Maxine Waters directly invites Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to respond in person before Congress about the Libra project.
Despite the fact that a few days ago the US House Committee on Financial Services, of which Waters is President, heard the Libra project director, David Marcus, Waters says she did not receive all the answers she expected.
In addition, since some of the answers could not be provided by Marcus, she now asks that the leading exponent of Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg, should provide them.
It wouldn’t be the first time that Zuckerberg himself has been heard by members of Congress during an official hearing, so Waters’ request doesn’t seem to be risky in any way.
The request was made by Waters herself during an interview with Yahoo Finance.
During this interview the Chairman of the Financial Services Commission said:
“The first thing he could tell us is why Facebook came up with this idea altogether. I think this is Facebook in its effort to broaden its influence and its power and to make more money”.
She also commented on the hearing with David Marcus:
“I don’t feel as if we absolutely know what it is and how it’s going to work, but I think we did get an understanding that we’ve got to put a lot more time and attention into this to be able to understand it and make some decisions about whether it’s in the best interest of our country”.
One of the problems highlighted by Waters is the one concerning the agencies that should regulate Libra. She said:
“That’s the problem — because we don’t know what it is. Not knowing what it is, you certainly can’t begin to talk about who should regulate it. It could be, if that it goes forward, it would be a whole new regulatory system set up. A whole new regulatory agency. I don’t know at this point. But because it is not well defined in ways that we understand, I cannot tell you who should or could be regulating something like this”.
The matters according to which Waters would also need a hearing with Zuckerberg himself are those related to the trust that can or cannot be placed in Facebook, and to the threat that this new digital currency seems to bring to the US dollar itself.
In that regard, she said:
“It’s obvious facebook is going to have to get beyond this trust issue.
[…] I think this is a huge idea that’s born out of Facebook. It’s a global idea that’s born out of Facebook and I think the Libra is a challenge to our dollar. So we’ve got a lot of questions to ask and we want to ask them of Mr. Zuckerberg”.
