Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh told the House Financial Services Committee on July 14 that the central bank will decline to rescue the cryptocurrency industry in a crisis, a message he delivered during his first semiannual monetary policy testimony as chair.
The exchange came from Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA), a longtime crypto skeptic, who asked whether the Fed would backstop failing digital-asset firms the way it supported money market funds in 2008. Warsh rejected the premise. “We do not want to be in the bailout business, full stop,” he said. He added, “We want to be in a position where we’re not bailing out anybody, including crypto.”
Warsh, who took office May 15 and presided over his first FOMC meeting in June, framed the stance through his own history.
As a Fed governor under Chairman Ben Bernanke, he helped design the 2008 rescue effort. “I still have the scars from the 2008 financial crisis,” he said. “That is not something we want to repeat.” He argued that the post-crisis bailouts bred moral hazard, and he wants to spare digital assets the same fate.
For a market that spent years seeking legitimacy alongside traditional finance, the comments draw a hard line. Warsh, described as the first crypto-native Fed chair, has treated Bitcoin as a gauge rather than a ward of the state. During his nomination hearing he called Bitcoin “not a substitute for the U.S. dollar,” and he has used its price as a thermometer for whether monetary policy sits in the right place.
Warsh chimes in on the GENIUS Act rules deadline
The warning lands days before a pivotal deadline. Rules to implement the GENIUS Act, the stablecoin law enacted in 2025, are due Saturday, and Warsh confirmed the Fed is “racing” to publish its proposals on time.
The statute pays stablecoin holders ahead of other creditors when an issuer fails and requires full reserves behind each coin. With the stablecoin market near $310 billion, Sherman pressed the point that a run on one issuer could spread across the sector.
Warsh declined to offer an absolute pledge. He told lawmakers the Fed would act to limit “extraordinary” risks over the next four years, language that leaves room for intervention in a systemic event. American Banker noted that he declined to rule out any future step-in.
At the Senate Banking Committee the following day, Warsh urged banking regulators to coordinate on GENIUS Act rulemaking to prevent regulatory arbitrage, a race that lets firms hunt for the lightest oversight.
He paired that call with a defense of Fed independence on monetary policy and a pledge to shrink a balance sheet that sits near $6.7 trillion.
The takeaway for crypto is a market-discipline era: the Fed will set the rules of the road, yet firms that overreach will bear the cost of their own failures. For an industry that courted federal backing, Warsh’s message asks it to stand on its own.