The GENIUS Act and the Wild West of crypto

If Congress passes the GENIUS Act, banks will be allowed to issue their own cryptocurrency, as long as it’s tied to a stable asset like the dollar. But some economists warn it could have very unstable outcomes.

Barry Eichengreen, professor of economics and political science at the University of California, Berkeley. Author of a New York Times guest essay “The Genius Act Will Bring Economic Chaos."

Zeke Faux, investigative reporter at Bloomberg News. Author of “Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall.”

Dante Disparte, chief strategy officer and head of Global Policy for Circle.

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Someone must be rather pleased with themselves for coming up with the official title of Senate Bill 394. The title is The Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act, a.k.a. the GENIUS Act. The bill aims to create a regulatory framework for a type of cryptocurrency known as stablecoins.

The legislation would also allow banks and even companies like Amazon or Walmart to issue their own stable coins. Under specified conditions, the Senate gave the crypto industry its first big legislative win when it passed the GENIUS Act last month, the House is expected to vote on it next week. Now the crypto industry says the GENIUS Act will modernize the U.S. economy.

Skeptics say we've been here before, with banks and companies issuing their own currencies and it did not go well. So let's better understand the nitty gritty of the GENIUS Act and whether it will or won't modernize the U.S. economy. And to do, we're gonna start with Zeke Faux. He's an investigative reporter for Bloomberg Business Week. Author of “Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall.”

Zeke, it's great to have you back.

ZEKE FAUX: Hi Meghna.

CHAKRABARTI: So I'm going to admit that no matter how many times we do shows about crypto, I never fully understand it. So I wanted to start with like the 101. What is a stablecoin?

FAUX: So the easiest way to understand a stablecoin is to think of something like PayPal.

It's like a digital way to send money, but with stablecoins, instead of having a company like PayPal or Venmo keep track of your money, you've got a stable coin issuer that would, and your stable coin, instead of only being moved through one company's app, you can use any crypto wallet to zap it around the world. And on the backend, what's happening is that you send money to the issuer of the stablecoin.

The most popular one is called Tether, and if you send them a dollar, they issue you a digital token, which, you know, you can send around in crypto land. And they're supposed to keep your dollar in reserve somewhere. So that if you ever want to cash in your digital token, you can get that dollar back. So that's why the value is supposed to stay stable at a dollar.

CHAKRABARTI: Why not just use dollars for transactions? What do stable coins provide that the dollar doesn't?

FAUX: Yeah, it is a good question and if you are here in the U.S., there's really not much motivation to use stablecoins unless you are already trading crypto and want to keep your money in cryptocurrency. But what is really amazing about stablecoins is that anyone can use them around the world.

So somebody who's in, say, Nigeria or Venezuela, who would have a lot of trouble opening a U.S. dollar-based bank account, can quite easily acquire stable coins and hold their money in dollars. And using stable coins, I can send money to somebody across the world knowing only their crypto wallet address, which is like a string of random letters and numbers. I don't need to know their name; I don't need to know their email. They don't need to know mine.

So it's like normally any sort of U.S. dollar transfer is heavily regulated. It goes through banks who are doing all sorts of checks, and with this, it's like, it's instant, it's semi-anonymous, and there's no refunds.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so I'm writing this down, because I want to come back to it in just a few minutes here about, okay, less regulation in the minds of crypto supporters equates to less friction. That's what you're saying, right? So therefore, it becomes more useful and even maybe an economic, a more economically efficient way of doing trader transactions.

FAUX: Yeah, you can see why this is very appealing to a financial institution. Just for example, a big bank like J.P. Morgan might employ 10 or 20,000 people in its compliance department. And Tether, which is the issuer of the biggest stablecoin in the world, which has tens of millions of these wallets using it only has 20 or 30 people.

So it's a huge savings for them. And this company Tether, as you can imagine, it's quite profitable to run this big money transfer network with a tiny crew of employees. And in fact, they made $13 billion last year. They're one of the most profitable companies in the world. So a lot of companies in the U.S. are wanting to get in on that.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. It's interesting you mentioned J.P. Morgan. I'm seeing here some reporting that says J.P. Morgan has already filed, quietly, filed some trademarks for potential stable coins, one under the name of JP MD. So looks like the financial institutions really are quite interested in this?

FAUX: Yeah. And if you think about the PayPal example right now, if you're PayPal, you need to follow all these rules, collect all this information about your users have these controls to stop money laundering or fraud and if you say you're now PayPal, the stablecoin, you no longer have to follow those rules. So you could save tons of money. So it's great for them. But obviously, if you think that these money laundering rules, all the controls on the banking system have a purpose, you should be concerned about creating this backdoor that lets people get around them.

CHAKRABARTI: Those pesky rules, Zeke, they're always getting in the way. Okay. So thank you for that backgrounder. Because really, I don't know what it is about crypto, but it's just always on the edge of my ability to understand why it even exists. But here we have the GENIUS Act, which I'm seeing is being talked about as one of the first big legislative wins for the crypto industry.

Can you just quickly summarize what the GENIUS Act would do?

FAUX: So right now people are using stable coins. They exist, but they're in a legal gray area. And what this GENIUS act would do is it would legitimize the industry and basically legalize the way that they're currently used. So it would also put in some new rules.

One of the concerns about stablecoins is that the company that issues them may claim to be holding the money in reserve. But how do you know? And the GENIUS Act, a lot of the new rules are focused on tracking to ensure that these stablecoins are really fully backed. But this, it would not change the system, where stablecoins can be moved from one anonymous wallet to another.

It would just codify it.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so Zeke, hang on here for a second because I'm going to keep coming back to you to be our explainer and our check on some of the things that are being claimed about what the GENIUS Act could do. But as I mentioned earlier there are a lot of keen observers out there who say even before the first computer was ever invented, we've been in this space before about what happens when non-governmental institutions are issuing forms of their own currency.

So let me bring Barry Eichengreen into the conversation. He's a professor of economics and political science at the University of California, Berkeley, and he recently wrote a New York Times opinion piece called The GENIUS Act Will Bring Economic Chaos.

And we have a link to it at onpointradio.org. Professor Eken Green, welcome to On Point.

BARRY EICHENGREEN: Hi Meghna.

CHAKRABARTI: So you have written that you think the GENIUS Act could essentially resurrect a Wild West of currency when it comes to the weaknesses of currency. Why?

EICHENGREEN: We've had a wild west of currency before in the United States.

The free banking era from the mid 1830s through the early 1860s, under that system, every bank, Meghna's Bank and Zeke's Bank could issue their own dollar notes, and they were supposed to back them with gold in the same way that stablecoin issuers today might back their coins with actual treasury bills.

But the backing was sometimes less than met the eye. So that different dollar bills issued by different banks traded at different prices, and that put at risk what economists refer to as the singleness of money. That every dollar bill is equally good as every other dollar bill, nobody cared about who gave you a dollar.

If all of a sudden that is no longer the case, people will be reluctant to use the currency in transactions, or they'll have to keep a big telephone book under the counter of the corner store and look up the value of Zeke's dollar versus Meghna's dollar. I fear that we could be going back to that kind of world with the GENIUS Act.

CHAKRABARTI: I can just guarantee you right now, professor Eichengreen, that the Meghna dollar will never be less worthless than what I claim it is worth. It sounds like you're saying that that's basically the extent to which regulation existed surrounding these bank issued notes from the 1830s to the 1860s.

Can you give me a more specific example like how you were saying that banks were issuing their notes, with telling the public that we actually do have this much in reserve in cash, but they didn't. How is that even possible?

EICHENGREEN: Back then, banks were regulated by individual states.

So each state had its own version of the GENIUS Act on the books, if you will. Some said that banks had to hold actual gold reserve for every dollar note they issued. They had to hold in their vaults a dollars' worth of gold. But other states would say, you can hold state government bonds, or you can hold, quote, high quality railway bonds, unquote.

Sometimes the bonds were worth less than their supposed nominal value. So when somebody received the bank note and wanted to convert it into actual gold, the bank didn't have the collateral and couldn't pay off the note holders. The GENIUS Act assumes that regulation will be efficient and effective, and that a dollar stablecoin will be backed by an actual dollar of reserve.

I think we have centuries of history of bank regulations suggesting that there are times when the regulated will be one step ahead of the regulator, and we may be going back to that kind of world.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Zeke, before the break, Professor Eichengreen was describing in the 19th century, a system where in the free banking era, as he said, just about any bank could issue its own currency. And I'm wondering if you think that's a good analogy for what the GENIUS Act would do or does the GENIUS Act go even farther?

Because I understand that it's not just banks, but other large entities could issue their own stablecoin under the GENIUS Act. I'm seeing it like Amazon could or Walmart could. What would they actually use to back those coins? Zeke.

FAUX: So they would be acting like banks and they would have to hold safe assets in reserve just like banks would.

And the appeal for Amazon or Walmart is that for companies like that, they spend huge amounts of money on credit card fees. And like right now, every time you go swipe your card at Walmart, the credit card issuer is keeping something like 2% of that transaction, so it's like a tax on everything that you buy.

And if Walmart could somehow incentivize you to use Walmart coin for your transaction, they would eliminate that fee. And when you're a stablecoin issuer, stablecoins don't pay interest. The GENIUS Act would ban them from paying interest. So Walmart would be sitting on this big pile of money, they'd earn interest on it.

So they'd be turning something that costs them a lot of money to a profit center. So the appeal for them is clear.

CHAKRABARTI: Huh. Okay. So Professor Eichengreen, I want to go jump back and forth between the 19th and the 21st centuries here. Was there a similar kind of appeal to banks in the 19th century under the free banking era as you talked about?

EICHENGREEN: There was a shortage of coin in the United States. 19th century is before the era of digital money. The alternatives were to use actual gold and silver coins in transactions or to use bank notes. So I think the fact that free banks turn to issuing notes in mid 1830s was a cost saving innovation of the sort that Zeke was describing a moment ago.

Having said that, I want to dispute the premise. When I use my credit card, I'm not only paying 2% in order to make a payment at Amazon or Walmart or whatever. But I'm getting a package of services. For that 2%, I get fraud protection. I get the option of paying over time. So I think the actual savings to the consumer from moving from credit cards and debit cards to stablecoins is less than meets the eye.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, we're going to come back to that repeatedly over the hour in terms of the advantage to institutions versus the advantages to consumers. But Professor Eichengreen, what underlies both the stable coin proposal, as far as I understand it, and the free banking era, is that when a consumer, let's stick to the mid 19th century.

Ostensibly, was to be able to go back to a bank with one of its bank-issued notes and say, I would actually like the dollars now, in exchange, the presumption is that those dollars were there, but that wasn't always true. You've got some examples.

EICHENGREEN: That wasn't always true. So you mentioned in your lead into the hour, the case of Michigan, where that often was not true. Because regulation by the banking commission of the state of Michigan, of locally chartered banks was lax. So the banks didn't have gold in the vault or high-quality bonds on its balance sheet. So when I showed up with one of its $1 notes and asked for a dollar's worth of gold in return, the bank didn't have the gold.

Or it didn't have the bonds that it could sell in order to obtain the gold to pay me back. So that led to a variety of problems. Number one, the corner store would sell a sack of flour to a customer, end up with a worthless note. Number two, people began to worry about whether these banks were really as solid as they said they were.

So you had runs on individual banks, which could spill over from one bank to another.

CHAKRABARTI: And what impact did that have on Michigan? I understand that it was like a large portion, a large fraction of the income of the state at that time that was made vulnerable by these bank issued notes.

EICHENGREEN: So banks would issue worthless notes, close to worthless notes, storekeepers and farmers and others would accept them in payment for what they produced. And that payment would end up worthless. So you add up the losses to people who ended up holding the near worthless notes and you get figures like the one you cited, Meghna. Of, they lost the equivalent of 40% of annual state income over the course of the three decades that this system operated.

CHAKRABARTI: Over the course of 30 years in Michigan. Okay, Zeke. Now we're gonna hear in a minute or two the point of view of someone from within the crypto industry about the advantages to stablecoins and the GENIUS Act, as he sees them. But correct me if I'm wrong, but we have in recent, just in recent times, seen the value of not just crypto, but some specific stable coins also plummet in the way that Professor Eichengreen was talking about, that happened in the 19th century.

I'm looking here at what happened in what, 2022, with a stable coin called TARA. I know you know about that Zeke.

FAUX: Yes. So this was a stablecoin that was backed by cryptocurrency instead of dollars run by this very obnoxious young crypto bro named Do Kwon. It was supposed to always be worth a dollar because you could trade it for a dollar worth of lunar coins. Now, why were the lunar coins valuable? You weren't supposed to ask that question, and eventually people did. And this system, which had tens of billions of dollars, totally collapsed.

The GENIUS Act proponents say that it would ban algorithmic or crypto backed stablecoins like this and that it would be safer. The critics of the GENIUS Act are more focused on the money laundering risks which I think are significant. In my book Number Go Up, I cited a text message from a Russian money launderer, and he was promoting stablecoins to his co-conspirators.

And he was like, they're amazing. It's fast, it's anonymous. You can send money just like email. And criminals all around the world are catching on and they're popping up in more and more cases. Just the other day, The Economist had a big story saying how Tether the stablecoin became money launderers' dream currency.

'Cause it's very handy to be able to zap huge amounts of dollars around the world.

CHAKRABARTI: So here's the thing. From what I understand in the crypto industry, they believe that's worth the worth the risk in order to really bring the means of transactions into the modern era.

So let's listen for a second to a supporter of these stablecoins and why he thinks they will actually help modernize the economy for the future.

DANTE DISPARTE: You can't have the economy of the future unless you have the money of the future. Your and my financial needs don't take bank holidays. And if you want to send money fast instantly to anyone, anywhere, you effectively need to render money digitally in a very safe way.

CHAKRABARTI: And so that's what stablecoins are solving for, is your ability to send digital money the way you would send cash to trusted recipients near instantly.

So this is Dante Disparte. He's the Chief Strategy Officer and head of global policy for a group called Circle. And Circle issues a stablecoin called USDC, which is currently the second largest stablecoin in the market with more than $61 billion worth in circulation.

DISPARTE: It's often a fallacy that the current payment system is fast and it's already digital. It is often neither. The current payment system exacts the highest cost from the people who could afford it least. Just ask any listener who has ever sent a cross-border payment or an international remittance, and just ask any small merchant or business how much they have to pay and how long they have to wait for their commerce to actually hit their bank account.

CHAKRABARTI: These differences according to Dante Disparte can be quite significant. We've talked about options like domestic wire transfers, which can cost an average of $26 per transfer. Even debit card interchange fees average about 21 cents per transaction, and with stablecoins, the exact fee depends on the specific blockchain being used and the size of the transfer, but it can cost just a fraction of a cent.

Here's the thing though, none of that really prevents stablecoin issuers from doing exactly what banks currently do with any of their transaction fees. The stablecoin issuers could spike their fees in the future, but Disparte says he is not worried about that.

DISPARTE: For the better part of seven years in the global policy conversation, there has been a principled conversation about what should we do with regulating not only stablecoins but broader crypto assets. And the point is, gradualism isn't a great policy strategy in the face of competition, neither at the national level, nor of course the corporate level and the objective should be payment systems optionality.

The more options we introduce into not only the role of the dollar around the world, which I think stablecoins are advancing, but into introducing principled competition to established payment systems, the better.

CHAKRABARTI: And finally, Disparte says that he hopes stable coins will ultimately be well regulated and not used just in the U.S. but around the world.

DISPARTE: Frankly, as someone who sends remittances to family and loved ones internationally, I instantly see the benefit. It's not enough to try to get a U.S. law passed. We have done an extraordinary amount of work to ensure that the international frameworks have emerged. And that anyone, anywhere who uses regulated stablecoins, which the GENIUS Act would call payment stable coins, enjoy the same rights, same privileges, and same protections as I might in the United States.

CHAKRABARTI: So that's Dante Disparte, Chief Strategy Officer and head of global policy for the crypto company Circle. Professor Eichengreen, how do you respond to that? Mr. Disparte sees a much more positive future with adequate regulation. What do you think?

EICHENGREEN: He assumes that adequate regulation will be adequate.

I agree with Zeke that it's overly optimistic to assume that the regulators will be able to prevent fly by night stablecoin issuers from evading, know your customer and anti-money laundering rules. It's not surprising to hear stablecoin promoters talking their own book. But what they forget, I think, is that the incumbents in this financial sphere and this payment sphere, they're adopting new technologies, new digital technologies as well.

So that the banks that have traditionally done business with one another across borders using this international agreement called Swift. Swift is adopting digital technology and blockchain technology as well. Would you rather have this technology being utilized by long established, reputable banks or by some fly by night operator? If I decide to issue a stable coin tomorrow, can you be confident that I'm going to properly enforce anti-money laundering rules, versus international consortium of banks, which have been in this business for a long time and can use digital technology to bring down costs as well?

CHAKRABARTI: Right.

Zeke, let me ask you this because I was really struck by when Dante Disparte said that he wants enough regulation in the stablecoin space so that people can quote, enjoy the same rights, same protections and same privileges that stablecoin users in the United States might have, but this is exactly the purpose of regulation, right?

And regulation can only offer those same protections by introducing friction, by slowing transactions down so that the things that you and Professor Eichengreen have been talking about can be implemented, right? Anti money laundering, or even, the backing of a government's treasury.

Is it possible that we're just missing the point here and the future that Disparte sees in terms of these same protections happening can happen without the kind of friction that we have in conventional currency trades?

FAUX: There is no way to apply anti-money laundering checks to crypto because it can be held in anonymous wallets.

And I actually traveled to Cambodia to see how this works in practice. Over there, stablecoins are more popular, and I went to one of the many currency exchange shops where they advertise that you can trade stablecoins for cash. I saw a hungover looking Chinese guy in pajamas, walk up to the desk and leave with a brick of $50,000 in cash.

And I was able to using the anonymous crypto wallet on my phone, just zap some stablecoins to the clerk and receive $100 in cash, no questions asked. Nothing in this bill would stop stablecoin use like that. And in fact, if stablecoins got really popular and everyone was, they were widely accepted, right?

A lot of the regulation depends on the idea that people will actually want to exchange them back and forth for cash. And that's where like the checks will apply. But if it really takes off and it's really popular, there'll be less need to exchange them for cash. It'll become much easier to conceal huge amounts of money.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Eichengreen, there's another point about the historical connections I wanted to ask you about, because you write in your New York Times opinion piece that basically all modern economies in the world right now have a uniform, reliable payment system backed by their governments, right?

That's suitable for how interconnected economies are and that the issuing of stablecoins could fracture that. And how would regulators be able to regulate hundreds, if not thousands of different kinds of coins moving around in the U.S. economy? But I also think that's part of the point, right?

From the cryptocurrency industry's perspective, they simply do not trust anymore conventional institutions. And did we not have that same lack of trust in the 19th century that led to some of the free banking era?

EICHENGREEN: We did have the same lack of trust in the 19th century, so we had a central bank, the equivalent of the Fed, until President Andrew Jackson in 1832 concluded it was too powerful, and it needed to be abolished.

And that's when state governments stepped in and passed these free banking laws that permitted anybody with a minimum amount of money to establish his own bank. I do think it's important to bear in mind that there is this strong libertarian strand skepticism about regulation, about government in general underlying the stablecoin movement.

CHAKRABARTI: Zeke in the event that one of these stablecoins, let's hypothesize, in the future, would actually collapse. Given what we've seen in terms of how fast financial contagion can spread and now even faster because of things like social media. Could the collapse of a stablecoin actually quickly contaminate the rest of the U.S. economy?

FAUX: That's a fear that top officials in the U.S. have. The stablecoins don't have deposit insurance. So if customers start to worry about a particular stablecoin, they could all pull out their money at once. That could cause the stablecoin issuer to have to dump whatever assets they have on the market, depressing their price.

The bigger this gets, the more of a risk it is. In crypto, there's an almost an expectation that the whole industry will crash every couple years. They call it a cycle. And in the past when crypto has crashed, there haven't been that many interconnections between the real economy and the crypto world.

So it hasn't been a big problem for regular people. The more that crypto and the regular Wall Street are connected, the greater the risk that the next time crypto collapses, which no one will dispute will eventually happen. That could harm the real economy. So it's definitely something I'm worried about.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow. Okay. So in the last kind of minute and a half that we have, Professor Eichengreen, I'll give you the last word here because Zeke just said a couple of things. One is these stablecoins, there's no deposit insurance associated with them, which does not sound good for customers. And the presumption in the crypto industry that every couple of years there's going to be a crash.

That's the opposite of stability in an economy. So what would you suggest to lawmakers now to learn from the history of the 19th century that you walked us through?

EICHENGREEN: They can learn from the history of the 19th century, but they can also learn from the failure of Silicon Valley Bank in 2023 when the government worried about destabilizing the entire financial system and the economy.

They stepped in and they guaranteed all the deposits of Silicon Valley Bank. So legitimizing stablecoins is gonna create the expectation that when things go wrong, the taxpayer is gonna foot the bill, the government is gonna step in and stabilize newly unstable coins at our expense. I think that's a very real prospect.

CHAKRABARTI: So not wanting regulation, but still wanting government bailouts, that's what you're saying?

EICHENGREEN: Not for the first time.

CHAKRABARTI: If you'll allow me, I'd like to end the show today talking about my parents. My father, Dr. Sankar Lal Chakrabarti, died back in October 2022. My mother, Usha Chakrabarti, died just a couple of weeks ago on June 25th, only nine days shy of her 81st birthday. My mom and dad were married for 52 years.

Mom had an aggressive form of peritoneal cancer, and she was living with us in the Boston area in her final months. Now we don't have a large place, so my 10-year-old son had tenderly offered her his room, and it was there where my mother died. Peacefully supported by home hospice care, surrounded by her children and grandchildren.

And a few Lego robots, RC cars and stuffed animals. My mother was blessed to retain her lucidity until the day she died. It was only that morning as her body chemistry was rapidly changing, that she began hallucinating. And I don't know what it was. Maybe it's the reporter in me. More likely the grieving child in me, soon to be a motherless child.

And in that wild and selfish grief, I recorded some of my conversations with her in a desperate attempt to grab tight onto the gifts she was giving me, even now in the last hours of her life, as her eyes gazed into a light that mine could not see. I am gonna play a moment of that tape now, and there's nothing extreme in it.

My mother's hallucinations were not terrifying to her. She's not in distress, but I do understand that it could be difficult to hear the voice of a dying woman. This moment of tape is just over one minute long if you'd rather not listen to it. And again, I fully understand that, but let me assure you, my mom would be okay with this. Of that, I am sure.

Because she always told us to be brave and to face the facts of life, even at life's end. And also, I'd like to play this moment because it says more about her gentleness and determination than any words that I could come up with.

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Mom? Actually, wait, I'm not sure I heard that. Can you tell me again where are we right now? Because if you tell me, then I can really help you. Where are we?

USHA CHAKRABARTI: We're in the airport.

MEGHNA CHAKRBARTI: We're in the airport. Okay. Are we going somewhere?

USHA CHAKRABARTI: Yeah.

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Where are we going?

USHA CHAKRABARTI: Here.

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Here? That's my nose. You grabbed my nose. I got you. Are you going to get on an airplane, mom?

USHA CHAKRABARTI: Yeah.

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Can I come with you?

USHA CHAKRABARTI:  Okay.

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Where are we gonna go? Where's the airplane flying to?

That's my face you keep patting. Is the airplane going to India? Is the airplane going to Oregon?

USHA CHAKRABARTI: Yeah.

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Okay. Love you.

CHAKRABARTI: Death is a distillation. My mom was frail, but so focused on home. Usha Kombrabail Chakrabarti was born in Mumbai, India in 1944. The youngest of four girls. But it is Corvallis, Oregon and the house I'm sitting in right now that she called home. She grew up poor. As a teenage girl, she wanted to go to the advanced math and science school in her neighborhood, but her parents could not afford to pay for it.

Instead for months, my mom prepared for exams by herself and scored high enough to get into the school on scholarship. And later on she wanted to pursue her master's degree in chemistry. But again, my grandparents just did not have the money to support her education. So my aunt, her oldest sister, took an extra job to help pay for my mom to go to graduate school, and my mother never forgot my aunt's love and sacrifice.

My mom had thick, black, curly hair, long eyelashes and was always working, always busy. She was a brilliant cook, international adventurer, culturally open-minded. We celebrated Christmas, Easter, Diwali, St. Patrick's Day, you name it because of her. She never got taller than five-foot, one inch.

But in our minds, she stood at more than a hundred feet tall. Her spirit was indomitable. Her generosity all encompassing, her standards high and her grit absolute. My father was utterly devoted to my mother. He could not live without her. He was the intellectual, the dreamer, the lover of abstraction, the one who decided that a better future for both of them awaited in the United States.

I like to think that if my father was the architect of our family's story, then it was my mother who was our chief engineer. The person whose hands, literal hands, hard work, and quiet genius actually built our family's edifice. Architects are dreamers. Engineers are the doers. That was definitely my dad and my mom.

My mom lived in the United States for a half century and here's the real point. She was the most American of us all, and no kidding. My mom's birthday is actually the 4th of July, and that is why I think that when her mind began taking those final steps on June 25th, that she was at the airport in her mind, waiting to fly home, not to India, but to Corvallis, Oregon, U.S.A.

My mother was fiercely proud of her adopted country and fiercely aware of its shortcomings, but I never once heard her complain. Instead, she was the doer. She volunteered at the schools my brother and I attended. She canvased and phone banked. She befriended everyone in the neighborhood no matter who they were or what they believed.

My mom worked very hard. We never had a ton of money when I was growing up, so like many moms, she went back to work as a research chemist only a few weeks after I was born. When my brother came along, mom wanted to be able to stay home with him, but we still needed two incomes. So she worked the graveyard shift at Hewlett-Packard making silicon chips while we were sleeping.

Always aim for excellence and be humble. That's what my dad imbued into me and my brother. My mom, less give it to you, philosophical pronouncements, oftentimes just told me, be tougher. I now know that what she meant was, you are stronger than you think you are. I know these things about my mom now as an adult, but I wish I had known them about her when we were both younger.

I wish I had seen her truthfully, the way my daughter clearly sees her grandmother. My teenage daughter was able to be by her grandmother's side the moment she passed away. But earlier in that day, my daughter was at camp. I called to give her an update on her grandmother's health, and my daughter had learned that hearing is the last sense to fade away in the dying brain.

So she really wanted me to hold the phone up to my mom's ear. She talked with her Ammama for a long time, and I recorded that too. My daughter has given me permission to share this part with you.

You inspire me, Ammama, and you challenge me to always never give up. And you know what? I was told one time that just because you don't give up doesn't mean you'll make it. But you know what? You are proof Ammama, that's not true. And I'm not saying that you can lift a car with one hand, but it's resilience that isn't easy to acquire, but I'll learn from your example. Because I want to be like you.

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: And you're doing, you just, your words are reaching her. It's really helped calm her.

Okay. okay. It's not that I won't be able to reach what you've reached, it's that I will be able to reach what you've reached because I've had you in my life. It's not a farewell because you're not leaving me.

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Yeah.

It's an I'll see you later, and I love you and we will all, we'll all get through this together and I just, I love you so much.

CHAKRABARTI: My mother, Usha Chakrabarti built me. And while I mourn losing her, my much greater sorrow lies in the fact that even though I told her I loved her all the time, I did not often enough tell her how much I appreciate her. Women are the keystones in most families.

They carry the weight of their family's futures invisibly on their backs. So in honor of my mother, I ask you one simple thing. If there's a woman who has helped build you up, please take a moment to hold her close. And say, I love you. I appreciate you. I see you. Mom, I see you. Now, go out there into the cosmos and go see dad.

The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.