WASHINGTON—United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) today joined Mornings with Maria on Fox Business to discuss today’s Senate Banking Committee hearing on the nomination of Dr. Saule Omarova to be Comptroller of the Currency, his expectations for a nominee to the Federal Reserve, and crypto market regulations.
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Partial Transcript
Hagerty on Biden’s radical nominee to be Comptroller of the Currency: “I serve on the Senate Banking Committee, and I think that we’re going to see some very detailed questioning of a very controversial candidate. Again, this just reflects the massive bait-and-switch that America undertook. Back in 2020, Biden campaigned as a moderate, yet he’s put forward some of the most radical nominees that we’ve ever seen. And here we’re talking about a Marxist academic, someone that wants to do away with private bank accounts to put them in charge of the federal government. And she’ll [Saule Omarova] be in charge of an army of 2,400 bank examiners, armed with a billion dollar war chest. And if you think about what the Biden Administration has talked about in terms of spying on our bank accounts, giving them the opportunity to come in and execute any company that they want because they’re in a disapproved category. For example, she’s talking about oil and gas, or coal. It’s not the government’s role to step in and set the private sector aside for the government to allocate capital, which is what she’s talking about. She wants to be able to use the government as a social engineering tool to dictate where financing can go and where it cannot. She said it, she wants to bankrupt American companies with whom she may disagree.”
Hagerty on Omarova’s radical idea to nationalize banks and increase government surveillance on individual bank accounts: “That’s what she says. She wants the Federal Reserve to be in charge of this. She wants the government to basically be in charge of all banking assets. That way they can spy much more easily on every American. You know, they put forward their proposal, whether it’s $600 or $10,000 that moves to the bank account, they want access to this. They want the IRS to have access, and they’re talking about massively expanding the IRS. So she wants to control the bank accounts. The IRS is going to grow tremendously. The snooping on America is going to be severe. This feels like Communist China and the surveillance environment there. That’s the direction she wants to take us. And then allowing the government to determine which industries are favored and which are not—which ones deserve to be banked and which ones should go bankrupt—those were her words, Maria. This is frightening.”
Hagerty on the probability of Omarova getting through committee: “I think it’s going to be very difficult for her to get through our committee. I cannot imagine a single Republican voting for her in the committees because the Senate is 50-50. The committee is evenly divided. We just need one Democrat to call the White House and say ‘step back’. We don’t need this type of radical Marxist-type of approach to our banking system. Trillions of dollars, the banking system in America is the envy of the world. She would like to destroy the banking system as we know it. I can imagine that this will be very difficult for some of my colleagues like Senator [Jon] Tester, even Senator [Mark] Warner. I think they may have serious reservations with this.”
Hagerty on the next Fed chairman nominee: “Maria, I’ve been very reluctant to comment on nominations before they’re even put forward, but I’ll say this: we’re in the middle of a series of crises, whether it’s the inflation crisis that the Biden Administration has set off, the energy crisis that they precipitated. We’ve got national security crises at our Southern border, in Afghanistan. You’ve got Russia piling up on the Ukrainian border, and China is moving everywhere around the world, again, against our interests. The last thing we need is another de-stabilizing nominee put in place, particularly over our central banking system.”
Hagerty on the reporting requirements for crypto buried in the so-called Build Back Better plan: “This just underscores how reckless the Democrats have been since Joe Biden took office. They’ve pushed all of this through something called the reconciliation process. I serve on the Banking Committee. We’ve yet to see anything having to do with regulating the crypto markets. This is an area where America truly can innovate. The block chain technology possesses so much potential. And yet what we do is have people in back rooms, putting together regulations that nobody sees. You’ve got to pass the bill before you can find out what’s in it. That’s where we are with these regulations. We’re seeing something, a process put in place that may completely dampen one of the most innovative industries and area where America could be at the forefront. And they’re talking about putting these regulations together in a back room. We’ve got serious problems with this. This is the last thing we should be doing to take an innovative industry like this and regulating it through the back door in this manner.”