Things To Come: The Rise Of Central Bank Digital Currency

Feds Using Banking Crisis to Usher in Central Bank Digital Currency, Experts Warn

Brenda Baletti, Ph.D.

Experts warn that recent bank failures and the stabilization measures taken by the Federal Reserve and Wall Street are creating even greater bank consolidation — which could further pave the way for a central bank digital currency.

A week-and-a-half after the second-largest bank failure in American history ignited uncertainty throughout the global economy, experts warn bank failures and the stabilization measures taken by the Federal Reserve and Wall Street are creating even greater bank consolidation — and might further pave the way for a central bank digital currency (CBDC).

Now the banking crisis is spreading to Europe. Swiss regulators engineered a “forced marriage” between UBS and the troubled Credit Suisse this past weekend as part of an effort to stabilize the bank in the face of increasing concerns that a major financial crisis is imminent.

The collapse and downgrading of these banks have bolstered the position of what has come to be called the systemically important banks (SIBs) — financial institutions whose failure could trigger a financial crisis.

These “too big to fail” financial institutions — which include JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Wells Fargo, among others — have been inundated with billions of dollars of new deposits “as smaller lenders face turmoil,” the Financial Times reported.

This series of events led analysts to raise questions about how this might open the door to the Federal Reserve’s exploratory plan to launch a CBDC.

Independent journalist and political commentator Kim Iversensaid a CBDC is the Fed’s “end goal.” She predicted further consolidation of smaller banks into larger ones will make it “that much easier to roll out a central bank digital currency and social credit score for us all.”

Iversen added: “You want to control someone, control their money and that’s ultimately the end goal.”

Fed and U.S. Treasury want ‘to centralize control and centralize money’

Catherine Austin Fitts, founder and president of the Solari Report, told The Defender the financial instability we are seeing now is “a symptom of a mismanagement of the federal credit by the Fed and the U.S. Department of the Treasury over a very long period of time.”

She said the goal of their economic management strategies has been “to centralize control and centralize money.”

Economist Jeffrey Sachs explained that the direct root of the current crisis is the tightening of monetary conditions by the Fed and the European Central Bank after years of expansionary monetary policy.

The Washington Post also reported that as a result of the bank collapses, billions of dollars flowed from small and regional banks into the coffers of giant banks such as JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America — a shift that likely means “greater consolidation of the banking industry.”

This will have dire implications for regional banks, which “will need to pay more for funding, either by raising interest rates on deposits or by paying higher lending costs in the wholesale market.”

Over the last 30 years, more than 10,000 banks — mostly small banks — disappeared from the U.S.

Marty Bent and Michael Krieger, who spoke with investigative reporter Whitney Webb on a recent episode of her podcast, “Unlimited Hangout,” argued that regardless of the Fed’s intervention, we are still seeing a move toward bank consolidation (and ultimately a CBDC).

The Solari Report released a report in June 2022 that found between 2002 and 2019, JPMorgan paid at least $42 billion in court settlements for criminal activity.

Iversen agreed that the management of this crisis is part of a broader move toward bank consolidation, and ultimately CBDC:

“They are going to get everybody to want this [CBDC] and the way they’re going to do that is by allowing Banks to go under one by one … while at the same time consolidating all these small banks into the big banks and those big banks are the Federal Reserve, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase.

According to Austin Fitts, “The pandemic killed a lot of small businesses, and it looks to me that in this situation there’s an effort to kill the small banks, which, you know, if that succeeds we’re in real trouble.”

“The federal credit is being used to consolidate the banking system and that is very bad for regular people,” she added.

‘CBDCs are not currencies, they are a control tool’

CBDCs are government-backed digital currencies issued by a central bank. They can be issued to financial institutions or to the general public, effectively giving people a bank account the government can directly access, in an account held either by the government itself or a commercial bank.

CBDCs are rapidly being rolled out to bring about a new economic transaction system. The International Monetary Fund last year reported that more than 100 national governments are researching, testing or rolling out CBDCs.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) has a working group dedicated to ensuring the different national CBDCs are interoperable. Just last week, the WEF argued that CBDCs are “inevitable.”

More...