Christine Lagarde says central banks don’t want to schedule CBDCs. They will let the private banks take care of it…
Your salary, with or without expiry date?
Speaking at the Bank for International Settlements Innovation Summit in late March, Christine Lagarde justified CBDCs by the decline in the use of cash.
“We are seeing a decrease in the use of cash. This is the general trend. It fell from 72% to 59%. […] People are clearly expressing their preference for digital payment,” she said.
Certainly, but perhaps this ” preference “ explained by the scarcity of ATMs and the exorbitant withdrawal fees…
Regarding the CBDC, the President of the ECB tried to reassure by saying that it was not up to the central banks to program the CBDC:
“A CBDC issued by a central bank would not be programmable. It would not be associated with any particular limitation, either in time or in the type of use. In my opinion, it would no longer be a CBDC, but a coupon. »
On the other hand, private banks will have plenty of time to fiddle with our money. “Those who can program the CBDC are the intermediaries, that is, the private banks”has she entrusts.
“It’s their job. They know how to do it, but if we have to say a euro is a euro, whether it’s cash or digital, then for us it can’t be programmable. It can be associated with conditionality, which is different, but it cannot be programmable”.
At the end of the day, the powerful are well and truly preparing to condition access to OUR money. With the blessing of central banks.
program me
If C. Lagarde does not want to get his hands dirty, others do not worry about it. Including Bo Li, deputy managing director of the IMF and former deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China.
The latter declared in October 2022 during a gnawing table organized in Washington about the programmability of CBDCs:
“The CBDC can enable government agencies and private sector actors to program – to create smart contracts – to enable targeted political functions. For example, payment of social assistance, consumer coupons, food stamps. By programming the CBDC, money can be precisely programmed to choose who to distribute it to and for what purposes. »
So while Ms. Lagarde says central banks have no interest in programming CBDCs, some are keenly interested, even if the programming is delegated to others.
For example, the Reserve Bank of India is exploring the possibility of creating a programmable CBDC with expiration dates.
In Thailand, the Pheu Thai party propose to offer the equivalent of 217 dollars to all citizens in the event of victory in the next elections. And, surprise, this CBDC must be spent within a radius of 4 km within a limit of six months (excluding cigarettes and alcohol).
In other words, the Thais would set foot in the stirrup of a system of total control over what they can consume, where and when.
This is the ultimate objective: to make cash disappear and to grant oneself the power to limit and/or direct consumption. Such a system would, for example, reduce the country’s trade balance deficit. Where to cut off the supply of an overly curious journalist…
Outcry in the United States
Several presidential American politicians are up in arms against the CBDC. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis even wants to ban it as a precaution:
“We consider the CBDC to be a threat to freedom. The idea of a CBDC is lone of the things we’re going to ban in Florida this year. […] They will tell us that the CBDC will not be abused, but we are not born yesterday. »
Same opinion on the side of Robert F. Kennedy (nephew of JFK):
“We should be wary. CBDCs are the ultimate mechanisms of surveillance and social control. Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin offer the public a way to escape the bursting of the bubble. The White House is colluding with the banksters to keep us trapped in this bubble. »
Or as Christine Lagarde would say about Bitcoin, “if there is a loophole, it will be used”…
Fortunately, we have a parallel monetary system such as Bitcoin. It will be indispensable against an Orwellian currency linked to social credit. This system is already in the making in China:
Do we want a world in which an artificial intelligence digs into our purchase history, Internet search history, our associations or our declarations to judge if we are worthy of spending our money as we see fit?
A world in which we would have no choice but to see our savings massacred by the inflation resulting from the bad choices of an elite of incompetents?
In the face of this dystopia, bitcoin will always be there.
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