CBDCS ROLL EVER ON
More and more countries are signing up to go fully digital with their money.
This past week Australia announced they were going to “pilot” a central bank digital currency. Thailand is likewise piloting a retail CBDC by the end of the year, as is Nepal.
Meanwhile in the US a “bipartisan group of lawmakers” wants to pressure the Federal Reserve to take a digital dollar more seriously, talking up the “threat” of the digital yuan.
Just yesterday it was reported that the digital ruble is very much still a thing and may be launched as soon as 2023. More worryingly the report describes how some digital rubles could be “colored” or “targeted”, meaning only usable for specific goods or services.
That’s a dangerous step, reducing currency from a simple guarantor of value to essentially government-issued vouchers.
We’ve covered that danger many times before (in Western nations the term used is “programmability”). Indeed the benefits of programmability were discussed the Bank of England’s CBDC Summit, the minutes of which were published on Friday.
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