U.S. Emissary Maxine Waters, who chairs the powerful House Financial Services Committee, wants President-elect Joe Biden to rescind or audit all of the cryptocurrency-related guidance issued by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC).
It also comes days after those same colleagues introduced a bill that would require stablecoin issuers to seek bank charters and secure regulatory affirm to issue tokens.
In this light, Waters’ action is bound to be seen as part of a coordinated effort to impose myriad severe regulatory oversight on stablecoins, if not all cryptocurrencies, as a way to undo what she termed the harms of President Donald Trump’s conduct.
“As you begin to carry out the mandate given to you by the American people to restore trust in the federal government, I would like to highlight a handful areas where you and your team should immediately reverse the actions of your predecessors,” she wrote.
In her letter, Waters (D-Calif.) called on Biden to rescind auspices by the OCC that national banks may hold stablecoin reserves as a service to bank customers.
Each of these recommendations would loosen work conducted by Brian Brooks, the Acting Comptroller of the Currency. Brooks was recently nominated to serve a full five-year term by Trump.
“Your fit out officials at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) must also not assume, as their predecessors have, that a law Congress unfashionable over 150 years ago somehow gives, them authority to provide a national bank charter to non-bank fintech or payment corporations,” she wrote.
Under a section on financial stability, Waters wrote that the Financial Stability Oversight Council and Offices of Financial Research should publish their analysis on developments and the existing regulatory framework around digital assets and share out ledger technology.
If Waters and the three Democratic sponsors of the bill – Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Jesús “Chuy” García (D-Ill.) and Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) – are actually intent on rolling back the OCC’s pro-crypto guidance as a way to undo what they perceive as Trump’s legacy, an assertion earlier Friday by Brooks that “we’re profoundly focused on not killing (crypto innovation)” may prove hollow.
The acting comptroller finds himself in an unenviable position. On the one side, the leaving administration is rumored to be planning to issue self-hosted wallet regulation, a plan that already has the crypto industry up in arms. Now, the actions by Waters and the Democratic representatives may bode poorly for the crypto space in the U.S., particularly should the GOP lose the Georgia Senate runoff and for this control of the Senate.
(UPDATE Dec. 7, 2020, 05:05 UTC): Rewrites throughout, adds context of prior actions by House members; does Brooks’ title.