This is the Cato Daily podcast for Tuesday, February 4th, 2025.

I'm Caleb Brown.

What should Congress do to reform monetary and financial systems to protect privacy, unleash

investment, and generally enhance freedom when it comes to money?

I spoke with Cato's Jennifer Shulp and Norver

Michelle about their recommendations to the new Congress out today. Even before this set of

recommendations came out in line with other recommendations that you and your team have made in the past, the president

issued an executive order relating to cryptocurrencies and central bank digital currencies.

Can you walk us through what you understand about those?

Sure.

I believe it's characterized as a digital asset order.

And it's, I think, all in all, a positive thing that they've issued that order.

It orders a lot of the agencies to view digital assets in a positive way as opposed to the negative

way that we've been dealing with. So that's a good thing. There are some specific things in there

that we really like, like as you mentioned, prohibition against central bank digital currencies,

which is good. Their view or some of the principles that they've

outlined in there for how they view digital assets and how Congress should view it and the

agencies should view it, that's pretty positive too, basically saying that people should have

the right if they're acting lawfully to use these products,

which, believe it or not, is a big, big switch.

So that's encouraging.

And they're going to form a task force to look at a lot of these issues closer,

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