Facebook’s Libra to be ‘carefully’ looked at by US Fed
‘Given the possible scale of it, I think that our expectations from a consumer protection standpoint, from a regulatory standpoint, are going to be very, very high,’ said US Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell.
The United States (US) Federal Reserve will be looking at Facebook's cryptocurrency Libra in close detail and likely to impose ‘very, very high’ standards on consumer protection on the crypto, from a regulatory standpoint, the central bank’s chairman Jerome Powell said on Tuesday.
‘We're looking at it very carefully,’ Mr Powell said at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in an AFP report. ‘Given the possible scale of it, I think that our expectations from a consumer protection standpoint, from a regulatory standpoint, are going to be very, very high.’
Speaking at the forum, Mr Powell said that ‘authority for overseeing Libra is going to be in a number of places but I think the big picture is we're going to be looking really carefully at it’.
Regulators get heated up on Libra
Mr Powell joins other US officials who have voiced their concerns over the global digital currency as well as calls from officials in Europe calling for a close regulatory scrutiny on it.
US’ house financial services committee chairwoman Maxine Waters last week appealed to Facebook to pause on its cryptocurrency development until the US Congress and regulators can examine it.
‘Facebook has data on billions of people and has repeatedly shown a disregard for the protection and careful use of this data,’ said Ms Waters in a statement.
‘With the announcement that it plans to create a cryptocurrency, Facebook is continuing its unchecked expansion and extending its reach into the lives of its users,’ she had said.
Cryptocurrency Libra
Providing details on its cryptocurrency last week, Facebook said Libra will be governed by the Libra Association based in Geneva, a council formed to make decisions over the cryptocurrency so that no one single authority can make the full decision on issues surrounding the coin.
As a stable coin, Libra will be pegged to a basket of bank deposits and short-term government securities for a group of historically stable international currencies, including the US dollar and the Euro to keep its value stable.
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