Shit is getting real...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonb...9mv0oajABnGBGtGEzVAbtyUHyo_AZ3gc#37f7969c4bea
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonb...9mv0oajABnGBGtGEzVAbtyUHyo_AZ3gc#37f7969c4bea
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As the markets continue to drop and the U.S. looks to Congress for agreement on a massive stimulus package to save the economy from impacts of the coronavirus pandemic, the newest offer by House Democrats includes a very forward-looking kind of stimulus: the creation of a ‘digital dollar’ and the establishment of ‘digital dollar wallets.’ In what will send shock waves through the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry, particularly for those following central bank digital currencies around the world, this signals the U.S. is serious in establishing infrastructure for a central bank digital currency.
Both Speaker Pelosi’s ‘Take Responsibility for Workers and Families Act’ and the ‘Financial Protections and Assistance for America’s Consumers, States, Businesses, and Vulnerable Populations Act (H.R. 6321),’ introduced by Chairwoman Maxine Waters of Financial Services Committee, introduced these concepts today as a way of delivering the economic stimulus payments to U.S. citizens.
The bill establishes a digital dollar, which it defines as ‘a balance expressed as a dollar value consisting of digital ledger entries that are recorded as liabilities in the accounts of any Federal Reserve Bank or ... an electronic unit of value, redeemable by an eligible financial institution (as determined by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System).’ Additionally, a digital dollar wallet is identified as ‘a digital wallet or account, maintained by a Federal reserve bank on behalf of any person, that represents holdings in an electronic device or service that is used to store digital dollars that may be tied to a digital or physical identity.’
A mandate also requires all ‘member banks’ establish a ‘pass-through digital dollar wallet’ to all customers eligible for the stimulus. Member banks include those banks that are ‘members’ of the Federal Reserve and regulated by the Fed. Additionally, ‘Non-Member’ state banks - those that not members of the Federal Reserve and regulated by the FDIC - could opt-in to offer pass-through digital dollar wallets as well.
The Federal Reserve banks themselves would also make available a digital dollar wallet to any U.S. person eligible for the payments as well. Additionally, the U.S. Postal Service would aim to help unbanked individuals and/or those without proper ID to establish their identity be provided a digital dollar account, and would set up ATMs for customers to access their funds.
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China's central bank is one step closer to issuing its official digital currency. It seems the People's Bank of China (PBC), in collaboration with private companies, has completed development of the sovereign digital currency's basic functions and is now drafting relevant laws to pave the way for its circulation, industry insiders said.
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Deputy Managing Director Tao Zhang’s Keynote Address on Central Bank Digital Currency
March 19, 2020
London School of Economics
February 28, 2020
It’s a real pleasure for me to be here for this conference on China’s Trade and Financial Globalization. I want to thank the Institute of Global Affairs of the London School of Economics for the invitation.
This afternoon, we’re going to take up a topic that everybody seems to be talking about these days – namely, central bank digital currency (or “CBDC” for short). This is a “widely accessible, digital form of fiat money that can be legal tender,” and a recent BIS survey of central banks shows that 80 percent were exploring CBDC.
I’ll start by laying out what I see as some of the main pros and cons of CBDC, as well as their international implications. I’ll say a few words about a few recent pilot experiences with these currencies, and also about some variants and alternatives to CBDCs. Finally, I will close by sharing what the IMF is doing in this area.
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At the IMF, we have been ramping up our research, analysis, and overall thinking on CBDCs, and indeed, on Fintech in general. Together with the World Bank, the IMF produced the Bali Fintech Agenda, which offers a framework to guide policymakers in thinking about how to regulate Fintech in their jurisdictions. We also routinely publish Fintech Notes, Staff Discussion Notes and Working papers on issues related to Fintech and CBDC, specifically. In January, for instance, we came out with a note on “Institutional Arrangements for Fintech Regulation and Supervision” and another on the “Regulation of Crypto-Assets.” And we also collaborate with other international organizations and standard setters, such as the Financial Stability Board (FSB) and Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructure (CPMI). The Fund is also a member of the G7 Working Group on Digital Payments.
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The Federal Reserve on Tuesday announced the establishment of a temporary repurchase agreement facility for foreign and international monetary authorities (FIMA Repo Facility) to help support the smooth functioning of financial markets, including the U.S. Treasury market, and thus maintain the supply of credit to U.S. households and businesses. The FIMA Repo Facility will allow FIMA account holders, which consist of central banks and other international monetary authorities with accounts at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, to enter into repurchase agreements with the Federal Reserve. In these transactions, FIMA account holders temporarily exchange their U.S. Treasury securities held with the Federal Reserve for U.S. dollars, which can then be made available to institutions in their jurisdictions. This facility should help support the smooth functioning of the U.S. Treasury market by providing an alternative temporary source of U.S. dollars other than sales of securities in the open market. It should also serve, along with the U.S. dollar liquidity swap lines the Federal Reserve has established with other central banks, to help ease strains in global U.S. dollar funding markets.
The Federal Reserve provides U.S. dollar-denominated banking services to FIMA account holders in support of Federal Reserve objectives and in recognition of the U.S. dollar's predominant role as an international currency. The FIMA Repo Facility, which adds to the range of services the Federal Reserve provides, will be available beginning April 6 and will continue for at least 6 months.
German Foreign Office said:France, Germany and the United Kingdom confirm that INSTEX has successfully concluded its first transaction, facilitating the export of medical goods from Europe to Iran. INSTEX and its Iranian counterpart STFI will work on more transactions and enhancing the mechanism.
The United States opposes creation of liquidity through issuance of the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) as part of the response to the coronavirus pandemic, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Thursday.
In a statement to the IMF’s steering committee, Mnuchin said 70% of the funds created through an SDR allocation, something akin to a central bank “printing” new money, would go to G20 countries that did not need it, while only 3% would go to low-income countries.
Instead, he said, members should contribute to two IMF facilities that provide funds to the poorest countries, and the U.S. government was exploring such a contribution itself.
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A normal SDR printing exercise requires that the total SDRs be issued to all IMF members in proportion to their voting rights in the IMF. This means that U.S. adversaries such as Iran and China would get part of the bailout money along with more needy countries in Africa and Latin America.
The U.S. is now holding up the new issuance of new SDRs for exactly this reason.
We’ll see how this impasse gets resolved. Perhaps new SDRs will be issued right away. But as the depression lingers and the Fed’s impotence is exposed, the issue of printing a trillion SDRs will be back on the table.
China may have their own conditions such as a diminution in the role of the dollar as a global reserve currency. The U.S. may be more desperate when the time comes. Either way, this issue will not go away.
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... the clearest signal of provocative and ambitious Chinese intent. That came from the People’s Bank of China’s fix for the Chinese currency to start the week. This is the level the central bank sets as a guide for the market, and the exchange rate can vary from it by no more than 2% in either direction — it effectively tells the world how far China is prepared to allow its currency to move. And Monday’s fix against the dollar was the weakest since 2008.
China left its currency fixed at an unrealistically weak level for several years after it acceded to the World Trade Organization in 2001. After 2005, it agreed on a swift appreciation, which halted in the spring of 2008 as the credit crisis took hold. In 2010 it was allowed to resume a steady climb. Since its shock devaluation in 2015, which caused a minor global crisis, the trend has been toward letting the currency weaken, particularly when China might want to send a message — as it did when the fix reached its previous post-2008 low in the days after the U.S. announced new tariffs on China in August last year. A weaker currency tends to make China more competitive, and makes life harder for U.S. exporters. So this can be seen as a very provocative gesture. Could China conceivably be prepared to let the yuan move all the way back to 8.0 per dollar?
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... the Executive Committee of the Italian Banking Association recently approved new general guidelines for a CBDC."Italian banks are available to participate in projects and experiments of a digital currency of the European Central Bank, contributing, thanks to the skills acquired in the construction of infrastructures and distributed governance, to speed up the implementation of a European-level initiative in a first nation. Since last year, the ABI has set up a working group dedicated to deepening the aspects related to digital coins and crypto-assets. Hence the 10 considerations shared by the Executive Committee," the Italian baking association said on its website.
Here are the ten criteria for an Italian CBDC:...
- Monetary stability and full compliance with the European regulatory framework must be preserved as a matter of priority.
- Italian banks are already operating on a Distributed ledger technology DLT infrastructure with the Spunta project. They are intended to be part of the change brought about by an important innovation such as digital coins.
- A programmable digital currency represents an innovation in the financial field capable of profoundly revolutionizing money and exchange. This is a transformation capable of bringing significant potential added value, particularly in terms of the efficiency of the operating and management processes. Hence the importance of dedicating attention and energy to develop, quickly and with the collaboration of all the ecosystem players, useful tools first of all for the development of the Euro area.
- Digital money needs to be fully trusted by citizens. To this end, it is essential that the highest standards of regulatory compliance, safety and supervision are adhered to.
- In particular, a Central Bank Digital Currency, thanks to the central role played by the Central Bank, represents the tool that more than any other can reconcile the needs of innovation, in line with the current reference framework of rules, existing instruments and interoperability with the analog world. The existence of such an instrument could at the same time reduce the attractiveness of instruments of comparable use but issued by private individuals or (in cases of complete decentralization) which cannot be identified, characterized by an intrinsically higher risk profile.
- With the aim of fully explaining the transformative potential of these instruments, the possibility, at the moment of study, of issuing a European CBDC intended for the public, which could represent an evolution of cash, is of particular interest. Thanks to the role of the banks, it is possible to identify technical solutions and reference models to preserve the current characteristics of cash, while introducing many benefits of the digital world (already proper to electronic payment instruments), such as the possibility of not losing the own money and, in this period of strong attention to health risk, to operate in contactless mode.
- Detailed work will lead to the identification of the distribution, conservation and exchange model of digital currencies that best fits the customer's service needs, to maintain the effectiveness of the monetary policy transmission mechanisms and regulatory compliance. Of course, in each of these objectives, the role of banks is crucial.
- Achieving high ease of use, while ensuring full interoperability between the digital and analog world and a total level of circularity between all the players in the ecosystem, represents a success factor in the diffusion of these tools.
- Particular attention must be paid, according to the technological choices that will be adopted, to the citizens' personal data protection profiles.
- Projecting these reflections into the future, it is possible to affirm that the availability of a CBDC will enable a series of use cases of great interest: to favor the transmission of value between peers, thus also facilitating the logic of exchange between person and machine and between machine and machine; allow the settlement of cross-border peer-to-peer transactions, mitigating the interest rate, exchange rate and counterparty risk; Promote, thanks to the programmability characteristic of these currencies, the execution of exchanges upon the occurrence of predefined conditions, ultimately reducing administrative processes.
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Returning to South Korea, he said the two countries have been working on a special trade vehicle, similar to that established with the European Union, which would allow Iran to complete humanitarian transactions using the money locked in Korean banks.
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The EU mechanism -- known as Instex -- provides European companies with a trading vehicle to sell goods and services to Iran without using dollars, routing transactions through U.S. banks, or moving money across the Iranian border. But its impact has been limited due to companies’ fears over the reach of American penalties.
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The Fed has been cutting back for weeks on its asset purchases, and on its last weekly balance sheet, its total assets actually fell by $74 billion. Now Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey published a piece on Bloomberg Opinion today in which he wrote that these massive central-bank balance sheets – he was talking in global terms – “mustn’t become a permanent feature.”
“As economies recover, it’s likely that some of the exceptional monetary stimulus will need to be withdrawn,” he said. And this shedding of part of the bonds that had been purchased would happen before the central bank raises interest rates, he said.
This is the opposite of how the Fed did it last time: It started raising rates in December 2015 and started shedding Treasury securities and MBS in October 2017.
This time, the Fed front-loaded $2.8 trillion in QE and has already started shedding some of it even as FOMC members don’t see interest rate hikes through 2022. This is a big shift, of reducing the balance sheet first, and then raising rates.
In Bailey’s piece, there was no word of negative interest rates or yield curve control. What he is saying is that the balance sheet became the primary tool for adding stimulus and will become the primary tool for withdrawing stimulus, as interest rates remain near-zero.
And he is saying that the BOE’s balance sheet isn’t going to stay this massive for long and that it will undo some of the accommodation as the economy figures out where the new normal is.
The Fed is leading. The BOE is publishing the reasoning for other central banks to do the same.
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A record high price for gold, known as the currency of last resort, is raising questions about the U.S. dollar's future as the world's reserve currency, according to a Goldman Sachs research note published Tuesday.
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"Combined with a record level of debt accumulation by the US government, real concerns around the longevity of the US dollar as a reserve currency have started to emerge," the analysts wrote.
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The unnatural calm that settled over financial markets in the wake in the Covid-19 pandemic is being disturbed by ominous signs that the US dollar is in trouble. This is not just a matter of risk-off moments or yield differentials, as some suggest. Something more fundamental is at work.
What makes the behaviour of the dollar particularly ominous is that the world’s key currency is sliding not only against benchmarks such as gold and silver but also against many measures of value including other key currencies. A general depreciation of the world’s leading currency is rare.
The dollar is at a two-year low against a basket of currencies and US Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell’s statement on July 29 that the Fed will keep monetary policy very loose, at least until the end of this year, portends further weakness.
Even if the main reserve and transaction currency is not exactly tottering, its wobbles hint at scenarios where it has to share pole position with other currencies, an unstable state in itself. Conventional wisdom holds that the dollar will retain pole position as the paramount global currency because the euro is not in a position to offer a real challenge and China is cautious about dismantling yuan exchange controls, while the Japanese yen is not a serious contender.
Recent events suggest, however, that the dollar could erode from within as the US retreats increasingly from international obligations and as its domestic economy weakens. In that case, some of the many exporters dependent on China could be persuaded to accept more yuan transactions.
Dollar depreciation could, as some suggest, simply reflect the fact that financial managers everywhere are “rotating” out of the US currency in search of yield as real or inflation-adjusted returns on dollar securities hit zero or even negative levels.
This is obviously a factor but there is certainly more to the dollar's decline than just yield. As suggested here before, confidence in currencies and faith in them as measures of value and as mediums of exchange cannot survive the idea that their supply is virtually endless.
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Which brings us back to the dollar, with markets seeing a debased currency hardly worth the paper it is printed on. They are buying precious metals instead, and non-dollar currencies. This is dangerous because many things could fall with the dollar, from global reserves and trade, to banking and financial transactions and commodities.
The US could be the biggest loser. The exorbitant privilege it enjoys because the dollar is the global currency means the US does not face balance-of-payments crises while it imports in its own currency. But the dollar world could go the same way as the sterling area, into obscurity.
From Standard Oil to Chase Manhattan, from the Council of Foreign Relations to the Trilateral Commission, from the World Bank to the Bilderberg Group the Rockefeller brothers have used the Iron Fist of 20th century capitalism, Americo-Anglo style. They have played geopolitical hardball, been instrumental in overthrowing governments abroad as well as controlling both political parties, even the supposed enemies, the Neo-Cons and the Neo-liberals domestically. The have worked through the eugenics movement for most of the 20th century to sterilize people living on the capitalist “periphery” and they have propagandized for “population control”. They also play political softball through innocent sounding Think Tanks, Foundations, and Universities to train the next generation of Rockefellers as well as spread its ideology through books, journals, and newspapers.
No, you're going to need 500 "globeros".
China’s top banking watchdog cautioned that U.S. dollar dominance combined with the massive stimulus unleashed by the Federal Reserve could push the world to the edge of another financial crisis.
In a rare act of public criticism, China Banking Regulatory Commission Chairman Guo Shuqing also lashed out at developed nations seeking to divert blame from their own failures to contain the virus outbreak and moves by the U.S. to blacklist Chinese companies and entities.
“In an international monetary system dominated by the U.S. dollar, the unprecedented, unlimited quantitative easing policy of the U.S. actually consumes the creditworthiness of the dollar and erodes the foundation of global financial stability,” Guo wrote in an article published in the Communist Party’s Qiushi magazine on Sunday. “The world may once again be pushed to the verge of a global financial crisis.”
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China’s Ministry of Commerce is moving forward with its plan for a digital currency, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
The plan will come with a large number of cities in which to test the currency, including Beijing and the provinces Tianjin and Hebei in the north, the Yangtze River Delta to the south, and the Guangdong province and the neighboring cities of Hong Kong and Macau along the country’s prosperous southern coast, WSJ reported.
The project’s policy design is set to be complete by the end of the year, although there’s no set date for when the expansion will begin.
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According to my analysis the world is heading towards a new monetary system that incorporates gold, although I do not know how that system will be structured. To get a better perspective I decided to interview Pentti Pikkarainen, former Head of Banking Operations at the central bank of Finland, member of the Voima Gold Advisory Board, and Professor of Practice at the University of Oulu in Finland. Pikkarainen thinks we are moving towards a multi-reserve currency system. My interpretation of Pikkarainen's view is that the dollar will lose its primacy status, and gold, the dollar, euro, yen, pound, renminbi, etc., will be competing each other.
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August 13, 2020
Boston – The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston today announced a multiyear collaboration with the Digital Currency Initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to perform technical research related to a central bank digital currency. The research project will explore the use of existing and new technologies to build and test a hypothetical digital currency platform.
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The Boston Fed and MIT have structured the research collaboration into work phases that extend over two to three years. The first phase will involve jointly building and testing a hypothetical central bank digital currency for wide-scale, general purpose use. The objective in this phase will be to determine how to architect a scalable, accessible cryptographic platform to meet the needs of a theoretical U.S. dollar CBDC, including stringent design requirements for speed, security, privacy and resiliency.
In later phases, researchers will assess technology trade-offs by coding and testing various architectures, to see how they impact the CBDC’s design goals. The research results will be published jointly with MIT, and the code would be licensed as open-source software, so anyone can use or continue experimenting with it.
In parallel to the work with researchers at MIT, the Boston Fed will independently evaluate other systems to understand their potential pros and cons in supporting a central bank digital currency. Before any CBDC could be issued, a separate, extensive policy process would be required.
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In Berlin, where last week saw a two-day meeting of financial officials from Europe, central bankers discussed digital payments and the confines of digital, national currencies.
At a high level, officials said that the European Central Bank should be the only one that should issue digital currencies.
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Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann said at the gathering that cash will still have a place in the world.
“Many people value cash very highly, and for legitimate reasons. It provides privacy, and its use does not necessarily depend on technical infrastructure,” he said. At the same event, ECB President Christine Lagarde took note that there has been no decision yet to create a digital euro, though a task force’s findings are due to be presented within the next few weeks. ...
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... 80 percent of 66 central banks queried by the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) said they were working on CBDCs ...
Global banks are preparing for the possibility that there will be no clear victor on the night of the U.S. presidential election, a scenario that could spark days or weeks of chaos in global equities and fixed income markets, several bankers said.
Over the past two weeks, major banks have run simulations to ensure they could cope with a spike in market, liquidity and credit risks, and have been advising clients on precautionary hedges and capital raising strategies if a contested election result on Nov. 3 leads funding markets to dry up.
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If the winner is too close to call, a legal battle and even a constitutional crisis could ensue, say bank strategists. Trump last week said he expects the result to be settled by the Supreme Court. Tuesday’s unruly first televised presidential debate has added to the uncertainty.
"If there is a constitutional crisis, we believe that the loss of political credibility and standing of the United States as a stable country could threaten its status as a safe haven with unfathomable consequences for the economy and for markets," BNP Paribas' BNPP.PA Head of Macro Strategy Daniel Ahn said.
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... A crash in the dollar is likely and it could fall by as much as 35 per cent by the end of 2021.
The reason: a lethal interplay between a collapse in domestic saving and a gaping current account deficit. ...
Economist Stephen Roach warns next year will be brutal for the dollar.
Not only does he see growing odds of a double-dip recession, the Yale University senior fellow believes his "seemingly crazed idea" that the dollar would crash shouldn't be so crazy anymore. ...
Yesterday, the Financial Times published an article from Stephen Roach --formerly of Morgan Stanley, and now a senior lecturer at Yale-- in which he calls for the imminent collapse of the US dollar (which will decline by a third by the end of 2021, apparently) and its loss of global reserve currency status. Such pieces from Roach, always with the same theme, seem to appear once or twice a year now, and always get coverage in the financial press, regardless of the fact that they are nonsense. Two colleagues contacted me last night about the piece, which shows how much consternation it caused: one to double check that Roach’s arguments were indeed as silly as they looked and he wasn’t going mad.
Anyway, Roach is roaching that the USD will collapse because the US is running a vast fiscal deficit, and that will cause a vast current account deficit, and then foreigners won’t want to fund it, and then the USD will plunge, and then something else will emerge to replace it globally. This is what they teach at Yale today, apparently.
Naturally, this overlooks that the vast fiscal deficit --which looming stimulus would indeed make vaster-- represents a transfer from the public sector to the private sector, so the huge deficit on one hand is matched by a huge surplus on the other. Think of those cheques for USD1,200 going to households, and all the households who just bank it while working from home. In other words, if the US runs a 20% fiscal deficit, for example, it won’t run a 20% current account deficit too: private savings will spike at the same time, and it will only run perhaps a 4% deficit overall.
G7 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors’ Statement on Digital Payments
October 13, 2020
WASHINGTON – The widespread adoption of digital payments has the potential to address frictions in existing payment systems by improving access to financial services, reducing inefficiencies, and lowering costs. At the same time, payment services should be appropriately supervised and regulated to address challenges and risks related to financial stability, consumer protection, privacy, taxation, cybersecurity, operational resilience, money laundering, terrorist and proliferation financing, market integrity, governance, and legal certainty, among others.
The public sector, through the provision of fiat currency and the conduct of independent monetary policy, as well as its regulatory and supervisory roles, plays an essential role in ensuring the safety and the efficiency of payment systems, financial stability, and the achievement of macroeconomic objectives. It is in this context, that a number of G7 authorities are exploring the opportunities and risks associated with central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Confidence in the stability of domestic payment systems and the international monetary system is underpinned by credible and longstanding public sector commitments to transparency, the rule of law, and sound economic governance. We are committed to addressing existing frictions within payment systems and to fostering continual improvement.
The G7 continues to support the work of the FSB, FATF, CPMI, and other standard-setting bodies to analyze the risks associated with and determine appropriate policy responses to digital payments. In particular, the G7 underscores the importance of the G20 agenda to enhance the efficiency of cross-border payments and to address regulatory and public policy issues arising from global stablecoins and other similar arrangements. The G7 continues to maintain that no global stablecoin project should begin operation until it adequately addresses relevant legal, regulatory, and oversight requirements through appropriate design and by adhering to applicable standards.
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might be a good time to borrow loads ( but I see the banks are making it hard to borrow right now ) and watch it all burn in the re-set ......
Predictably, in times of economic uncertainty, demand for a sense of hope—even the false kind—soars; add a pandemic and a lockdown to the mix and it can quickly create a ripe terrain for financial scams looking to exploit people’s need for that hope....
Over these past few months, conspiracies about an imminent global economic reset, a mysterious act named NESARA, and a new era of gold-backed cryptocurrency to be ushered in by Donald Trump have been seeing a surge in popularity on social media. If any of this sounds remotely familiar to some of you, it may be because NESARA has been around for decades, fooling thousands (and counting) since first making an appearance in the late 1990s.
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