Screenshot/C-SPAN
Michael Barr in March 2011
Brian Brooks, the acting head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) in the waning days of the Trump administration, was a reliable ally for the cryptocurrency industry. This stands to reason, since he had previously served as the chief legal officer for digital currency exchange Coinbase. During Brooks’s eight-month tenure at OCC, he approved Anchorage as the nation’s first federally chartered crypto bank, and enabled commercial banks to use stablecoins for payments.
This is not really someone whose endorsement former Obama Treasury official Michael Barr has sought as he seeks to take over Joe Biden’s OCC. But that’s what he got this week.
In a Monday interview with CoinDesk TV, Brooks suggested that Barr shares his industry-friendly approach to crypto. Brooks laid out his thesis of decentralized currencies, that they are both a “freer technology and a more sound money strategy than central bank governed money-printing approaches.” He then added, “If it is true that Michael Barr is my successor at the OCC, I think he’s likely to have more of a thesis similar to mine on this. He has a background, having spent some time on the Ripple advisory board, for example.”
This is precisely the stance Barr’s supporters have been attempting to downplay as they fight to get him the OCC slot. Ripple, which calls itself the “Amazon of payments,” was sued last December by the SEC for allegedly selling its cryptocurrency XRP without registering it as a security. The case remains active.
Barr has served on the advisory boards of several financial-technology companies, venture capital firms, and industry advisory groups. It’s why many observers believe he would take a welcoming approach to financial innovations like bitcoin, online peer-to-peer lending, and more. Apparently Trump’s OCC chief agrees with those observers. “It’s not a partisan issue, it’s more about who’s a tech adopter and who’s an innovator versus who isn’t,” Brooks told CoinDesk TV.
Barr’s positions on digital currencies and financial-technology innovations are critical, because of their centrality to the OCC’s ongoing work. OCC charters give banks protection from many state-based regulations and legitimacy as banking operations; for the crypto industry, it’s highly prized. Last week, the OCC made Protego the second firm with a crypto bank charter. At a time when cryptocurrencies are on a speculative ride, OCC will play a major role in the Biden administration as to whether these markets will be well regulated or not.
“This is damning praise by Brooks,” said co-founder of Demand Progress David Segal, who has been engaged in the contest over Biden’s personnel picks. “Receiving the effective endorsement of one’s Trump-era predecessor, on grounds of similarity of vision, is something no potential Biden nominee should want to have to explain away during the vetting process.”
Sources have indicated to the Prospect that Barr has not locked down the position at OCC as of yet. The other main name that has been widely suggested is Cal-Irvine law professor Mehrsa Baradaran (who is a Prospect board member). The choice has become a proxy fight over who will have more influence in the Biden administration: financial reformers or throwbacks to the Wall Street–friendly era of Obama and his Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner.
But the more pressing battle in the Barr fight concerns the cryptocurrency technologies that were just emerging in the Obama years. Barr’s coziness with them, and praise from Trump-era regulatory officials who also support digital currencies, could be a bridge too far for the Biden team.
