Congress Holds a Skeptical Eye Against Facebook’s Libra, Scrutiny Continues

Maxine Waters, the chairperson, U.S. House Financial Services stated in an interview that the committee is to continue the probe into Facebook’s Next-Gen cryptocurrency initiative, Libra. Waters’ announce it right after the Republican Patrick McHenry, released a statement to Waters pleading a hearing about Facebook’s cryptocurrency initiative.

The statement also gave a pre-structured timeline for the fall of 2019. The list has an announcement of continuing the review of Libra along with the wallet software been developed with Facebook as a parent company.

Calibra David released a statement to congress for Tuesday and Wednesday. He said that Libra is only to be controlled by the government of Sweden due to its inherent origin in the country.

At the same time, he assures the governments that Libra will align with all the tax rules, monetary laws and fraud laws of the U.S. He says that The Libra Association anticipates the fact that the currency will be authorized, be equipped with appropriate supervisory overheads and properly regulated.

Marcus also said in an interview that, Geneva running it’s the current head operation, it intends to be operating under the supervision of the Swiss Financial Markets Supervisory Authority.

He added that they already had a word with FINMA before and anticipate in order to interact with them on an apt framework of regulation for Facebook’s Libra. The Association also intends to apply to FinCEN, The U.S. Department of Treasury & Fin Crimes Enforcement, with tags of being a monetary service.

The big question is whether Congress is savvy enough to understand Libra to the extent that it can coherently regulate it. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s testimonies before Congress last year were rife with lawmakers dispensing clueless or off-topic questions.

The Libra Association, which will manage the Reserve, has no intention of competing with any sovereign currencies or entering the monetary policy arena. It will work with the Federal Reserve and other central banks to make sure Libra does not compete with sovereign currencies or interfere with monetary policy. Monetary policy is properly the province of central banks.

Given Facebook’s huge aims — and its history of demonstrated success and as well as disregard of privacy and aggravating a lot of political as well as social glitches globally — the statement of Libra came out as an immediate response from the regulators who are keen on cryptocurrency’s innate nature if evasion and fraud trading. And this id not it, Facebook will continue to receive such probes and questions even after the currencies have been successfully implemented.