Saule Omarova, Pres. Joe Biden’s nominee for the role of the Comptroller of the Currency, said during a virtual conference in March 2021 that we should eliminate all deposits and private bank accounts.
In March, Omarova spoke at the LPE Project’s “Law & Political Economy: Democracy Beyond Neoliberalism” conference.
Omarova talked about one of her documents, “How to Democratize dollars and Finance the American Economy,” which could help in redesigning the financial sector and help make the economy “more fair for all people.”
She stated it would transition the “private-public power balance” and democratize finance to a more systemic level.
While discussing her paper, she stated that the Federal Reserve, the United states’ central bank, is only allowed to use “indirect levers” to “cause private banks to boost their lending.”
Her document calls for removing all banks and changing all bank deposits to a “FedAccount” at the U.S. Federal Reserve.
During her conference speech, she stated, “There won’t be any more private checking accounts, and all American deposit accounts will be kept directly at the Fed”:
Omarova stated her proposal would grant the Fed more “proactive” monetary policy tools, like “helicopter money.” She also thought that the United states’ Reserve could “take money” from U.S. citizens during an inflationary environment.
A former high level government official said that if congress were to confirm Omarova, she would be in the “least accountable, and most powerful” position over the United States’ banking system.
When talking about FedAccounts, the former high level government official stated, “The Democratic Party during the last couple of administrations, they would like the government to take over of the financial functions from banks.”
Omarova’s radical prospective led to 21 state financial officers to call for the president to withdraw her nomination for the U.S. comptroller:
The LPE serves as a platform to discuss:
“The role of law and legal discourse in the creation and management of capitalism and in mediating heightened tensions between democratic self-rule and capitalist order. Scholars in our network seek to better understand the connection between market supremacy and gender, racial, and economic injustice; to express the relationship between devaluation and capitalism of ecological and social reproduction; and to explore the distinctive ways that law gives shape to and legitimizes neoliberal capitalism, ranging from dynamics of financialization to the relation between the carceral state and capitalism.”
Author: Scott Dowdy
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