The @BillWaltonShow: Chris Iacovella and Norbert Michel

On this episode of The Bill Walton Show, Chris Iacovella, President of the American Securities Association, and Norbert Michel, Director of the CATO Institute Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives, join Bill Walton for a discussion on federal regulation in the financial sector.

Iacovella and Michel at their respective organizations are fighting to protect individuals’ freedom and privacy as the financial sector marches in lockstep with the federal government toward a centralized, federal-controlled bank with a digital currency. The trend of increased reliance on digital currencies and transactions and the abandonment of physical currency paired with events such as the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank are building a case for further regulation that centralizes the financial sector with the Federal Reserve and the administrative state. The current regulations under the Dodd-Frank Act are clearing the way for centralized banking by forcing the consolidation of banks into large corporations and discouraging the establishment of new, small-scale banks.

“Each crisis has these folks go to Congress and ask for more power. ‘We could have stopped it if only we had the authority to do this’ or ‘This was deregulatory and that’s why Silicon Valley Bank went down’,” Iacovella observes.

The most recent crises are being used as justification for a national, federally-controlled bank that could closely monitor financial patterns and behaviors of individuals. This control, however beneficial it may be for the stability of banks, is a serious violation of individual freedom and privacy. It allows the federal government to monitor citizens’ spending habits, either punish or reward them for the businesses and organizations they patron, and access personal information of citizens without a warrant.

“It sounds Orwellian,” Michel comments. “They create this giant record, electronic record of all these things that people who have committed no crime are doing. That’s a constitutional violation. At the bare minimum, a Fourth Amendment violation.”

“It’s just part and parcel to this agenda of eroding the Fourth Amendment and destroying the right of privacy that every American should be allowed to enjoy,” Iacovella adds. “The government has decided they want to understand everything that we do. It wants to know our securities transactions. It wants to know what we buy, when we buy things, what he hold as security, what we invest in, what we finance, how much debt we have. Why they need to know all of this, is an open question and the debate hasn’t happened.”

Michel and Iacovella are the doing the work that Congress should be doing right now to flesh out every single violation of the fundamental rights of Americans a central bank would commit. The next step Congress would take and needs to take would be to craft legislation with protections against the establishment of a central bank. Michel and Iacovella urge Congress to take the offensive on this and prevent it before it becomes a problematic reality.

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