Gary Gensler brushed off criticism from Republican lawmakers over the Securities and Exchange Commission's aggressive stance on crypto markets and questioned whether the industry even wants to comply with its rules.
Appearing for the first time before the GOP-controlled House Financial Services Committee, the SEC chair defended the agency's approach. The regulator has recently brought a series of high-profile enforcement actions, and Gensler has said many crypto tokens are really just unregistered securities.
"It's not a matter of lack of clarity," he said during a hearing on Tuesday. "This is a field that, in the main, has built up around non-compliance, and that's their business model."
Gensler also said that the agency could use more resources to police the asset class. "There are more things to look at and investigate than we have people on the staff to do," he said.
Ahead of the hearing, the Republicans on the panel released a letter to Gensler that blasted the SEC's digital-asset regulation. The lawmakers took particular issue with his repeated calls for crypto trading platforms to come in and register with the agency.
"You have failed to provide a path that allows digital asset trading platforms to register," the lawmakers wrote. "Without clear rules of the road, your push for firms to 'come in and register' is a willful misrepresentation of the SEC's non-existent registration process. The only entity to blame for the lack of registrants is the SEC itself."
Debt ceiling
During the hearing, Gensler also sought to connect the recent failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank to their work with clients involved in the digital-asset industry.
Beyond crypto, Gensler faced a barrage of questions over how Wall Street's main regulator oversees capital markets. He was asked about everything from swaps to U.S. Treasuries, trading in which he said could fray if the Congress doesn't extend the debt ceiling.
"It would be one heck of a mess in the capital markets" if the U.S. were to default on its debt, Gensler said.
