While around 90 countries and currency unions are currently exploring how to unleash CBDC programs as a cashless replacement for the existing fiat scheme, the United States is about to become the first country in the world to ban all central bank-controlled CBDCs.
Back in May, the U.S. House of Representatives passed House Resolution 5403, known as the "CBDC Anti-Surveillance State Act, to prohibit the private Federal Reserve from issuing CBDCs. First introduced in September 2023 and sponsored by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), HR 5403 would amend the Federal Reserve Act, protect the right of financial privacy, and stop the U.S. government from "weaponizing their financial system against their own citizens."
According to Technocracy.news, the passage of HR 5403 would prevent the Fed from:
1) Offering any products or services directly to individuals
2) Maintaining accounts on behalf of individuals
3) Issue a CBDC or any other digital asset that is substantially similar in name or label to an individual
(Related: Did you know that "over 98 percent" of the world's central banks, including the private Federal Reserve here in America, are planning to go cashless with their own respective CBDC systems?)
The outcome of the 2024 election will decide the future of CBDCs in America. Under Kamala Harris, Americans can expect to eventually have CBDCs rammed down their throats. Under Trump, at least according to his campaign rhetoric, there will never be any CBDCs in America.
At a recent campaign stop in New Hampshire, the former president promised that he will "never allow the creation of a central bank digital currency" because doing so "would give a federal government, our federal government, absolute control over your money."
Powerful think tanks like the Atlantic Council are freaking out about the prospect of CBDCs being dead in the water. A recent piece from the group by John Lipsky, the senior director of the Council's GeoEconomics Center, and Ananya Kumar, the associate director for digital currencies at the GeoEconomics Center, argues that the passage of HR 5403 could cause serious harm to the U.S. dollar while throttling innovation across the public and private sectors.
The U.S. is pretty much dead last when it comes to CBDC development, and the Atlantic Council is worried that the lag will increase the risk of "a fragmented payment system emerging in which different models proliferate and make the international financial architecture more expensive and less efficient."
With Canada and Australia dropping out of the game with CBCDs, and this after both countries were on track to become early adopters of the technology, it is already looking as though CBDCs as a global payment scheme are already dead in the water – so what happens next?
Well, according to Trump at the recent Bitcoin Conference 2024, private, dollar-backed "stablecoins" are the future of money. They are "just as programmable and surveillable as CBDCs," according to reports, but instead of being run by private central banks they will be run by other private interests.
"While recent statements from Trump and other Republican politicians may offer a sliver of hope that the U.S. will somehow resist the global march toward CBDCs, they should also be taken with a generous dose of caution. While bread-and-butter CBDCs have finally begun receiving the public attention they deserve due to their terrifying surveillance and seizure potential, few realise a privately issued synthetic CBDC could do much the same –– and perhaps even more."
More related news can be found at CurrencyReset.news.
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