Tag Archives: Digital currencies

This YEAR in the New Normal, from Off-Guardian

Posted on January 3, 2022 | Leave a comment

A few minor stories in 2021 are set to become major stories in 2022. From off-guardian.org:

ur first “This Week” of 2022 doesn’t just look back over our shoulders, but forward too. What were the unfinished plotlines of 2021? What minor stories of last year could be major stories of this year?

This week we review what OffG will be on the lookout for in 2022.

1. Programmable digital currency

For the uninitiated, a programmable digital currency is a form of digital currency which can be programmed…I hope that clears up any confusion.

In all seriousness, central banks are researching the possibility of issuing their own digital currencies. These central-bank digital currencies (CBDCs) would be “programmable”, meaning either the bank issuing the currency, or the company paying it out as wages, have direct control over its use.

Banks (or employers) would have the power to set limits on the usage of the money they issue. They could limit how much of it can be spent, where it can be spent and what it can be spent on etc.

We published a long-form article on the possible abuses of such a controlling system of currency last summer. Since that article came out there have been further calls for its introduction, with Estonia and Ukraine both moving towards trialling the system soon, and Japan researching its feasibility.

Definitely a major concern for human freedom, and a major story to keep an eye on 2022.

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Posted in Banking, Business, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Currencies, Environment, Government, Medicine, Politics, Propaganda, Science

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Diabolical — How Digital ID Will Control Your Life, by Joseph Mercola

Posted on November 20, 2021 | Leave a comment

By now the plan is pretty clear. From Joseph Mercola at lewrockwell.com:

While the media continue to scoff at warnings that vaccine passports are part of a surveillance structure that is likely to become a permanent part of our lives if we allow their implementation, there’s nothing to suggest that this won’t be the case.

In “The Jimmy Dore Show” above, Dore highlights and interviews Max Blumenthal about his article, “Public Health or Private Wealth? How Digital Vaccine Passports Pave Way for Unprecedented Surveillance Capitalism,”1 co-written with investigative reporter Jeremy Loffredo.

The article reviews some of the tragic consequences that can be expected if a global rollout of digital vaccine passports were to succeed. Loffredo and Blumenthal point to India, where a digital ID system has already been implemented.

The database, called Aadhaar, contains the digital identifications of more than 1 billion residents, making it the largest biometric digital ID system ever constructed.

India’s System Illustrates the Dangers of Digital IDs

While not officially described as such, the system is a “de facto social credit system,” the authors say. It’s sold to the public as the key access point to government services, but it also tracks users’ geolocation, employment and purchasing habits.

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Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Government, Law, Medicine, Politics, Propaganda, Tyranny

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The global reset scam, by Alasdair Macleod

Posted on November 20, 2020 | 1 comment

It doesn’t matter much if you shift from paper money to digital money if they’re both worthless. From Alasdair Macleod at goldmoney.com:

This article takes a tilt at increasing speculation about statist global resets, and why plans such as those promoted by the World Economic Forum will fail. Central bank digital currencies will simply run out of time.

Instead, the collapse of unbacked fiat currencies will end all supra-national government solutions to their policy failures. Already, there is mounting evidence of money beginning to flee bank accounts into stocks, commodities and even bitcoin. This is an early warning of a rapidly developing monetary collapse.

Moreover, nothing can now stop the collapse of fiat currencies, and with it schemes to control humanity for the convenience and ambitions of government planners. There can only be one statist solution and that is to mobilise gold reserves to back and save their currencies, which in order to succeed will have to be fully convertible into circulating gold coinage. It will also require the role of governments to be reset into a non-welfare, non-interventionist minimalist role, which can only be achieved after a complete collapse of the current fiat-financed system.

Anything less will fail.

The Deep State and The Blob fuel conspiracy theories

Increasingly, people are beginning to realise that their world is undergoing a period of rapid change, with the future of fiat money now uncertain. For most, it is too difficult to even contemplate. But growing uncertainties are driving wild speculation about what those in authority now have in store for the human race in the form of a global reset. It is a time for conspiracy theorists, aided and abetted by our politicians and central bankers who are being increasingly evasive, because events are spiralling out of their control.

Then there is America’s Deep State, or the British equivalent, the more recently christened Blob; an amorphous entity comprised of the permanent bureaucracy with its own agenda. These faceless planners have moved on from merely making ministers’ lives difficult if they deviate from the blob’s predetermined course — immortalised in “Yes Minister” and its sequel series “Yes Prime Minister”.

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Posted in Business, Collapse, Currencies, Debt, Economics, Economy, Governments

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A New World Monetary Order Is Coming, by Stefan Gleason

Posted on October 28, 2020 | 1 comment

The envisioned monetary order will be, like the whole coronavirus and climate change scams, just another means by which the Davos Crowd will rule the world. At least that’s how the Davos Crowd imagines things. From Stefan Gleason at activistpost.com:

The global coronavirus pandemic has accelerated several troubling trends already in force. Among them are exponential debt growth, rising dependency on government, and scaled-up central bank interventions into markets and the economy.

Central bankers now appear poised to embark on their biggest power play ever.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, in coordination with the European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), is preparing to roll out central bank digital currencies.

The globalist IMF recently called for a new “Bretton Woods Moment” to address the loss of trillions of dollars in global economic output due to the coronavirus.

In the aftermath of World War II, the original Bretton Woods agreement established a world monetary order with the U.S. dollar as the reserve currency.

Importantly, the dollar was to be pegged to the price of gold. Foreign governments and central banks could also redeem their dollar reserves in gold, and they started doing so in earnest in the 1960s and early 1970s.

In 1971, President Richard Nixon closed the gold window, effectively ushering in a new world monetary order based solely on the full faith and credit of the United States. An inflation crisis followed a few years later.

In response, the Federal Reserve took the painful step of jacking up interest rates to defend its wilting Federal Reserve Note and tame rising prices.

Fast forward to 2020, and the Fed has assumed for itself novel policy mandates that are a precursor to a new monetary system.

But the monetary masters aren’t contemplating a return to sound money. Rather, they’re planning for even more debt, more inflation, and picking of winners and losers in the economy.

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Digital Money Is Coming to America, by Bill Bonner

Posted on September 27, 2020 | Leave a comment

Inflationary regimes have often swapped the old, depreciated-to-next-to-nothing currency for a brand new, nominally revalued and reset currency that soon sinks to next to nothing. Right now the world’s inflationary regimes are scheming to replace currencies, especially that hard to track paper money, with digital, easy to monitor, currencies. From Bill Bonner at rogueeconomics.com:

Week 28 of the Quarantine

SAN MARTIN, ARGENTINA – For half a century, America’s greatest export has been the dollar. So much so that there are now more physical dollars outside the U.S. than in it.

Overseas, people use dollars as an alternative to their own money. Foreigners are more familiar with Ben Franklin than Americans. In many places, people cling to U.S. dollars like a drowning man to driftwood.

Here in Argentina, for example, inflation is already running at about 50% per year. People think it will get a lot worse. So they prepare by trading their pesos for dollars – now at a rate of 150-to-1.

Sinking Dollar

But what happens when the dollar sinks?

The question is premature. Almost naïve.

For the present, the dollar is as buoyant as an empty plastic bottle. The velocity of money – a key component of consumer price inflation – is actually going down.

Americans are happy to get dollars from the government. And foreigners are happy to get them any way they can.

But soon, everyone will see that the U.S. feds are acting like the people who run sh*thole countries. They stifle the economy with laws and regulations – shutdowns, moratoria on evictions, $1,200 checks for everyone – and try to finance it with printing-press money.

We have no superpowers here at the Diary. We cannot climb walls, fly through the air, or see through concrete walls. So we cannot tell you when or how the dollar fails.

But today, we will explore the question of what you should do about it.

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Doubling down on failed policies with central bank digital currencies, by Alasdair Macleod

Posted on August 22, 2020 | Leave a comment

Whether it’s a piece of paper backed by nothing or a digital currency backed by nothing, phony-baloney money is still phony-baloney money. From Alasdair Macleod at goldmoney.com:

Many central banks are researching retail digital currencies, which if implemented, would allow them to issue a new currency directly to the public, managed on a centralised ledger bypassing commercial banks. While there is an element of feeling the need to address new private sector currency developments which threaten central bank monopolies, specific objectives are beginning to emerge.

This article does not consider technology issues, confining its comments to the policy objectives identified in an IMF survey of central banks.[i] It points out the dangers to individual freedom and why the application of a monetary policy extended to include central bank digital currencies are bound to fail.

Introduction

Fiat currencies are failing — let’s try something different. This seems to be the logic partly behind the feverish research by central banks into digital currencies (CBDCs). The central banks of the Bahamas, Ecuador, Ukraine and Uruguay have conducted limited scale pilot projects, and China is also reported to have planned trials through Meituan-Dianping, an on-line food retailer and two further Tencent backed companies, though the status of these projects is at the moment unclear.

These are retail CBDCs. With a retail CBDC, the central bank issues the new CBDC to the public, either through agents, such as commercial banks, or directly to the public, bypassing the current financial system entirely. An advantage claimed over existing fiat is that it is capable of providing access through mobile technology to everyone, including the unbanked. But these advantages are already available through credit and debit cards and e-money, stored in apps such as M-Pesa and AliPay. They work perfectly well, replacing the need for cash where cash is not necessarily available or desired by transacting individuals. Perhaps further development of these facilities could be seen to pose a threat to the fiat monopoly.

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Digital Dollar Ending Privacy and Liberty, by Jack Dapper

Posted on April 12, 2020 | Leave a comment

How much more does the government need to know about you than what you buy and sell? From Jack Dapper at theburningplatform.com:

Good day Earth Clan—

Imagine this hypothetical situation from the not too distant future:

A widowed grandma no longer has the physical strength to take care of the yard work of her home. She has a bright and well-mannered grandson, who happens to have a pretty and polite high school sweetheart. She nurses a not-so-secret desire that God will bless her with the longevity to see her great-grandchildren. Regardless, the yard work needed to get done and so she hired her strapping young grandson to mow the lawn in the warmer months and shovel the driveway in the colder months, among other sundry tasks throughout the year. She compensated him handsomely for his efforts, paying him $3,000 over the course of year, plus $500 each on his birthday and Christmas.

All these payments happened electronically, of course, given that the digital dollar was debuted on New Year’s Day 2021. American citizens were mandated to exchange all their physical currency for digital dollars within the year. The government also demanded its subjects submit their physical gold and silver holdings. The government was generous enough to compensate these “gold bugs” at cost for their “barbarous relic” rather than the value it had skyrocketed during the collapse of the dollar in 2020 due to hyperinflation. Our widowed grandma in question was shocked to learn on the evening news that some people had foolishly refused to hand over their illicit “pet rocks” and were summarily jailed or killed in shootouts.

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Posted in Banking, Business, Civil Liberties, Currencies, Debt, Economy, Government, Privacy, Surveillance

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Doug Casey on the Disturbing Trend to Tax Savings and Eliminate Cash

Posted on April 2, 2020 | 1 comment

Congruent with the coronavirus outbreak, governments are increasing their control of  the financial systems. They’ll keep you locked in your homes and your money locked in their banks. From Doug Casey at internationalman.com:

tax on savings
 

International Man: Let’s start with the basics. What exactly are negative interest rates? Could they exist in a free market without state intervention?

Doug Casey: Right now, over $17 trillion of bonds, and a lot of bank accounts—especially in Europe—are offering negative interest rates. It’s something that can only exist in Bizarro World, something that’s really a cosmic impossibility in a normal world. It’s especially true since almost all the world’s banks are zombies—bankrupt. Fractional reserve banking—which is only possible in a world where central banks control the money supply—is intrinsically unsound.

The economy is head over heels in debt. If things slow down—as they do now, due to the hysteria over The Virus—lots of loans will go into default. It won’t be because of The Virus itself, however. Coronavirus is just the pin that broke the bubble.

Negative rates are a political phenomenon, not a market phenomenon. It’s quite amazing to see bankrupt governments issuing negative rate bonds. It’s what’s been called return-free risk.

The whole financial world is in a bubble because of the trillions of currency units created since the crisis unfolded in 2008. Bonds are in a hyper bubble—the worst possible place to be. They’re a triple threat to capital—interest rate risk, currency risk, and default risk. And, again, at negative rates, they are truly a return-free risk.

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Digital Currency: What Do the Global Banking Elite Want? by Steven Guinness

Posted on January 26, 2020 | Leave a comment

Slowly but surely, the central bankers and their cronies and minions are edging towards a digital global currency. From Steven Guinness at stevenguinness2.wordpress.com:

Amidst the annual spectacle of the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Bank for International Settlements this week announced that multiple central banks have created a group that will ‘assess potential cases for central bank digital currencies‘.

Here is the press release from the BIS in full:

The Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the European Central Bank, the Sveriges Riksbank and the Swiss National Bank, together with the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), have created a group to share experiences as they assess the potential cases for central bank digital currency (CBDC) in their home jurisdictions.

The group will assess CBDC use cases; economic, functional and technical design choices, including cross-border interoperability; and the sharing of knowledge on emerging technologies. It will closely coordinate with the relevant institutions and forums – in particular, the Financial Stability Board and the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI).

The group will be co-chaired by Benoît Cœuré, Head of the BIS Innovation Hub, and Jon Cunliffe, Deputy Governor of the Bank of England and Chair of the CPMI. It will include senior representatives of the participating institutions.

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BOE and Fed Continue to Advance Digital Currency Agenda, by Steve Guinness

Posted on November 1, 2019 | Leave a comment

Anything the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve like should make the rest of us quite wary. From Steve Guinness at steveguinness2.wordpress.com:

Over the past three years a popular narrative has sprung up in the independent media, which says that the UK’s decision to leave the EU and Donald Trump’s rise to U.S. President is somehow evidence of globalists (and by extension central banks) ‘losing control‘. From what I’ve observed this belief is cultivated in large part by those who are ideologically disposed in favour of Brexit and/or Trump, rather than it being indicative of reality.

The suggestion that central banks in particular have ‘backed themselves into a corner‘ on monetary policy is often where attention is focused. But there is a great deal more to central banks than just their stance on interest rates and stimulus measures.

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