Take its recent attempt to defend the currency by raising the statutory reserve requirements to as high as 40%.
However, there's a statutory limit to the amount of paper currency that can be in circulation at any one time.
Prior to the 1930s, the authority of most central banks to expand the money supply was limited by statutory requirements that restricted the capacity of the central bank to issue currency and (less commonly) to incur deposit liabilities to the volume of the central bank's international reserves.
"A currency peg or intervention does not in and of itself satisfy the statutory test" for constituting "manipulation," the report said.
"The only statutory [authority] that I have as a commissioner to limit contributions to $100 is currency of the United States, and a bitcoin is not currency," Goodman told The Hill.
"There is no express statutory requirement that says you must make this amount of loans," said John C. Dugan, the comptroller of the currency.
"There is no express statutory requirement that says you must make this amount of loans," said John C. Dugan, the comptroller of the currency, one of the major banking regulators, said in a recent interview.
Two weeks ago, as the New Year loomed and many people were on holiday, the Obama administration -- specifically Secretary of Treasury Tim Geithner -- announced, as quietly as possible, its decision not to label China as a "currency manipulator" even though in its required semi-annual report it stated that China had not met the statutory requirements to avoid such a designation.
When the comptroller of the currency fined a consulting firm in 2006, a federal appeals court later ruled that the regulator had "exceeded his statutory authority".
