NTU Sends Memo to House Financial Services Committee on Priorities for the 118th Congress

With respect to the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im), NTU urges your committee to keep the interests of taxpayers at the forefront. It is taxpayers who are ultimately on the hook for Ex-Im financing and insurance obligations. Ex-Im recently bypassed Congress and expanded the Bank’s mission to include manufacturing for domestically used goods, as opposed to just exports. NTU encourages your committee to reverse such “mission creep.” Moreover, Ex-Im financing should support exports from a broad range of small businesses, not a handful of large corporations. Finally, as Congress looks to level the playing field with our international competitors, NTU encourages your committee to make the reduction of foreign subsidies the priority, as opposed to the escalation of domestic subsidies. 

Flooding is the most expensive type of natural disaster in the United States. Between 1980 and 2021, the U.S. endured 36 separate flooding events that each had an economic cost of over $1 billion, with a total economic cost of over $168 billion. According to FEMA, of every $1 spent in mitigation the U.S. government saves $6 in unspent recovery funds. Years of heavily subsidized policies and natural disasters have left the NFIP with a debt of $20.5 billion and no clear way of managing its financial obligations in the long-run. Therefore it is essential for reforms to NFIP in order for it to be on sound financial standing to be able to reverse years of persistent deficits and to ensure the program does not receive a taxpayer-funded bailout. 

As the financial industry continues to innovate it is becoming increasingly urgent that Congress acts to protect consumer privacy and the financial data they share with existing and emergency industry participants. Chairman McHenry recently released a draft bill that we hope the Senate will consider and work in partnership with the House to accomplish real solutions that will protect consumers and taxpayers privacy alike. 

Over the past decade, Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) both have issued substantial guidance on their respective treatments of cryptocurrencies. Unfortunately, there has not yet been clarity on the division of crypto regulatory authority between the CFTC and the SEC. Even some of the largest crypto company CEOs have been quoted recently asking for regulatory clarity. For a nascent industry with tough growing pains, it’s of the utmost importance to get the definitional language correct. It’s far past time to bring the crypto industry out of the regulatory shadows and into a workable legal framework where it belongs. 

NTU has developed a definition that is close to comprehensive and solves many of the problems in clearly delineating the difference between crypto tokens covered by CFTC and SEC jurisdictions. It also draws much clearer lines between CFTC and SEC authority while avoiding many of the past definitions’ pitfalls. It is intended to be a reasonable compromise between many of the different perspectives on this topic, from regulators, to industry, to other think tanks as well. Contrary to some maximalists’ thinking, building a consensus framework in a Congress with tight margins will be key for legislative success in shaping a new crypto future.