Drumbeats for the cashless society

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The solution: We need a digital dollar, a currency that all Americans can use to transact in the 21st century economy. And this crisis offers an ideal opportunity to create it.
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To help provide U.S. taxpayers with stimulus payments to get through the recession brought about by the coronavirus, the idea of a digital dollar has been brought to light once again by legislators. The Automatic BOOST to Communities Act (ABC Act) reintroduces the digital dollar concept and uses similar language to legislation brought forward in March per Coindesk.
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Under the ABC Act, Congress would have the Fed make “FedAccounts” that would let citizens, companies and residents in the nation access financial services. Legislation from Thursday indicated per the report that “no later than January 1, 2021, the Secretary shall offer all recipients of BOOST payments the option to receive their payments in digital dollar wallets.”

The idea first showed up in the “Financial Protections and Assistance for America’s Consumers, States, Businesses, and Vulnerable Populations Act” and the “Take Responsibility for Workers and Families Act.” ...

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... In a new project by the Atlantic Council Global Business and Economics Center and Harvard University Belfer Center we will begin tracking what the world is doing on central bank digital currencies: ...

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lefty said:

I maintain a cash stash with my PMs, firearms, and ammo in safes. Will continue to do so. I'm looking forward to it becoming contraband. I love contraband!

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Sky News host Chris Smith says the coronavirus pandemic quickly morphed Australia into a cashless society, but as more of our “online world is compromised, the more cash we’ll stash”. One of the major changes that quickly morphed into our daily lives during Covid-19, was cashless spending,” Mr Smith said. “The supermarkets, large retailers and even the local fruit and vegie guy and pharmacist, were telling us to tap or swipe”. Mr Smith said as society becomes increasingly cashless you can see why the big bankers are “rubbing their hands together; no more staff or rent to pay for branches; and no more servicing or repairing of expensive ATMs”. However, he said as Australians are being warned of increasing online attacks to their personal information, again it has shown that during “times of crisis, makes cash king”.

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Is it wise for Australia to become a fully cashless society?

The coronavirus pandemic has led many Aussies to use contactless payment systems instead of physical cash, whether it’s using their card or their phone (think Apple Pay). According to a survey by Mastercard, 44% of Australians said they’re using cash less often since the pandemic began.

It’s not hard to imagine why, in the middle of a global respiratory pandemic. 80% of respondents in the Asia Pacific said they saw contactless payments as a cleaner payment option. In the future, 75% of Aussies in the survey said they’d keep using contactless payments once the pandemic is over.
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Australia is already well on the way to a cashless society.

The Reserve Bank's 2019 Consumer Payments Survey, released in March, found that in the space of a decade cash went from the dominant form of payment to now barely cracking a quarter of transactions.

But it's not all consumer-driven.

Last year, the Federal Government proposed laws to ban cash payments of $10,000 and more, threatening jail sentences of up to two years for people who didn't obey.

Meanwhile, cryptocurrencies, once the dream of Silicon Valley tech-heads and Facebook, are now being seriously considered by governments around the world.

And in recent years the likes of India and the European Central Bank have phased out higher-value notes.

It's led global firm Research and Markets to estimate that Australia could become the Asia-Pacific's "first cashless society" by 2022. The Commonwealth Bank thinks we'll probably get there by 2026.
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Cash was already being edged out in many countries as urban consumers paid increasingly with apps and cards for even the smallest purchases. But the coronavirus is accelerating a shift toward a cashless future, raising new calculations for merchants and enriching the digital payments industry.
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... In the United States, 40 million customers went online for groceries in April. In Italy, where cash is king, the volume of e-commerce transactions has surged more than 80 percent, according to McKinsey & Company.
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... Former central bank officials Simon Potter, who led the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s markets group, and Julia Coronado, who spent eight years as an economist for the Fed’s Board of Governors, are among the innovators brainstorming solutions. They propose creating a monetary tool that they call recession insurance bonds, which draw on some of the advances in digital payments. ...

BLOOMBERG MARKETS: How would recession insurance bonds work?

JULIA CORONADO: Congress would grant the Federal Reserve an additional tool for providing support—say, a percent of GDP [in a lump sum that would be divided equally and distributed] to households in a recession. Recession insurance bonds would be zero-coupon securities, a contingent asset of households that would basically lie in wait. The trigger could be reaching the zero lower bound on interest rates or, as economist Claudia Sahm has proposed, a 0.5 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate. The Fed would then activate the securities and deposit the funds digitally in households’ apps.
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BM: What are the objections from the Fed, and other challenges?

SP: The reaction from some of my former colleagues a while ago to the notion of helicopter money was not the most embracing. Some of those concerns have disappeared.

The two objections were related to the switch of deposits in normal times from the traditional banking system into digital accounts and the extra stress in crisis times as people want to get safe. An account with the central bank is safe because the central bank can always print money to honor that claim. A private bank can’t do that because their asset side has all kinds of credit on it. What we’ve created is a narrow bank-type model [narrow banks only take deposits and invest them in the safest assets] that’s small and fit for purpose, with a cap of $10,000 [per person].
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BM: Have you seen similar trials elsewhere?

SP: Sweden is a leader in thinking about this in part because they had a large decline in cash use. China is testing versions of digital currency. Fintech firms in the U.S. are interested in this—there’s a stable coin version of our proposal.

There’s easily sufficient innovation within the U.S. to do this. How to do it in a way that’s well regulated and serving the public purpose is something the Fed should focus on over the next few years. It would be a key accomplishment of the Fed and Treasury to get this infrastructure in place.

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In Shenzhen, the high-tech metropolis that just extended China’s largest digital yuan trial, participants interviewed by Bloomberg showed little interest in switching from mobile payment systems run by Ant Group Co. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. that have already replaced cash in much of the country. Some balked at the possibility a digital yuan might give authorities easier access to real-time data on their financial lives.
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Jerome Powell, Chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, has silenced the calls for a U.S. central bank digital currency (CBDC) to be issued in the near future, saying that the central bank has “not decided to proceed” with the issuance of a CBDC for the time being.

"We do not see ourselves making that decision for some time," he said Tuesday, speaking remotely on a panel about the role of central banks in digital markets to global financial leaders and crypto regulation experts attending a conference in Paris.

Powell indicated that the central bank would instead be working in collaboration with Congress and the executive branch to evaluate the policy and technological issues. This includes a multi-year period during which the Fed will focus on “building public confidence in our analysis and ultimate conclusions, which we certainly haven’t reached yet.”

The central bank Chair also said the Fed would need approval from the White House and Congress to proceed with a digital dollar.

As for what the central bank will be looking for in the creation of a CBDC, Powell identified four key characteristics: intermediated, privacy-protected, identity-verified, and interoperable.

“First is intermediated. The second is private privacy protected, but the third is identity verified, so it would not be anonymous. It would not be an anonymous bearer instrument. And fourth is transferable or interoperable,” Powell said. “We would be looking to balance privacy protection with identity verification, which has to be done in today’s traditional banking system as well.”
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The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has announced the launch of Project Icebreaker, a joint exploration with the central banks of Israel, Norway and Sweden on how central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) can be used for international retail and remittance payments.

Through Project Icebreaker, the three central banks and the BIS Innovation Hub Nordic Centre will collaborate to “develop a ‘hub’ to which participating central banks will connect their domestic proof-of-concept CBDC systems,” the BIS said.

The overall objective of the project is to test some of the key functions of CBDCs and evaluate the technical feasibility of interlinking different domestic CBDC systems.
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pmbug said:

The Fed will not be issuing a digital dollar anytime soon, says Powell

Fed Chair Powell says that the U.S. will not proceed with a digital dollar for the time being as more evaluation is needed on its long-term effects.

www.kitco.com

Norway, Israel and Sweeden central banks join the BIS in exploring CBDC payments

The BIS announces the launch of ‘Project Icebreaker’ to explore CBDC payments with the central banks of Israel, Norway and Sweden.

www.kitco.com

Sounds like global adoption of CBDCs are still a number of years (a decade?) away.

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Goldhedge said:

Whenever the Govt denies a thing it usually means they already have it in place waiting for the right false flag to implement.

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Penn said:

I worried when I seen that- but it could be great for PMs. Also note that ghetto folks trade in tide soap. People will still trade... if anything folks are getting more creative

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This report presents progress made during the investigation phase of the digital euro
project and elaborates on the foundational design options that were recently
endorsed by the Governing Council. As regards the design of the transfer
mechanism used to validate transactions, the Eurosystem will further explore a
digital euro solution, in which transactions would be made online and would be
validated by a third party, as well as a peer-to-peer validated solution for offline
payments. The Eurosystem will explore options that could allow a digital euro to
replicate some cash-like features and enable greater privacy for low-value
transactions. Consideration is also being given to incorporating limit and
remuneration-based tools in the design of a digital euro to curb its use as a form of
investment. Quantitative limits on the holdings of individual users would limit
individual take-up and the speed of deposit conversion, while remuneration-based
tools could be calibrated to make large digital euro holdings above a certain
threshold unattractive compared to other highly liquid and low-risk assets. In general,
a number of further steps would need to be taken before a digital euro could be
introduced. In the first quarter of 2023, the European Commission will propose a
regulation to establish the digital euro, which is expected to help achieve the digital
euro objectives. ...

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Goldhedge said:

Whenever the Govt denies a thing it usually means they already have it in place waiting for the right false flag to implement.

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lefty said:

My only intoxicant ingestion is a (as in 1) short glass of red wine every evening, no buzz.

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The two cases of PayPal and Ye represent what I believe are legitimate and mounting concerns surrounding centralized finance. Admittedly, Ye is an extreme example. He’s a multiplatinum recording artist with tens of millions of social media followers. But there’s a real fear among everyday people that they too can be fined or have their accounts frozen or canceled at any time for expressing nonconformist views.

That brings me to CBDCs. ...

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... It is not difficult to imagine the consequences of a payment processing giant instituting such an oppressive policy, making it not only the arbitrator of truth but also giving it a stranglehold over a person's livelihood when it disagrees with that individual. ...

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pmbug said:

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pmbug said:

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Bigfoot said:

"Financial inclusion"... these people are such psychopaths. You see this exact same sales pitch with the Rockefeller and Gates Foundations. "We need equitable distribution of vaccines." "Everyone has the right to a digital ID."

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Japan Credit Bureau (JCB), the country’s equivalent of an international payment system like Visa or Mastercard, has announced the start of the “JCBDC” project, which is designed to develop and test settlement solutions for central bank digital currencies (CBDC).

The goal of the project is to utilize “JCB’s existing credit card infrastructure and card-shaped interface for CBDC transactions,” the announcement said.
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The payment solution is expected to be fully developed by the end of 2022. The JCB plans to “conduct demonstration experiments at actual stores until the end of March 2023 to verify [the] technology and eliminate problems.”

The Bank of Japan previously shared the three-phase trial outline for its CBDC, and this latest announcement aligns with phase 3, which involves a Pilot program that “somewhat reflects the actual design and functions of CBDC and involves private payment service providers and end users.” According to the BoJ governor, the digital yen could launch by 2026.

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mtnman said:

Australia, isn't that where the Eunuchs gave up there guns? I don't care what they want to do now... Cashless may be coming but its WAY WAY WAY down the road. The US has a HUGE black and gray market that's not cashless and not going away any time soon.

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NEW YORK, SINGAPORE—The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s New York Innovation Center (NYIC) and the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) today announced Project Cedar Phase II x Ubin+, a joint experiment to investigate how wholesale central bank digital currencies (wCBDCs) could improve the efficiency of cross-border wholesale payments involving multiple currencies.

Project Cedar Phase II x Ubin+ will enhance designs for atomic settlement of cross-border cross-currency transactions, leveraging wCBDCs as a settlement asset. The effort, which entails establishing connectivity across multiple heterogeneous simulated currency ledgers, aims to significantly reduce settlement risk, a key pain point in cross-border cross-currency transactions.
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The Project Cedar Phase II x Ubin+ experiment is not intended to advance any specific policy outcome, nor is it intended to signal that the Federal Reserve will make any imminent decisions about the appropriateness of issuing a retail or wholesale CBDC, nor how one would necessarily be designed. A report detailing the experiment and findings of Project Cedar Phase II x Ubin+ will be released in 2023.

Project Cedar is a multi-phase research effort to develop a technical framework for a theoretical wCBDC in the Federal Reserve context and aims to contribute to a broad and transparent public dialogue about CBDC from a technical perspective. Phase I of Project Cedar found that using a wCBDC prototype to facilitate transactions supported by blockchain technology could improve the speed and safety of cross-border wholesale payments.
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Vladimir Putin proposes a bank-free international digital payment system​

Monkey Minute 11.27.22 - Putin's Push for Digital Currency​

Defending no man’s land: New report outlines policy options to tackle cryptocurrency risks​

FedNowSM Service​

Get ready for instant payments!​

FedNow in the News​

• FedNow Pilot Brings New Features, Use Cases for Instant Payments in '23 and Beyond (Off-site), PYMNTS.com
• The Federal Reserve Begins Piloting Its FedNow Real Time Payments Service (Off-site), Digital Transactions
• More Than 70 Organizations Showcase Instant Payments Solutions For FedNow Service Implementation (Off-site), Global Fintech Series

cheka said:

bitcoiners repent/apologize-- you helped deliver humanity into this nightmare

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Banks aren't what you think they are which has become a huge, huge problem.​

For the first time in years, Denmark hasn't recorded a single bank robbery. There wouldn't have been much point.

Cash transactions in the Nordic country have become virtually obsolete, with Danes increasingly opting to use cards and smart phones for payments.
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Finance Denmark, the banking sector’s association, said only about 20 bank branches across the country have cash holdings. But then the number of bank branches has fallen from 219 in 1991 to 56 in 2021, it said.

News reports noted that cash withdrawals in Denmark have been dropping by about three-quarters every year for the past six years.
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Finance Denmark said criminals in recent years have turned to defrauding people online.

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