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Elizabeth Warren Calls for US to Create a CBDC

"I think it's time for us to move in that direction," the Democratic senator told NBC's Chuck Todd, in an interview to be aired Thursday night.

Updated May 11, 2023, 4:39 p.m. Published Apr 1, 2022, 1:09 a.m.

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) says it's time for the U.S. to create its own central bank digital currency (CBDC). Warren spoke with NBC's Chuck Todd on "Meet the Press Reports," scheduled to air at 10:30 p.m. ET on Thursday. NBCUniversal shared a partial transcript of the conversation with CoinDesk.

"So a lot that banks do wrong, if you think, 'We could improve that in a digital world,' the answer is, 'Sure you could.' But in that case, let's do a central bank digital currency," Warren told Todd. "Yes, I think it's time for us to move in that direction."
Responding to Todd's question on whether bitcoin (BTC) will face at minimum being regulated like a commodity, Warren responded, "I think it's going to end up getting regulated," using the subprime mortgage financial crisis that started in 2007 as an example of why it's needed. She didn't say what form such regulations might take.
In March Warren announced a new bill to block cryptocurrency companies from conducting business with sanctioned companies. The Digital Assets Sanctions Compliance Enhancement Act, introduced with senators Jack Reed (D-R.I.), Mark Warner (D-Va.), Jon Tester (D-Mont.) and others, would allow the U.S. president to add non-U.S.-based crypto companies to sanctions list if they support sanctions evasion.
On whether the senator saw cryptocurrency as "this decade's real estate bubble," Warren replied, "The whole digital world has worked very much like a bubble works. What is it moved up on? It's moved up on the fact that people all tell each other that it's going to be great, just again like it was on that real estate market. How many times did people say, 'Real Estate always goes up. It never goes down?' They said it decades ago before the last real estate bubble. They said it in the 2000s, before the crash in 2008."

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Greg Ahlstrand

Originally from California, I've been Asia-based since 1999, headquartered in Hong Kong and Jakarta and traveling throughout the Asean countries, Japan, Korea, the Chinese mainland and Taiwan for stories. Made Australia a couple of times, too. I started my journalism career as a news assistant at the Fresno Bee in Central California while studying the subject in school after the Navy. I went from launching and recovering helicopters on flight decks at sea to recovering papers fresh off the printer in the Bee's basement and launching them onto the editors' desks, whose editors had long since gone home for the night. Eventually, they let me stop delivering the paper and start writing stuff in it. My first beat was night cops: liquor store robberies, gang shootings, fatal car crashes (almost always alcohol related). It was an education. I am, as implied above, a U.S. Navy veteran. I served in seagoing helicopter squadrons as an aviation anti-submarine warfare technician throughout the Asia Pacific region and the Indian Ocean. I have a significant number of sailor stories to tell. I have no significant crypto holdings. Among my hobbies are welding, building stuff, home remodelling, (or knocking a house down and starting from scratch if it's too far gone to fix), riding horses and rebuilding old tractors. So far I've done a Ford 8N and a Ford 9N. It's slow going, because I live in Hong Kong and the tractors are in California, so I only get to work on them once or twice a year, for a week or two at a time - and that was before covid. I love my Lab, Cooper, whom my neighbors asked me to adopt two years ago when they moved back to Shanghai from Hong Kong. Cooper and I actually planned the whole thing -- we've known each other almost his whole life -- but his first parents are unaware of the conspiracy; and they send him Christmas presents every year.