be killed by either one. [8]

    Why it matters — Solvency and liquidity are two different ways to die, and the phrase capital reserves runs them together.

33. 34

    A reverse mortgage runs the other way

    The US consumer regulator, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, explains a home loan for owners aged 62 and over in which the amount owed goes up over time rather than down. Money is drawn against the value of the house. The loan generally must be repaid when the owner sells or stops living there, and it can fall due sooner if they fail to pay property taxes or home insurance. Not everyone qualifies. [42]

    Why it matters — It is the only common household loan where the debt written at the start grows on its own until somebody sells the house.

34. 35

    A 36% ceiling that only some Americans get

    Under the US Military Lending Act, serving members of the armed forces and their dependants cannot be charged more than 36% a year on most consumer loans. The consumer regulator lists that protection alongside the rules governing what debt collectors may say and do, including that a collector generally cannot take Social Security or veterans' benefits straight out of a bank account or prepaid card. [43]

    Why it matters — Congress capped the price of borrowing for the people it employs to fight, and for nobody else.

35. 36

    Stablecoins are used hardest where banking is weakest

    A Brookings Institution commentary argues that stablecoins matter more in poorer countries than in rich ones, because they cross borders in near real time where existing payment systems are slow and costly. It cites figures from the analysis firm Chainalysis putting stablecoins at 52% of crypto activity in sub-Saharan Africa, used for remittances and daily spending. Countries in eastern Europe including Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia lead on adoption measured against population. [44]

    Why it matters — Where the local banking promise is unreliable, people reach for somebody else's promise, and mostly that is a dollar.

36. 37

    Central banks are testing tokenized versions of their own money

    Reserves - the money banks hold at a central bank - already exist only as digital entries. Several central banks are now experimenting with issuing them on distributed ledgers, the technology behind blockchains. The IMF prefers the term tokenized reserves to wholesale digital currency, because nothing about the money itself changes, only the plumbing that settles it. Lisa Cook, a governor of the US Federal Reserve, told a conference in Dakar, Senegal on 8 May 2026 that tokenization could speed up cross-border payments in West Africa and other emerging economies. [45][16]

    Why it matters — The safest money in the system is being rebuilt on new plumbing, and central banks want it to still be theirs afterwards.

37. 38

    What a bank's accounts actually show

    A bank's financial statements do not look like an ordinary company's - there is no stock and no invoices owed to it. Its revenue is net interest income, the gap between what it pays on deposits and earns on loans, plus fees. Deposits are typically short-term and reprice quickly; fixed-rate loans do not. That mismatch is called interest rate risk. [46]

    Why it matters — It is how a bank can be sunk by interest rates moving rather than by any of its borrowers failing to pay.