FED’s Chair Jerome Powel Met With Coinbase CEO Back In May

FED’s Chair Jerome Powel met with Coinbase’s CEO Brian Armstrong On May 11 according to the FED records that we read more about in our latest coinbase news.

Paul Ryan who is the former Speaker of the House was also attending the meeting. On May 14^th, Armstrong tweeted about having spent the week in DC meeting with members of Congress and heads of different federal agencies but didn’t really specify whether Powell was one of them. The meeting was a week before the Fed announced plans to release a discussion paper detailing the research into a central bank digital currency.

1/ I spent most of this week in DC meeting with members of Congress and heads of various federal agencies, along with @RonConway @katie_haun and @iampaulgrewal.

— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) May 15, 2021

The FED was studying digital money for some time now and it was exploring CBDCs or central bank digital currencies as a state-controlled digital dollar but Powell explained that they are not in a hurry to develop one. Powell stated that though China is already making a pilot of its own state-rolled digital currency, the US will continue proceeding with caution:

“The design of a CBDC would raise important monetary policy, financial stability, consumer protection, legal, and privacy considerations and will require careful thought and analysis—including input from the public and elected officials.”

FED’s chair Jerome Powel met with Armstrong but what specific discussions they made, remains uknown. One day before, the acting Currency Comptroller Michael Hsu suggested forming an inter-agency task force with the FDIC and FED specifically dedicated to crypto. The May 11 meeting between Powell and Armstrong coincided with a crash in Bitcoin’s price and other crypto assets while over the course of the week, BTC dipped from $50K to $40K.

As previously reported, Chairman Jerome Powell on CBDC comments said that the central bank is committed to exploring the potential costs and merits of launching a central bank digital currency but he hasn’t made a final decision yet. Powell believes that the United States should focus on getting right the developments of a central bank digital currency rather than doing it first.

While speaking on a panel that was hosted by the International Monetary Fund, Powell reassured that the United States is “committed to carefully and thoughtfully evaluate the potential costs and benefits of the CBDC for the US economy and payments system. He did admit that the digital currency has the potential to improve the current system of payments but he claimed that the FED hadn’t made a final decision on launching its own.