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A central bank digital currency (CBDC) is more or less as advertised: a digital, centralized token issued officially by a sovereign government.
When CBDCs first started getting mentions some years back, it was difficult to find a mainstream opinion on why this might not be the best idea ever. They were to speed up international payments, and... well, there must have been some other benefits that aren't coming to mind.
Nowadays, CBDCs are getting a lot of pushback. Will that matter? Probably not. They've already been rolled out in some countries, and in others are just a step away from that.
Understanding the pushback behind CBDCs is key to understanding their purpose, which is definitely not to help the Average Joe.

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What is a CBDC? The Chinese example
Instead of viewing CBDCs as a new and exciting take on currency, it would benefit us to view them as a control mechanism first and foremost. It's not without reason that China has been the poster nation for CBDCs this entire time.
Around 2018 or 2019, it was said that the U.S. should explore the digital dollar to avoid letting China get a trade advantage on the global stage with its digital yuan. Multiple countries said something to that tune.
The reason a CBDC works so well in China is that there is no pretense over its totalitarianism. The citizens are given a social credit score, that shifts based on how dutifully they water their garden or how much they agree with the government.
If their social credit score drops, they become an outcast in society, so to speak. Well, we know about all the Westerns with the outlaws and outcasts and what not, with a bounty on their heads... they did just fine, right?
Trouble is, since all the currency is in digital form and traceable, the Chinese government simply cuts off the undesirables from the financial system.
That means no grocery shopping, no utility bills, no bank account access, no investments. Again, how and why this is done to the Chinese resident is entirely the regime's discretion.
It's pretty easy to see why this kind of control is appealing to any government, so CBDCs are being rolled out pretty quick. If they are to take place as envisioned by various global groups, the China of today will be viewed as libertarian.
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The rapidly changing mainstream opinion
As noted, it used to be difficult to find a negative mainstream take on CBDCs. It was all "faster settlement, better financial inclusion and greater stability."
These primary selling points are looking increasingly bizarre. For starters, does anyone really believe that total government control over citizens' access to money will promote financial inclusion?
Then we get to the settlement bit, more specifically to do with commercial banks and financial institutions.
In what is definitely a changing narrative, close to the sole concern that the mainstream media was willing to cite back in the day was that CBDCs might destabilize the banking system in the short-term.
Fast forward less than five years ago, and the banking crisis is being used as a tool to bring about CBDCs. Again, it's not really clear why. The banking crisis is one of insolvency, which was caused by bad management by centralized entities. Yet, supposedly, centralizing things more is going to help things.
ITM Trading's Chief Market Analyst Lynette Zang is one of the many experienced and knowledgeable voices speaking out against CBDCs.
She specifically outlines how a crisis will be used to bring a "full surveillance economy", and the bigger the crisis, the easier it will be to pass off a CBDC.
CBDCs hardly need a banking crisis to take stage, though. While it's hard to disagree with any of Zang's points, many central banks were developing digital money long before the SVB collapse under the very weak pretense of competing with China.
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FedNow and moving your funds to the Federal Reserve's balance sheet
You might have heard of FedNow, which is basically a framework for CBDCs. Another great interview with plenty of good information, if not the most pleasing to hear, is that between Daniela Cambone and Stansberry Research's George Gammon.
Before delving into some of the points that Gammon brings up which are of exceeding interest to everyone, let's first outline how much you actually are in possession of your money based on what you hold:
Here we see how the further we move away from the physical, even in the case of cryptocurrencies, the less we really own our money. This is the basis of the banking crisis, whether you're talking Credit Suisse, SVB or any other.
It's supposed to hold so and so money redeemable for cash by clients whenever. The more it's revealed that it doesn't, the deeper we go into the banking crisis. Eventually, the doors are closed as you try to redeem, and the bank says: "Sorry."
As Gammon points out, CBDCs are going to give a similar amount of financial exertion to the Federal Reserve, the Treasury or both. If things go as currently outlined, your money would sit on the Fed's balance sheet or some sort of government account, as would that of any American citizen.
Just as banks have the ability to restrict your access, so too would the government. And it goes past just control and extends to mishandling. What happens to citizens of a nation when the nation starts having an economic crisis?
Gammon raises some other key considerations. How to sell the social credit system in the land of liberty? The green agenda is an easy one. We don't want the planet to blow up, right? Better restrict the financial access of anyone using too much gas.
Another point Gammon makes is that he's finding himself in a spot where things he was being blasted over in 2019 for being a conspiracy theorist are now here. And worse things are being explicitly stated to be in the making. Hard to argue with that one these days.
We've used China as an extreme example because that's what we have. But in actuality, it's not the only country with a CBDC. Nigeria has already rolled out its own, and it's not nearly as extreme in the sense of populace subjugation. It's not exactly Texas, but it might give us an idea of how things could look like on the domestic front.

Nigeria is selling eNaira, but the people aren't buying
The populous African country of Nigeria is far from the most digitalized society in the world. It's not a place like Norway or Sweden, where citizens will naively jump to any digital control mechanism because of a pretense of convenience.
That makes it all the stranger that it was one of the first countries to come out with a CBDC two years ago. Why, if the citizens don't want it?
And these days, we have plenty of insight into what things look like when CBDCs are enforced to an unwilling populace. Before we get to statistics, let's first give a little background into how the Nigerian government treated decentralized distributed ledger technology.
Crypto was always popular in Nigeria. The worse a government handles its fiat, the more popular crypto tends to be. And African governments aren't exactly the picture of financial stability.
Of course, the government of Nigeria banned private cryptocurrencies only to introduce the eNaira soon afterwards. This left Nigerians a little confused and a lot more suspicious. Weren't digital currencies bad just a moment ago?
For as much as Nigeria isn't a digital dystopia, it's actually spearheading in those terms pertaining to cryptocurrencies. Despite the bans, it ranked 11th in the world in terms of crypto adoption in a recent analysis. Beyond the how, we might also ask: why?
Well, onto the statistics we mentioned. Only 0.5% of Nigeria's population is reported to be using the eNaira. A practically negligible number that probably comes nearly exclusively from financial entities and the like.
It's not just the government that Nigerians don't trust, but also its fiat. The Naira in paper form has been devalued six times since 2015, and now that it's digital, expectations are for a 20% drop this year.
Here, we might also want to make a few points about currency devaluation and how CBDCs will make it a walk in the park.
Central bank digital currencies: Digital money printer go brrr...
Money printing. Such a messy affair. Isn't it heartwarming to know that governments of the world can debase their currencies with only the click of a button?
Any time you hear things like currency devaluation or currency debasement, what you're really hearing is that one or more central banks printed money out of thin air.
It can occasionally and supposedly refer to a weakening economy that weakens the fiat's clout, but not really and not on the global stage.
Practically nobody wants the Federal Reserve's boom and bust cycles. Well, the same can probably be said of the Federal Reserve anyways.
What it's done, like any central bank since its inception, is loosen then tighten. Things were a little more complex before 1971, so let's focus on what that looked like after Nixon untethered the U.S. dollar from gold.
There is a supposed crisis where money is needed. Maybe the federal government needs it, or maybe the people need it due to policies enforced by the federal government.
Either way, the country's central bank prints the money. More money means less scarcity, which lowers its value. This raises the inflation rate. In order to try and lower the inflation rate, which has worked to varying degrees in the past, the Fed raised the benchmark interest rate.
This obviously causes an economic crisis since there's less money around because it's all going on interest payments.
The hyperinflation that the U.S. is facing right now comes as a result of the multi-trillion dollar stimulus that was issued as a response to the lockdowns.
The lockdowns themselves were issued by the government: the populace didn't actually ask for them. So we again have an example of one bad policy after another, destroying the people's wealth while the government does as it wishes.
All of this will become more frequent and all the easier to do once CBDCs are up and running. Accountability will go away for the most part, the little bit of it that is left.
European Central Bank money, which affects 20-some nations, can be manipulated in minutes. Interest rates will no longer require meetings: monetary and fiscal policy can change on the spot.
And, as Gammon mentioned in the interview above, there will be no uniform interest rate. Americans will almost certainly be incentivized to use CBDCs with higher interest rates compared to cash and private bank deposit. The green agenda might not sell to everyone, but what about returns?
As the saga of CBDCs gets more and more tumultuous, we should also briefly cover the refuges one will have and that are already available.
How you can escape CBDCs: Gold, crypto and cash
We've placed them in that order for a reason. Right now, cash, crypto and gold are the only real refuges for anyone concerned about privacy, freedom and all these other American things.
Cash is already being cracked down. Businesses are being offered incentives to go cash-free. In the case of Nigeria, they've imposed ATM limit withdrawals.
Gammon says crypto is next, and that there will probably be a planned crash of the crypto market right around the time CBDCs are rolled out. Boats will be rocked. That leaves gold in physical form.
Throughout history, gold bullion has served as a safe-haven. The circumstances didn't matter. This track record alone tells us that things are unlikely to change.
It might be more difficult to get, own or store gold, but it won't budge from its role of providing privacy and protection as we get through this period.
And why not round things up by saying we will get through it? We know what the goal is: a global digital dictatorship. From mainstream media to the federal government, there is already a lot of critique, doubt and outright refusal.
In what has been a bit of a downer overview, that's one good takeaway. And instead of waiting for things to unravel further, let's remember: the best time to start proactively protecting your wealth is now.