US senators call Fidelity’s bitcoin retirement plan “immensely troubling”

Democrat politicians have contacted Fidelity Investments CEO Abigail Johnson demanding to know why the firm would offer an asset as “volatile, illiquid, and speculative” as bitcoin in its 401(k) retirement plans.

In a letter to Johnson on Wednesday, senators Dick Durbin, Tina Smith, and Elizabeth Warren called the decision to allow Fidelity’s users access to the world’s biggest crypto “ill-advised” and “immensely troubling.”

Pointing out bitcoin’s recent crash, the letter addressed the difficulties average Americans experience when trying to save for retirement and said that a 20% investment limit and disclaimers on its website show that Fidelity was well aware of the risks of investing in digital assets.

According to the senators, given that there are so many different ways for Americans to invest in bitcoin, “working families’ retirement accounts are no place to experiment with unregulated asset classes that have yet to demonstrate their value over time.”

Read more: Are big players like Grayscale and MicroStrategy moving bitcoin’s price?

While it does acknowledge that “blockchain shows promise and has the potential to be used for innovative and exciting applications,” in its conclusion, the letter states: “Retirement accounts must be held to a higher standard, one that Bitcoin and other unregulated digital assets fail to meet. This asset class is unwieldy, immensely complex, unregulated, and highly volatile,” (our emphasis).

The senators await Fidelity’s response.

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