The US Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell announced that the fed’s cryptocurrency and CBDC (central bank digital currency) report — which was initially planned to be released on September 2021 — will finally be published “within weeks”.
In regards to the report’s delays, Powell said: “We didn’t get it to quite where we needed to get it. But it’s effectively there now, it’s within weeks we will be publishing it.”
Powell has said similar things in the past. He stated that the report would be released in “coming weeks” at a Senate hearing in November, that the report is arriving “soon” two months earlier, and that it would be published by September in last July.
The report is said to be focused on the subject of CBDCs — a subject that is being researched by the Fed and regularly discussed at congressional hearings where Powell is a witness.
On Tuesday, Senator Pat Toomey asked Powell whether CBDC could not coexist with “well-regulated, privately issued stablecoins” if the Congress authorises the Fed to pursue the digital currency, to which Powell responded no.
Toomey also asked: “It seems to me that there is absolutely nothing in the history, the experience, the expertise, the capabilities of the Fed that lends the Fed to being a retail bank. Is that a fair observation?” Powell agreed to the statement.