Tag: digital currency

Beware: The ECB Digital Currency Is Coming

Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, has announced that the digital euro will be ready for October 2025.

However, she stressed the importance of moving forward with the legislative process that would impose the digital euro, urging the European Commission, the European Council, and member states parliaments to accelerate the laws and directives that are required to make the digital euro viable.

Why the rush? The European Central Bank’s losses have risen to 7.8 billion euros, and the European monetary authority has posted the second consecutive loss, while sovereign bonds in Europe have slumped again in the first two months of 2025. The ECB needs a digital euro to wash away its disastrous policy of the past decade.

The second reason is because confidence in the ECB’s policy is declining, sovereign bonds are not a reserve asset anymore, and inflation expectations rise. The hurry to impose the digital euro also comes at a time when European member states have announced large plans to spend, borrow, and invest in defense. Thus, the digital euro is critical to imposing the use of the euro as a currency, expanding the control of citizens, and disguising fiscal imbalances with a dangerous tool issued by a monetary institution that has lost most of its credibility in the past five years.

Remember that the ECB’s mandate is price stability, but inflation in the euro area has exceeded 22% in the past four years. At the same time, the European sovereign bond index has fallen by 14% since 2022.

There is another important reason to rush the digital euro. Global central banks and investment firms are concerned that European states will confiscate the assets of the Russian central bank, setting a dangerous precedent that could affect the assets of other non-European nations. As foreign funds fearing confiscation may leave the European financial system, the digital euro may be a useful tool to impose the use of the currency even if demand declines.

The digital euro, which Lagarde described in 2022 as “a digital banknote with a little less anonymity than the paper banknote because it is issued and guaranteed by the central bank,” is an unnecessary and dangerous tool.

Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) have been gaining attention as the technology of the future for monetary systems, but beneath their promise of efficiency and innovation lies a more pessimistic reality: they can serve as tools for surveillance, eroding personal privacy and financial freedom.

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The Stablecoin Trap: The Backdoor To Total Financial Control

The walls are closing in on your financial freedom—but not in the way most Americans believe.

While the debate rages over the future threat of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), a far more insidious reality has already taken hold: our existing financial system already functions as a digital control grid, monitoring transactions, restricting choices, and enforcing compliance through programmable money.

For over two years, my wife and I have traveled across 22 states warning about the rapid expansion of financial surveillance. What began as research into cryptocurrency crackdowns revealed something far more alarming: the United States already operates under what amounts to a CBDC.

  • 92% of all US dollars exist only as entries in databases.
  • Your transactions are monitored by government agencies—without warrants.
  • Your access to money can be revoked at any time with a keystroke.

The Federal Reserve processes over $4 trillion daily through its Oracle database system, while commercial banks impose programmable restrictions on what you can buy and how you can spend your own money. The IRS, NSA, and Treasury Department collect and analyze financial data without meaningful oversight, weaponizing money as a tool of control. This isn’t speculation—it’s documented reality.

Now, as President Trump’s Executive Order 14178 ostensibly “bans” CBDCs, his administration is quietly advancing stablecoin legislation that would hand digital currency control to the same banking cartel that owns the Federal Reserve. The STABLE Act and GENIUS Act don’t protect financial privacy—they enshrine financial surveillance into law, requiring strict KYC tracking on every transaction.

This isn’t defeating digital tyranny—it’s rebranding it.

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Sleepwalking Into a Cashless Society

Philip Lane, chief economist of the European Central Bank, recently expressed urgency for the need to develop a digital euro—also known as a central bank digital currency (CBDC)—to compete against stablecoins such as Tether and electronic payment systems developed by U.S. tech firms, such as Google Pay and Apple Pay. Not content with eliminating cash, now the goal of central banks is to eliminate any competing electronic payment system.

We’re sleepwalking into a world with digital currencies without any government coercion whatsoever. As a 51-year-old Generation Xer, I carry lots of cash in my wallet. I teach personal finance at the local university and recently asked a class of about 30 students if any of them had any cash. Not one of them had a single bill or coin on them. They use debit cards, credit cards, Venmo, and Apple Pay. As it turns out, cash usage among the 18–24 age cohort has declined from 28 percent to 13 percent over the last five years. Most like the convenience of electronic payments, even though studies show that people spend 12 percent to 18 percent more when using credit cards than cash. If the government does attempt to implement a digital dollar, there will be little resistance to it.

Currently, there is $2.36 trillion in U.S. currency in circulation. Of course, much of this is held outside our borders, owing to the dollar’s dominance as the global reserve currency. The most common denomination of U.S. currency is the $100 bill. There are more $100 bills in circulation than $1 bills. Many residents of foreign countries, such as Argentina, consider the U.S. dollar to be a store of value and a hedge against inflation and local currency depreciation. If the U.S. government ever decided to phase out paper currency, it would have far-reaching effects around the globe.

Promoters of a digital currency allege that it would cause a drop in criminal and illicit activity. That may be correct, or people may simply resort to another medium of exchange or barter. Philosophically speaking, virtue is not possible without the freedom of choice. If people can’t choose to misbehave, it does not make them virtuous. A society in which nobody has the freedom to misbehave is far more horrifying than a society where people actually misbehave. 

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Replacing Cash With Digital Dollar Would Pose A Grave Threat To Our Rights and Freedoms

The Bank of Canada has made no secret of its efforts to explore a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), a “digital dollar” issued and controlled by the central bank. The Bank of Canada is not alone. To date, 134 countries and currency unions have explored a CBDC, and 66 countries are already in advanced stages of implementation.

In 2023, cash accounted for a mere 11 percent of total payments made by Canadians. Consumers increasingly tap their credit and debit cards at checkouts, send e-transfers, or use online banking to pay bills, make investments, and donate to charities. For many Canadians, metal coins function less like a currency and more like a locker or shopping cart token; paper bills are for birthday cards, not for “serious” transactions. New legislation in Quebec empowers law enforcement to presume that cash sums of $2,000 or more are the proceeds of unlawful activity.

While most consumers seem to appreciate the convenience of an increasingly digital economy, a CBDC is a radical change from using credit cards and online banking apps. A CBDC would likely lead to a cashless economy, in which all financial transactions can be monitored and controlled by government. A cashless economy would create severe hardship for people who are homeless, technologically illiterate, or without ready access to the internet.

For Canadians who look after their finances electronically, cash remains essential to protect their rights and freedoms, including their privacy, security, and autonomy. In a cashless economy, all transactions are digital, subject to surveillance, and ultimately subject to government control. CBDC opens the door for governments to reward or penalize Canadians for their personal choices on how to live, where to go, and what to do with their own money.

Governments can use CBDC to restrict when, where, and what people are allowed to buy, leading to a level of control resembling communist China’s notorious “social credit” system. China uses “social credit” to reward citizens who support the Communist Party and its rules and policies. Those who criticize the Party can find themselves unable to board a train, plane, or subway, denied a bank loan, or prevented from enrolling their children in the best schools and universities.

Cash means privacy and confidentiality.

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Congressional Hearing Reveals Stablecoins And CBDCs Share The Same Financial Control Risks

A congressional hearing on digital currencies rarely makes headlines. Yet, this week’s debate over stablecoins and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) revealed more than technical disagreements; it exposed deeper anxiety about financial power, privacy, and control in an increasingly digital world.

The conversation unfolded along predictable lines. Those skeptical of CBDCs warned of creeping surveillance and government overreach. Advocates, meanwhile, framed it as a necessity, a matter of American competitiveness in a world where China and Europe are already moving ahead. Yet what emerged, almost inadvertently, was a realization that the supposedly safer alternative, privately issued stablecoins, carries many of the same risks.

While CBDC opponents championed stablecoins as the free-market alternative, testimony from industry leaders revealed that stablecoins — despite their branding as decentralized, private-sector solutions — already carry many of the same risks. The ability to freeze assets, enforce government mandates, and track transactions is a present reality, especially when combined with Know Your Customer (KYC) laws which eradicate privacy.

The core argument against CBDCs is simple: they give the federal government unprecedented control over personal finances. Randall Guynn, Chairman of the Financial Institutions Group at Davis Polk & Wardwell, issued a stark warning.

“A CBDC would give the Federal Reserve staff a direct window into virtually every transaction every person in America makes,” he said. “And at least one of them won’t be able to resist the temptation to use that information to promote what they consider to be worthy political goals.”

His comments echoed a broader concern: a US CBDC could function as a financial surveillance tool, much like China’s digital yuan. In China, authorities can track purchases in real-time and even restrict how certain funds are spent. Many fear the US government could use a CBDC to implement similar controls — whether to enforce political objectives, regulate behavior, or even deplatform individuals from the financial system.

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Christine Lagarde: We are getting ready to make the digital euro a reality in October

The ECB has been working on the digital euro for over five years. It is currently in the “preparation phase” which started in November 2023. The launch of the digital euro is the next phase, which involves the actual rollout of the digital euro across the EU member states.

“The deadline for us [to make the digital euro a reality] is going to be October 2025 and we are getting ready for that deadline,” Lagarde said during a press conference on 6 March.

“But,” she added, “we will not be able to move unless the other parties, the stakeholders as I call them – [European] Commission, Council and Parliament – actually complete the legislative process, without which we will not be able to move.”

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Digital Currency Leads Us by the Hand Down the Primrose Path to Slavery

The decay of values, the decline of crafts, of art, of literature, and, above all, of intellectual inquiry in the United States leaves us facing a wasteland wherein money is the only sentient beast, demanding due worship by all.

This horrific change was accompanied by the hollowing out of the economy. We went from agriculture in which there is a clear relationship between labor, product, and the moral and physical wellbeing of the family, to manufacturing in which production was cut off from daily life and monopolized by global capital, to a consumption and the service economy which is mediated by computers, creating online platforms controlled behind the curtains by unaccountable multinational technological monopolies.

And now, in the last stage of the decay of the angel, we are encouraged to welcome as a sign of advancement the replacements of humans with robots, drones, and AI systems. Citizens have no role in this alien economy and we can only feed our families by engaging in some banal activity at a tremendous distance from family and neighbors, and then bringing back the dollars so earned to purchase products sold retail by multinational corporations.

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IMF Offers a Glimpse at the Perils of Central Bank Digital Currencies

With Bitcoin climbing over $100,000, both investors and government officials are taking a closer look at digital money. The problem is that there’s a huge difference between an independent currency designed to resist surveillance and control, and one crafted by a central bank to enable exactly that. A new handbook from the International Monetary Fund embraces the potential of cryptocurrency while highlighting the dangers inherent in state dominance of the means of storing and exchanging value.

The IMF handbook’s opening chapter discusses how central bank digital currencies (CBDC) could keep government financial institutions relevant. “With digitalization and falling cash usage in parts of the world,” the authors write, “central banks are considering CBDC to ensure a fundamental anchor of trust in the monetary system.” Also discussed is the potential for CBDCs to “potentially help lower barriers to financial inclusion in countries with underdeveloped financial systems,” to “channel government payments directly to households,” and “to help reduce frictions in cross-border payments.”

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Michigan Bill Would Take First Steps Against A CBDC

A bill filed in the Michigan House would take the first steps toward limiting the impact of any potential future central bank digital currency (CBDC) in the state.

House Bill 6147 (HB6147) would prohibit a state governmental agency or any political subdivision from accepting a payment using central bank digital currency. It would also bar the same from advocating for or supporting any test of a central bank digital currency.

HB6147 is similar to a law passed in Alabama in 2023 and in Indiana, South Dakota, North Carolina and Georgia in 2024.

IN PRACTICE

In the spirit of James Madison’s blueprint in Federalist #46, the enactment of HB6147 would create “impediments” to the implementation of a CBDC in Michigan. Madison said “a refusal to cooperate with officers of the union” along with “the embarrassments created by legislative devices,” would “oppose, in any State, difficulties not to be despised.”

Other states have also taken steps to block the use of CBDCs. Indiana, Florida, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Utah have enacted laws that ban the use of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) as money in the state.

How such legislation will play out in practice against a CBDC, should the federal government attempt to implement one, is unknown.

Opponents of the legislation generally take the position that states can’t do anything to stop a CBDC, since – according to their view – under the supremacy clause “any federal law on this point will automatically override state law.”

We’ve heard this song and dance on other issues before.

In the ramp-up to the 1996 vote on Proposition 215 in California, voters were repeatedly told that legalization of marijuana, even for limited medical purposes, was a fruitless effort, since, under the supremacy clause, any such state law would be automatically overridden by the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 (CSA). At best, opponents told Californians, the state would end up in a costly, and losing court effort.

But despite those warnings, Californians voted yes, setting in motion the massive state-level movement we see today, where a growing majority of states have legalized what the federal government prohibits. Ultimately, the federal government will likely have to back down, even if just to save face, because it has become impossible to fully enforce its federal prohibition over this massive state and individual resistance.

A similar scenario played out in response to the REAL ID Act of 2005. The national ID system still isn’t fully up and running more than 17 years after the “final deadline” for full implementation.

Why not?

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Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) Projects Are Foundering in Five-Eye Nations. What Gives?

Canada and Australia shelve plans for retail CBDCs while the US could soon become the first country to explicitly ban the central bank from issuing a CBDC.   

As we warned in May 2022, a financial revolution is quietly sweeping the world (or at least trying to) that has the potential to reconfigure the very nature of money, making it programmable, far more surveillable and centrally controlled. To quote Washington DC-based blogger and analyst NS Lyons, “if not deliberately and carefully constrained in advance by law,… CBDCs have the potential to become even more than a technocratic central planner’s dream. They could represent the single greatest expansion of totalitarian power in history.”

At the time of writing that post, around 90 countries and currency unions were in the process of exploring a CBDC, according to the Atlantic Council’s CBDC tracker. Today, just two and a half years later, that number has increased to 134, representing 98% of global GDP. Around 66 of those countries are in the advanced stage of exploration—development, pilot, or launch.

But they do not include the United States. In fact, the US is not just trailing most countries on CBDC development; it could soon become the first country to explicitly ban the central bank from issuing a CBDC, to the undisguised horror of certain think tanks.

“CBDC Anti-Surveillance State Act.”

In May, the US House of Representatives passed HR 5403, also known as the “CBDC Anti-Surveillance State Act.” The bill, first introduced in September 2023 and sponsored by US Senator Ted Cruz, proposes amendments to the Federal Reserve Act to prohibit the US Federal Reserve from issuing CBDCs. It also seeks to protect the right to financial privacy and prevent the U.S. government from “weaponizing their financial system against their own citizens.”

If passed, HR 5403 will prevent the Fed from:

  1. Offering products or services directly to individuals.
  2. Maintaining accounts on behalf of individuals.
  3. Issuing a central bank digital currency or any digital asset that is substantially similar under any other name or label directly to an individual.

To become law, the bill still needs to clear the Senate, which is by not means guaranteed. But it is likely to receive added impetus from a new Trump administration, assuming Trump wins the election and isn’t assassinated before taking office or thwarted by a colour revolution, as Lambert posited yesterday. In January, Trump announced, to thunderous applause, at a New Hampshire that as president, he would “never allow the creation of a central bank digital currency.” Such a currency, he said, “would give a federal government, our federal government, absolute control over your money.”

Even a Kamala Harris administration is unlikely to fast-track a digital dollar, with progress set to continue to lag other jurisdictions, according to an article in The Banker. US voters — particularly Republican ones — are increasingly aware — and wary — of the threat posed by CBDCs, as demonstrated by the crowd’s reaction to Trump’s announcement. This, if nothing else, stands as testament to the power of social and independent media, and goes a long way to explaining why governments across the West are trying desperately to muzzle them.

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