[ineedasername]

That depends. If their holdings are in slightly risky "paper" to make money then it's not truly a stable coin because it relies on the market not going down, as it is doing right now. For example, if half their paper is in something roughly indexed to the Dow or similar then their backing is down roughly 5% YTD. That effectively means their actual peg is worth $0.95 on the dollar, a shakeup that could put them into a downward spiral.

On the other hand if they're exclusively in something as safe as US Treasury notes, satisfied by profiting a very small % but on a large pile of money, then they're on more solid footing. The fact that they say "commercial" paper makes me doubt this somewhat.

TLDR: if their 100% backing is in anything with even moderate risk, they could be doomed.

[jcranmer]

Well, Tether periodically breaks down their assets a little more, so we know that on December 31, 2021, Tether held ~$5 billion in cryptocurrency. Given that at the same time, Tether had just ~$140 million excess assets over liabilities, we can already conclude that Tether is probably insolvent solely from the subsequent rout in cryptocurrencies.

My suspicion is that a large fraction of Tether's claimed assets aren't valuable at anywhere near Tether's claimed value, and so Tether has actually been insolvent for years, and this is the main fuel for their reluctance to be precise in what their asset pool looks like.