#OTS

On Wednesday, several major crypto companies told Congress that the best way to govern them – should this be needed at all – is to create a new federal regulator that knows its way around the blockchain.  One trusts this proposal is a sincere effort at constructive engagement, but anyone who has run the financial-regulatory traps longer than a DLT minute knows that proposing a single regulator is the most effective way to look earnest and yet still roam free outside the regulatory perimeter.  There is simply no way Congress will pull itself together to enact a single crypto regulator.  And, even if Congress could do so, it shouldn’t.

Congressional obdurace about regulatory-agency rationalization isn’t because the financial-regulatory construct makes sense or even that Congress somehow thinks it does.  Congress knew that the multiplicity of banking agencies created undue opportunities for arbitrage and captivity at least as early as the 1971 Hunt Commission report arguing for what the then head of the Senate Banking Committee, William Proxmire, called the “Federal Banking Commission” when he tried to create one throughout the 1970s and early 1980s.  As banking blurred into financial services in the 1990s, the regulatory perimeter became even fuzzier and Congress tried to rationalize it in the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, ultimately having only minimal impact on the alphabet soup.

A new regulator – the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight – was created in 1992 for Fannie, Freddie, and the Home Loan Banks, but that was because the S&L crisis …