We need to talk about central bank digital currencies
Central banks are creating their own surveillance state
I’ve got a new piece up over at UnHerd about the push — in the UK and elsewhere — towards central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). The official explanations don’t add up, while the risks of giving governments and central banks such sweeping powers of surveillance and control are being seriously downplayed.
I’m also happy to announce that our new book — The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left — was recently covered by Larry Elliott in The Guardian: “Green and Fazi express bewilderment that the left has not [questioned] this aggressive form of authoritarian capitalism, which resulted in poor people everywhere suffering enormous losses while rich people everywhere became immeasurably richer”. Bewilderment, indeed.
Best regards,
Thomas Fazi
Website: thomasfazi.net
Twitter: @battleforeurope
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thomasfazi
Here in Holland we have a parliamentarian, Mahir Alkaya (Socialist Party), whose written a book on CBDCs and now serves as parliamentary rapporteur on the topic. He says the EU is pushing forward with a CBDC without real input from the member states; we aren't considered "stakeholders". That means parliamentary concerns about anonymity, programmability, and keeping the cash system are not being taken into consideration. That's the bad news. The good news is that there seems like growing skepticism and suspicions about CBDCs. I doubt it would be possible, for example, for the ECB to switch to a 100% CBDC system overnight, hence there should be plenty of opportunity to scrutinize whatever system they want to roll out.