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Brian Brooks

Board Member / Director, Bitfury

Search every verified Brian Brooks interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. On February 10, 2026, Brian Brooks, CEO of Bitfury, testified before the U.S. House Financial Services Committee at a hearing titled "Priced Out of the American Dream: Understanding the Policies Behind Rising Costs of Housing and Borrowing." Brooks stated that the U.S. is about 5 million housing units short of total demand, attributing part of the deficit to what he called "the magical thinking of rent control," which he said deters investment in new construction. He argued that the Department of Housing and Urban Development could withhold funding from localities that pursue policies reducing housing supply. Brooks also criticized the Dodd-Frank Act and federal banking policy for reducing banks' role in housing finance, stating that the law "singled out housing finance for negative treatment" and imposed capital requirements that small community banks cannot meet. He said this led to loans being sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, removing credit risk from banks. Brooks asserted that community banks are better credit managers than government-sponsored enterprises because of their local knowledge, and that "an enormous amount of deployable capital sits in banks below $10 billion."

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Notable quotes

“Too small to succeed, I think, is 100% true. So, what DoddFrank did is... almost singled out housing finance for negative treatment compared to almost everything else... if you're a sub 1 billion dollar community bank... you can't hold that kind of capital. It's just not feasible.”

“DoddFrank is partly to blame since it imposed a series of rules that disincentivized mortgage lending as a banking line of business. But separately, bank supervision, including by my old agency, the OCC, led banks to be very wary of lending to apartment owners and developers.”

“HUD could declare that some of these rent control and permitting ordinances in fact reduce the construction and availability of housing and refuse to subsidize states that pursue these policies. HUD also has the power under section 8 and various other statutory provisions to revoke approval or withhold funding to localities that pursue policies that reduce the supply of housing.”

“Rent control deters investors from building new housing units because they can't recoup their investment. So rents rise in those cities due to shortages while rents are stable or even falling in places without rent control laws.”

“Interest rates remain persistently high and regulatory pressures have reduced credit supply to a point that is almost as significant as the problem of housing supply itself.”

“Between the day the Bitcoin ETF received final approval and a week after, Bitcoin's market cap increased 550% — an increase of about $450 billion; the market value of regulatory clarity was $450 billion.”

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