US senators write to banking regulators about potential crypto discrimination

cointelegraph.com:

Four United States Republican senators lead by Bill Hagerty have written a letter to the heads of federal banking regulatory agencies questioning the ideological motivation behind recent regulatory moves in regard to cryptocurrency. They compared the regulators’ policies to the Obama administration’s Operation Choke Point.

The senators addressed Federal Reserve Board chair Jerome Powell, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) chair Marty Gruenberg, and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) acting comptroller Michael Hsu. The March 9 letter said that their agencies, along with the White House, have issued statements on heightened supervision that have resulted in unfortunate consequences for the cryptocurrency sector, such as the closing of crypto firms’ bank accounts.

The senators were referring to the joint statement released by those agencies on January 3 that said in part, “Issuing or holding as principal crypto-assets […] is highly likely to be inconsistent with safe and sound banking practices.” In addition, they pointed to a February Fed policy statement that said, making specific reference to crypto, that “legal permissibility is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition” for banking activity, and the Biden administration’s January “road map” that called for agencies to “ramp up enforcement.”

“This coordinated behavior seems disturbingly reminiscent of Operation Choke Point,” the senators wrote. In that operation “federal regulators applied pressure on financial institutions to cut off financial services to certain licensed, legally operating industries simply because certain regulators and policymakers disfavored those industries.” They added:

The senators posed a number of questions to the