Washington is currently the epicenter of the debate over the White House-nominee for OCC. Saule Omarova, of Biden’s choosing, is at the center of the row over her paper The People’s Ledger. Many attacks are targeted to her Soviet foundation that shows through her paper, proposing the reinvention of the US financial system. The conservative editorial board at the Wall Street Journal points out to her ingrained “Soviet-era views” reflected in her composition.
Knowing the OCC
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has been around since 1863. It regulates and oversees banks, from smaller, community lenders to large institutions. The list includes Bank of America, Citibank, and Wells Fargo.
While the OCC is housed within the Treasury Department, it is still given to operate independently, and part of its mandate is “ensuring fair access and equal treatment to bank customers.”
The institutions under OCC’s command have assets worth almost $15 trillion. They account for 65% of all “U.S. commercial banking assets,” according to the OCC.
Omarova’s Profile
Saule Omarova is currently a professor of corporate law and financial regulation at Cornell University. Prior to this, Omarova worked as a lawyer at Davis Polk. During the George W. Bush administration, she served as a special advisor for regulatory policy in the Treasury Department.
While her research is wide-ranging, on subjects swinging from energy policy to infrastructure investment, Omarova is a renowned scholar of financial regulation.
The People’s Ledger vs Bitcoin White Paper
A career-long pent-up theory that filled up Omarova’s work: “The People’s Ledger: How to Democratize Money and Finance the Economy” is wrapped tightly around the Federal Reserve’s heightened control over the financial institutions of the nation. This implies solidifying the central bank’s authority over the nation’s capital, thus, explaining a higher centralization through the nationalization of banks.
Omarova’s theory finds a problem with the CBDC proposals, considering them piecemeal and incremental to the existing system. Her conclusion takes all bank deposits to the Fed Reserve Board, titled FedAccounts. This redesign of the liability side of the Fed would gradually and logically shift towards a significant transformation of the Fed’s investment portfolio. This starkly suggests the rise of prominence in the government’s role in aligning the economy and investment flows. This would also imply building additional liabilities on the governance.
In her paper, Omarova bundles “crypto-assets” together with Gamestop and UBI. It is well-known that Gamestop and UBI are actual attempts to acquire more fiat dollars.
Omarova mentions the COVID crisis led the unbanked population to wait up to two months to receive their stimulus allocation as paper checks into their accounts.
She labors little investigation into why people in the US may be still unbanked even after prior well-meant government policies; simply stating that all citizens be given FedAccounts. This proposition also does not explain how the current regulatory system could keep people out of the system.
Most of these are appropriately addressed and resolved in the Bitcoin white paper which proposes the ultimate self-sovereign and alternative defying the deficiencies in the fiscal make-up of the existing system.
Read more: Bitcoin: A Global Recap Through 3 Generations
In Clarity…
Bitcoin can propagate demonstrated utility in the resolution of a variety of the problems detected in the theorized version.
Cryptocurrency offers a progressive route to the co-existence of parallel financial systems which grants equity in distribution and financial inclusion which are thoroughly misrepresented in the paper.
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