US Congress members are expecting that Brian Brooks, the incumbent Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) Chief, will leave his crypto days behind when he sits on his new role.
Yesterday, six members of Congress sent a letter “blasting” Brooks for busying himself with regulating the cryptocurrency industry during a worldwide pandemic.
The OCC, conducted by Brooks since April 2020, had put out several letters of clarification this summer that confirmed that cryptocurrency companies can become banks and that banks can also custody cryptocurrencies possessed by their clients.
The lawmakers, Rashida Tlaib (MI-13), Stephen Lynch (MA-08), Jesús G. “Chuy” García (IL-04), Deb Haaland (NM-01), Barbara Lee (CA-13), and Ayanna Pressley (MA-07), probed “whether this is an appropriate priority for the OCC during this pandemic.”
They attacked Brooks’s “excessive focus on crypto assets and crypto-related financial services.”
“Arguably, the immediate needs of millions of at-risk individuals who have not yet received an economic stimulus check and/or cannot deposit their funds in a bank, deserve greater attention than an effort to increase access to financial services to the ‘banked community’ via mobile phones,” they said.
The members of congress then stated that focusing on crypto overlooks issues that face small and minority-owned institutions, worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic.
No Comment