Nashville Standard

United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN), a member of the Senate Banking Committee, appeared on The Evening Edit on Fox Business to discuss his participation in the Bitcoin Nashville 2024 Conference alongside President Donald Trump and address concerns regarding Democrats' efforts to establish a Central Bank Digital Currency.

Hagerty shared his observations on Trump's remarks at the conference: “I tell you, the energy there was electric. Liz, the crowd was so responsive to President Trump. If you think about the alignment of basic, fundamental Republican principles of freedom and liberty, President Trump was speaking to his audience because the Bitcoiners are very much in that same vein. And I think they saw the alignment, and President Trump was very clear. He wants to see this innovation happen here in America and not force it offshore the way the current Administration has been doing. So he’s embracing one of the greatest, most impactful technologies that we see for our nation’s future. The productivity gains that we’ll see, I think will be enormous. We need to see it happening here on shore, and President Trump made that message extraordinarily clear and the crowd responded, as you could probably hear, in a very, very exciting and electric way.”

Regarding the Biden-Harris Administration's interest in a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), Hagerty stated: “It’s absolutely true, and I think the last point is probably the most critical because we’ve seen this Administration take every move in the direction of creating what is known as a Central Bank Digital Currency. It’s what’s being done in Communist China right now with their digital yuan. It’s a centralized product that would allow government surveillance and control of all of our financial transactions. The Bitcoin community, and I think everybody at that conference, wants to see something that’s decentralized, something that is not centrally controlled by the federal government but something that allows individuals to custody their own wealth and their own currency. This is something that is again fundamentally American. Those who want liberty and freedom appreciate this. Those who want centralized control like the current Administration want to move in the exact opposite direction which I think underlies why they’ve been so hostile to the cryptocurrency environment. It seems to be pushing in several nations but efforts underway here are quiet at this point. But what we’ve seen are significant efforts by this Administration to move in that direction.”