In a new New York Times essay, economist Barry Eichengreen attacks the Genius Act as a return to the United States’ mid-19th century Free Banking era, when different states and banks issued dubiously valuable currencies left and right. 

“The arrow of history points away from the private provision of multiple kinds of money. Virtually all economies, and not just that of the United States, have moved to create a more uniform, reliable payment system suitable for a deeply interconnected economy. Fracturing the payment system would only undermine that economy.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/opinion/genius-act-stablecoin-crypto.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

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@GeorgeSelgin and @lawrencehwhite1 among others have argued that the “wildcat” era of free banking in the us has been unfairly maligned, in large part due to regulations that kept the types of investments that these banks were allowed to make confined to a small local region. @nic has interviewed them on OTB