Crypto: The New Swiss Bank Account?
The U.S.' highest-ranking finance official says digital tokens may have the same whiff of notoriety as offshore Swiss bank accounts used to hide illicit money.
Asia is doing booming business in cryptocurrency trading, leading some regulators to openly warn the public about the potential dangers of the new and untested investments.
The U.S. has been relatively quiet so far, with the financial regulator looking into initial coin offerings, or ICOs. Now, the country's top finance minister has given an indication of where America stands on digital tokens like bitcoin.
G-20 Pressure
The U.S. will push its fellow G-20 nations to tamp down on anonymous digital wallets to hold bitcoins, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said. Absent this method of tracking the source of wealth, cryptocurrencies will be associated with ill-gotten money, he said.
«We can track those activities. The rest of the world doesn’t have that, so one of the things we will be working very closely with the G-20 is making sure that this doesn’t become the Swiss numbered bank account,» Mnuchin said on Friday according to media reports.
The comments are the highest-level indication yet of how the U.S. plans to wield its influence in the fast-growing crypto market, which is fueled by retail trading in Asia. Argentina hosts the next G-20 meeting in November.
Anti-Laundering Push
A former Goldman Sachs banker, Mnuchin is referring to the heyday or numbered accounts in the 1990s, before money-laundering rules put the kibosh on the anonymous method of stowing cash – often from criminal sources. Swiss banks still offer numbered accounts, but they are subject to stricter checks since a raft of regulation to combat money-laundering came into force more than ten years ago.
Cryptocurrency providers are grappling with a similar conundrum – to the point that exchanges such as Bitcoin Suisse has trouble finding a bank for its own cash needs, as finews.asia reported in November.
