Federal Government’s Digital Dollar Seen as Threat to Personal Liberty
Critics describe plans to create digital currencies as an “assault against financial privacy”
Critics are voicing concern about the power of the federal government’s plans to create a digital currency central bank (CBDC) as it advances its plans. digital dollar Federal agencies.
The latest step in the direction of a CBDC was called “Project Cedar,” As a launch, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York announced it last month. “wholesale” Digital dollar is a currency that can be used to transborder payments. It is available only to corporations and banks. This effort is barely mentioned in the wake of the scandalous collapse crypto-currency exchange FTX. Project Hamilton, a retail CBDC beta test conducted last February by the Boston Fed in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Digital Currency Initiative.
The Fed expressed satisfaction with its latest digital dollar venture. “Project Cedar showed that blockchain-enabled cross-border payments can be faster, simultaneous, and safer.” But critics of the Fed’s CBDC initiatives were less enthusiastic.
“The launch of a CBDC would most likely be the single largest assault to financial privacy since the creation of the Bank Secrecy Act and the establishment of the third-party doctrine,” Nicholas Anthony, a Cato Institute policy analyst, spoke to The Epoch Times. By contrast to the U.S. dollar in its current form—cash and bank deposits—a CBDC would be issued directly by the federal government, giving it potentially unlimited access to and control over Americans’ money.
“At its core, financial privacy is important because this information can reveal a person’s relationships, profession, religion, political leanings, locations, and so much more,” Anthony said. “And while cash offers the greatest privacy protection for Americans, banks too offer a sort of air gap that protects Americans from prying eyes. A CBDC, in contrast, would establish a direct link between individual citizens and the central bank.”
President Joe Biden issued a March executive order to develop and study a CBDC in the interest of financial stability, preventing crime and other purposes. “human rights; financial inclusion and equity; and climate change and pollution.”
“My administration places the highest urgency on research and development efforts into the potential design and deployment options of a United States CBDC,” Biden’s order stated. The State Department is responsible for the development of a digital dollar.
The 1970 Bank Secrecy Act to which Anthony referred forces banks to report to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network all transactions over $10,000, and any other transactions banks considered suspicious. According to the Treasury Department in 2019, banks reported approximately 20 million cases of suspicious activity. CBDCs allow government absolute access to private transactions.
Agustin Carstens is the general manager of Bank of International Settlements. October 2020 “We don’t know who is using a $100 bill today, we don’t know who’s using a 1,000-peso bill today. The key difference with a CBDC is the central bank will have absolute control of the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that central bank liability, and also we will have the technology to enforce that.”
The Progressive Vision for Americans’ Money
Money is used in free-market economies as both a means of exchange and as a storage of value. It can also be used as a vehicle to make payments and accumulate savings. The Biden administration has new goals for the digital dollar. These goals include environmental and social justice, which can only happen if the CBDC can be programmed.
A programmable CBDC would allow the government to not only track transactions, but could also include features such as negative interest rates that deduct a portion of your money over time. This would increase the efficiency of stimulus policies by requiring people who are eligible for government payments to spend instead of save. Progressives also favor the possibility to limit CBDC’s use in certain products such as gasoline and firearms.
Private companies have begun to move in this direction. PayPal, for instance, prohibits gun purchases through its services. Visa and Mastercard offer credit cards that measure the carbon footprint of the user’s spending each month and can give a “nudge” When certain limits are exceeded. And Visa, Mastercard, and American Express have set up category codes to track Americans’ gun purchases.
A CBDC can go further, however, discouraging purchases the government doesn’t like by imposing surcharges, or shutting off access to money altogether. This way, the Fed and Treasury Department could establish government policy on fossil fuels, gun controls, and social justice, without having to pass any laws through Congress.
“That’s exactly what’s not supposed to happen with money,” Christina Skinner, a professor at Wharton Business School, spoke to The Epoch Times. “It’s supposed to be this inalienable property right whose value is supposed to be set and maintained by market forces.”
The CBDC supports the argument that the United States needs a digital dollar, as other countries have it.
Fed Vice Chair Lael Brainard In May “the People’s Bank of China has been piloting the digital yuan, and several other foreign central banks are issuing or considering issuing their own digital currencies. A U.S. CBDC may be one potential way to ensure that people around the world who use the dollar can continue to rely on the strength and safety of the U.S. currency to transact and conduct business in the digital financial system.”
The Atlantic Council is a non-profit organization “group of foreign policy change makers,” reported That “as of December 2022, all G7 economies have now moved into the development stage of a CBDC. The New York Federal Reserve’s wholesale CBDC experiment, Project Cedar, has shifted the U.S. from research into development.”
The rise of cryptocurrency is causing concern among governments around the globe. This is important to remember “in November 2021, non‑state-issued digital assets reached a combined market capitalization of $3 trillion, up from approximately $14 billion in early November 2016,” the Biden executive order states that the United States must issue a digital currency to maintain its role as the world’s reserve currency, as well as to fight financial crime and make banking services available to underserved communities. The benefit for citizens is still unclear.
Skinner explained that Project Cedar is an effort to make cross border payments faster and easier. “If this sounds vague, it’s because it is vague. You can’t really pin anyone down and have them explain to you how the CBDC is going to make cross-border payments easier.”
“Central bank reserves that banks hold are already digital,” She spoke. “It’s difficult to really understand from a legal and technical standpoint what the difference is between a wholesale CBDC—this thing that only the banking sector can have—and the kinds of central bank reserves they already have; and certain members of the Federal Reserve Board have made this point over and over again.”
This has led to some suspecting other motives.
“A wholesale CBDC is likely to be a stepping stone toward a retail CBDC,” Anthony said. “In the worst case, it offers a sort of beta test for the Federal Reserve to test how effectively a CBDC might work without involving the entire country during the first round.”
Can Biden create a CBDC without Congressional Consent?
Biden’s executive order stated that Attorney General Merrick Garland must report within 180 days as to whether the administration needs congressional approval to create a digital dollar. The deadline passed without any report from the Justice Department and Congress has not authorized the Biden administration’s creation of a digital currency. However, the administration is still moving ahead with beta-testing CBDCs.
“They have not launched a CBDC, but they have conducted extensive theoretical and experimental research with banks, payments networks, and even tech companies,” Anthony said.
Skinner says that creating a digital currency without congressional approval is possible. “flies in the face of most things we think about separation of powers.” The U.S. Constitution clearly states that Congress is the only one with the power to make laws. “coin money and regulate the value thereof.”
“The constitution was constructed to keep monetary and fiscal power away from the president because of the tyrannical danger that comes from princes who have power over the money and the purse,” She told The Epoch Times.
Rep. Tom Emmer (R.Minn.), was elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives last January introduced a bill to ban the Fed from establishing a retail CBDC. “Not only would this CBDC model centralize Americans’ financial information, leaving it vulnerable to attack,” Emmer stated, “but it could be used as a surveillance tool that Americans should never tolerate from their own government.”
Because of its risks and downsides, a CBDC could be a difficult sell to American citizens as long as cash and bank deposits were still available as an alternative. One option for a CBDC to gain widespread acceptance would be to “crowd out” existing dollars by offering a higher interest rate on a CBDC compared to bank deposits, similar to how crypto exchanges like the now-bankrupt FTX were able to attract cash in exchange for digital currencies.
One point that critics make about a U.S. CBDC is that only the government seems to want it; there doesn’t appear to be significant consumer demand for a government-issued digital dollar.
A September 2022 poll of 2,200 bank customers found that 86 percent of Americans were “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the bank services they receive. The survey reported that “nine in 10 (88 percent) consumers agree they have multiple options when selecting products and services such as bank accounts, loans, and credit cards, and 85 percent said they have a wide array of choices when deciding where to bank.”
The claim that a CBDC would achieve “equity” by making banking services available to the underserved also appears dubious. According to a report from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., more than 95 percent of all American households have checking or savings accounts. Among those who don’t, the top-three reasons cited were: “Don’t have enough money to meet minimum balance requirements,” “Don’t trust banks,” and “Avoiding a bank gives more privacy.” It is unclear how a CBDC would resolve any of those issues.
“For the American people, there are no benefits to be gained,” Anthony said. “A CBDC would solely be to the benefit of the federal government by increasing its surveillance and control over the financial system”
Kevin Stocklin is a writer, film producer, and former investment banker. He wrote and produced “We All Fall Down: The American Mortgage Crisis,” a 2008 documentary on the collapse of the U.S. mortgage finance system.
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