John Rubino is a former Wall Street financial analyst and author or co-author of five books, including The Money Bubble: What to Do Before It Pops and Clean Money: Picking Winners in the Green-Tech Boom. He founded the popular financial website DollarCollapse.com in 2004, sold it in 2022, and now publishes John Rubino’s Substack newsletter.
Bombthrower Media’s Mark Jeftovic just posted some provocative thoughts on the timing of the forced migration to CBDS and how today’s seemingly omnipotent governments are dancing on the edge of the abyss. Here’s an excerpt:
The world is headed toward Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and everybody knows it, even the people who don’t want them (which at the moment looks to be most people).
But the policy-makers have deigned it be so, and CBDCs provide such a compelling opportunity for surveillance and social control that they are irresistible. That the fiat currency system is in the process of imploding makes it an imperative.
My editor and researcher JonB, (give him a follow) sent me this tweet:
It was to draw my attention to the timeline for Australia going cashless, and while doing so doesn’t coincide with the launch of their CBDC, the RBA is dilligently headed there (as are nearly all central banks globally).
One area of focus in The Bitcoin Capitalist is that we track all the national CBDC deployments and the myriad supranational policies and aspirations that go into them (we call it “Eye on EvilCoin”, for the Mr. Robot fans out there).
With the tweet above, I became more intrigued by the call-to-action itself, because I see this a lot: the idea that the way to resist the CBDC is to keep using cash. This is not only wrong-headed, it’s self-defeating.
Cash doesn’t buy you freedom under CBDCs
The error in thinking so arises from a failure to understand that cash is simply an older iteration of what digital cash and CBDCs are going to be: denominations in a currency, backed by nothing and controlled by the very state that you’re trying to protect yourself from.
It gets worse, because this is also the same state that has already weaponized the currency against you, either slowly, via targeted inflation (a.k.a “theft”) or overtly, as we saw here in Canada during the #FreedomConvoy.
The only thing I can see happening to the paper cash economy after a given country has (successfully) gone cashless, is that the paper currency will lose most of its value and everything gets far more expensive when priced in terms of cash.
It’ll be easier to destroy cash than ban it
Far easier. After all, governments and central banks have been destroying cash throughout history.
In all probability, they won’t even have to ban cash or impose penalties for using it.
All they’ll have to do is crank up the money printer and hyperinflate it out of existence – all the while offering holders of cash the opportunity to switch into the CBDC at seemingly advantageous (or one-sided) terms.
At that point, banning cash will seem akin to banning the buggy whip. Kind of pointless.
The good news
While it’s practically baked-in that CBDCs will either launch as, or morph into, CCP-style social credit systems, what is unknown at the moment is if Late Stage Globalism’s financial system will actually hold together long enough for retail CBDCs to deploy.
We see a lot of tweets and YouTube videos from people predicting a snap launch of a CBDC after a sudden banking holiday in the imminent future.
I don’t see that as possible, because there isn’t a major economy in the world that is anywhere close to being ready to launch a retail CBDC.
There are numerous interbank clearing networks that are either in test beds or already up and running. FedNow’s launch over the summer is one, and many say that is a precursor to the CBDC launch.
But at the retail level: on your phone, monitoring every transaction, metering your carbon footprint – this is still a long way off.
The US, the IMF, the BIS et al are still writing white papers about it. Many of them are chilling, to be sure, but they’re still navel gazing and not actually working on it. The UK just announced their retail CBDC roadmap and the research phase alone will start this year and go on for the next three years.
In Canada there are some tests going on but even the Bank of Canada admits there isn’t a compelling use case for CBDCs and not many Canadians really want it.
Of the four retail CBDCs already up and running (The Bahamas, Jamaica, The Eastern Caribbean Dollar, and Nigeria), they have all been plagued with technical problems or public apathy. Venezuela has launched two CBDCs over the past decade, each launch coinciding with a massive currency devaluation, and they both stiffed.
Globalism hanging by a thread
The reality is that the nation-state as we know it, and “globalism” as in the current world order, are hanging by a thread and ready to fall apart. The fiat currency is one of the things governments do control, but they don’t even have a lot of optionality with it – they can choose at what rate to debase it, and that’s about it.
Rather than COVID proving how powerful governments were, it exposed them as incompetent and weak. That’s why they’re scared. That’s why they’re doubling down. They have no other option.
Even if they manage to enact a Great Reset / WEF-inspired CBDC regime, it will only be temporary. The movement past centralized nation-states is unstoppable now, the incentives are such that decentralized mechanisms like Bitcoin will be a necessity of doing business in a multi-polar world.
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