As we warned 5 years ago already, the CBDC are coming.
Why on earth do we need a "more" digital currency when 98% of all transactions are already digital? When was the last time you paid cash for a 1,000 dollar transaction or even 100 dollar more recently?
But the issue of CBDC is of course not the D (Digital), it's the CB (Central Bank) since the currency is supposed to be issued directly by the Central Bank.
This is not the place for a monetary treatise but as long as banks were in charge of money creation through credit, your money and privacy were relatively secure. In the modern economy, managing your bank account was almost a related public service they were offering. It is also making it more difficult for the government to control your money and transactions, not because they can't but because they need the banks to share the data and an excuse to ask for it on a big scale. (There is none beyond individual cases!)
Once, your money is directly controlled through a personal digital wallet (That's what we are talking about with CBDC, not just digital, your money is already mostly digital.), the sky is the limit on what the Central Bank can do with YOUR money which almost immediately cease to be yours since it can be, first monitored then remotely controlled for whatever reason the government creates.
Think about it, in a modern economy where almost anything has a cost, what does freedom means without financial freedom? If someone, somewhere can know what you bought, where and when in real time, what's left to know about you?
You won't use your cash to escape the "system"? They'll make you use it by having you pay for the roads by miles / km (remember the green agenda?) even if they have to offer you free credit so you can move a little (remember the Universal Basic Income?) As soon as you really understand what can be done with CBDC it truly becomes frightening. (They won't do it? On day one no, but then just wait!)
And suddenly we move from a system where you could more or less do whatever you wanted (with some specified legal limits) to a system where the administration authorize you to do whatever your allowance or lack of, allows. No surprise there is total concordance of goals between the WEF "thinkers" and "freedom loving" Chinese bureaucrats! Total control on steroid. The wet dream of authoritarian regimes since the dawn of mankind is suddenly within reach!
Tell me again the problem with the 20 Euro / dollar notes in my pocket?
Authored by Kit Knightly via Off-Guardian.org,
Terror attacks in Moscow, ongoing genocide in Gaza, and cancer in the Royal family are dominating the headlines.
Meanwhile, on the financial back pages, all over the world the implementation of Central Bank Digital Currencies draws nearer.
China, whose digital Yuan was the major flagship CBDC, is in the middle of an immense trial covering over 25 million people. This week they released new guidelines for tourists using CBDCs for the first time.
A journalist for the crypto-focused DLNews wrote of her experience using it, and while functionality might seem limited right now we should note that she talks up the “de-dollarization” aspect of CBDCs, aligning digital currency with the “multilateral world” plan.
Hong Kong has its own CBDC program, the second trial stage of which launched last week. They are developing the ability to use “tokenised deposits” to add $160bn to their GDP.
In Europe, following late February’s Digital Euro Conference (DEC24), the European Central Bank has announced the development of the “digital euro rulebook”.
In Sweden, the Riksbank’s e-Krona program published its final report on its CBDC pilot a few days ago. Coin Telegraph reports they working on making its CBDC available offline.
The Central Bank of the UAE announced they are launching their own CBDC pilot a few days ago.
That’s just the technical developments, saying nothing of the ongoing propaganda campaign.
As I already said, in order to appeal to the anti-Imperialist left, we’re being told that CBDCs will help the world “de-dollarize”.
Another angle is that CBDCs will help developing nations prosper.
For example, BusinessMagnates.com reports that CBDCs will help “revive Latin American economies”.
All this is just from the past week. It goes on and on and on.
The only slight hold-out seems to be the US, where CBDCs remain somewhat contentious.
The e-dollar has stuttered along in progress compared to the rest of the world, with contradictory reports from officials emerging all the time.
This could be genuine opposition from US Imperialists due to the threat of de-dollarisation, it could be a natural response to a far more cash-based economy than most of the developed world, or it could be a deliberate propaganda campaign designed to promote CBDCs in anti-America quarters.
Of course, it’s an election year state-side, and Presidential candidates Donald Trump and Robert Kennedy Jr have both come out against CBDCs. While RFK jr is doubtless sincere, this would not be the first time the “deep state” has tried to discredit an opinion by having Trump endorse it.
But America or no America, the global CBDC roll-out is coming.
According to the Atlantic Council’s CBDC Tracker, 134 countries representing 98% of global GDP are currently working on their own digital currency.
While an Atlantic Council report from March 14th underlines the importance of “interoperability”:
Central banks and international financial institutions are realizing that uneven and dispersed technological advancements in digital currencies could actually create further fragmentation of the financial system, deepen digital divides, and create systemic risks. This would undercut the premise of digital currencies, which are supposed to create more efficiency in the existing system. Fortunately, there are some new models of interoperability across borders.
Interoperability isn’t just an important part of the CBDC plan, according to the Atlantic Council, it is the whole point.
Just yesterday, reported by Business Wire, SWIFT published their findings on “Seamless Introduction of CBDCs for Cross-Border Transactions”:
Interoperability is critical to Swift’s strategy for instant and frictionless transactions. The cooperative has focused its innovation agenda on interoperability between digital currencies and tokenised assets to overcome the potential risk of fragmentation, caused by the development of digital currencies on different technologies and with different standards and protocols. Swift’s solution has already been shown to enable cross-border transfers and connect CBDCs on different networks with each other, as well as with fiat currencies.
As we wrote in 2024: The Year Global Government Takes Shape, interoperability is the name of the game – there is no real practical difference between 195 interoperable digital currencies and one global currency.
Global currency is coming. It’s not on the front pages, but that’s hardly surprising.
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