Fed’s Chairman Denounces Libra, Predicts Project’s Uncertainty To Surpass Regulatory Demands

Jerome Powell, Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve has issued a stern warning to Facebook along the lines of its Libra project, maintaining that developments of the highly controversial cryptocurrency project cannot proceed until the accurate regulatory procedure has been put in place.

In Powell’s words, “serious concerns” are yet to be expressed and must be addressed before developments and implementation procedures.

Facebook seems to be under the limelight recently, particularly as a result of its newly announced cryptocurrency project, Libra. In this global financial services provision, as many as 1.7 billion unbanked people globally are targeted with financial services. This, according to report would enable Whatsapp and Facebook users to send and receive money on the respective platforms.

As many come to believe in this inbound “new dawn”, several governments and financial agencies move to put Libra under strict regulations, a result of which Facebook had to halt the development and implementation of Libra initially planned to launch in 2020.

The announcement of Libra had initially spelled good luck for bitcoin. This news came at the time when bitcoin was just recovering from the 2018 bear markets. With excitements of Libra in the air, bitcoin caught a bullish trend and moved up quite rapidly to record a high all-time of 15 months at $13,100 around early June. As bitcoin tried to maintain this those good day, news of Libra’s uncertain future caused a setback and bitcoin moved down the charts once again, loosing around 10% within the last 24 hours.

Powell commented that the proposed Bitcoin rival, Libra being developed by Facebook posed some serious financial problems than anyone can imagine as of now. According to him,

“Libra raises many serious concerns regarding privacy, money laundering, consumer protection, and financial stability,” Powell warned, added he doesn’t think “the project can go forward” until these are addressed.

Adding that Libra doesn’t exactly fit into the current financial system and policies, Powell also expressed his views on how regulatory procedure Libra has to pass through before implementation.

“It’s something that doesn’t fit neatly or easily within our regulatory scheme but it does have potentially systemic scale,” he said. “It needs a careful look, so I strongly believe we all need to be taking our time with this. The process of addressing these concerns should be a patient and careful one, not a sprint.”

Mark Zuckerberg and his Libra team, according to report are currently preparing to attend a Senate hearing next week and have promised to follow due regulatory process and cooperate with regulators. However, the implementation of Libra in other regions like India and China still remains uncertain.