By Jared Whitley. July 23, 2021. (Seeking Alpha)
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has made herself clear that she sees cryptocurrencies as “bogus private digital money” and a kind of social pestilence that needs to be annihilated through regulation. In short, she has no idea what blockchain technology is, what it does, how it works or why people use it – but it has to be stopped and she’s going to stop it.
Like many geriatric progressives approaching their sell-by date in Congress, Warren is so out of step that young progressives in her own party shake their heads at how wrong she is on this one.
But Warren is not some harmless grandmother yelling from her porch – she’s the chair of a Senate Banking subcommittee, and she can do real damage. In a recent letter to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler, Warren not so subtly demanded that the agency start grabbing more regulatory power in order to smash U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchanges. Legal and industry experts believe that Warren colluded with anti-crypto zealots inside the SEC to write that letter as a Beltway power play, hoping to lock in the SEC as “the Terminator” before other agencies, like the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), dare to legitimize the utility and benefits of this new technology. Taking a step back, it was an act of desperation by a faction of Washington dinosaurs that are poised to be on the losing side of history, and Gensler’s agency is in turmoil.