Chair of EU Parliament’s Committee on Budgets Calls for Crypto Ban Amid Banking Turmoil

A European lawmaker has urged authorities to impose a ban on cryptocurrencies citing the present-day crisis in the banking sector as a rationale. Johan Van Overtveldt, previous finance minister of Belgium, believes these belongings carry no economic or social price.

Belgium’s Ex-Finance Minister Suggests Ban on Decentralized Digital Currencies

Member of the European Parliament, Johan Van Overtveldt, has insisted that governments should prohibit cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. His phone arrives amid a crisis sparked by the failure of quite a few banking establishments, which includes two crypto-welcoming financial institutions in the U.S.

“Another lesson to be learned from the latest banking commotion. Enforce a strict ban on cryptocurrencies,” the lawmaker, who has earlier praised blockchain technology, tweeted on Friday. “Speculative poison and no economic or social extra price. If a governing administration bans medicine, it ought to also ban cryptos,” he argued.

Nog een les te trekken uit de huidige bankcommotie. Leg een strikt verbod op cryptocurrencies op. Speculatief gif en geen enkele economische- of sociale toegevoegde waarde. Als een overheid prescription drugs verbiedt, moet ze ook crypto’s verbieden.

— Johan Van Overtveldt (@jvanovertveldt) March 17, 2023

Van Overtveldt is a Belgian journalist and politician from the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) bash, who served as his country’s minister of finance involving 2014 and 2018, in the federal government of Prime Minister Charles Michel.

He was elected to the European Parliament in 2019 where he has been chairing the Committee on Budgets and signifies the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) team in the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON).

ECR is a smooth Eurosceptic, anti-federalist political team in the EU’s legislature. Free of charge company, negligible regulation, decreased taxation, alongside with “small government as the greatest catalysts for individual freedom and individual and national prosperity” are amongst its founding ideas.

Overtveldt’s assertion with regards to cryptocurrencies follows the collapse of a few U.S. banking institutions, two of which ended up concerned in the crypto place, Silvergate Financial institution and Silicon Valley Bank. The effects of these failures arrived at Europe, impacting Credit score Suisse, a important investment bank on the Old Continent.

Europe is nevertheless to comprehensively regulate its crypto financial system by enforcing a legislative package deal referred to as Markets in Crypto Belongings (MiCA). EU establishments and member states agreed on the proposal past summer. It introduces policies for crypto service suppliers throughout the 27-strong bloc.

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Do you consider Johan Van Overtveldt has a explanation to make a simply call for a crypto ban? Notify us in the responses segment below.

Lubomir Tassev

Lubomir Tassev is a journalist from tech-savvy Jap Europe who likes Hitchens’s estimate: “Being a writer is what I am, instead than what I do.” Other than crypto, blockchain and fintech, international politics and economics are two other resources of inspiration.