Will U.S. Trade Cash for CBDCs? Fed Sends Mixed Messages

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by Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., Childrens Health Defense:

Despite recent statements to the contrary by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, the U.S. Federal Reserve appears to be proceeding with the development of central bank digital currency (CBDC) infrastructure. Critics weigh in on Powell’s statements and what CBDCs — and going cashless — would mean for U.S. citizens.

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The U.S. Federal Reserve (the Fed) appears to be proceeding with the development of central bank digital currency (CBDC) infrastructure — including hiring software developers — despite recent statements to the contrary by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

“People don’t need to worry about a central bank digital currency, nothing like that is remotely close to happening anytime soon,” Powell said in his March 7 testimony before the Senate Banking Committee.

“If we were to ever do something like this, and we’re a very long way from even thinking about it, we would do this through the banking system,” Powell said. “The last thing … we the Federal Reserve would want would be to have individual accounts for all Americans.”

Catherine Austin Fitts, founder and publisher of the Solari Report and former U.S. assistant secretary of housing and urban development, told The Defender, “Powell’s latest language is slippery — more slippery than we have seen from him.”

In June 2023 comments about CBDCs, for example, Powell said that the Fed is “doing a great deal of work,” adding that “it’s something we really need to explore as a country.”

‘The closing of the totalitarian circle’

The Atlantic Council, a think tank that says it “promotes constructive leadership and engagement in international affairs based on the Atlantic Community’s central role in meeting global challenges,” defines a CBDC as “virtual money backed and issued by a central bank.”

According to the council, “In every country with an advanced retail CBDC project, CBDCs are intermediated, meaning they are distributed through banks, financial institutions, and payments service providers.”

In China though, “there is also an option for a direct CBDC — which can be accessed through a central bank application,” the Atlantic Council states.

Fitts, an outspoken critic of CBDCs, said they are “essential for the bankers to institute taxation without representation” and would allow “bankers to use AI [artificial intelligence] and software to institute a wide number of mandates, policies, rules and enforcement.”

CBDCs also would allow bankers to significantly lower retirement benefits and government obligations and end property rights and achieve the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) promise to “own nothing and be happy,” Fitts said. And they would allow them “to assert complete control over travel and labor behavior.”

According to Fitts, mandates, policies and rules could include “digital health passes” — sometimes referred to as “vaccine passports” — and climate change-related restrictions, including restrictions on transactions outside of the boundaries of so-called “15-minute cities,” Fitts added.

Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D., author of “Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom,” told The Defender that CBDCs represent “the closing of the totalitarian circle.”

“Every transaction involving CBDC would be transparent to central banks, regardless of whether a commercial bank acts as an intermediary,” Rectenwald said. “The Federal Reserve could exercise centralized surveillance and control over spending, debt and savings. Transaction privacy will be obliterated” because the system would likely be linked to a broader “digital identity system.”

Fitts put it this way: “Ultimately, the use of your money would depend on being compliant with every rule and regulation under the sun. It would make insect-based foods and vaccine mandates easily adopted and enforced.”

Rectenwald said a person’s digital identity could store health information, including vaccine status. It might also include a carbon footprint tracking element that could be used to determine whether someone may buy gas, meat or “anything else deemed to exceed one’s allotment in greenhouse gas emissions.”

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