Friday, August 14, 2020

IN the NEWS - Digital Currency Push

Laying the Groundwork for an ENFORCEMENT MECHANISM?---And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Revelation 13:17....guess we shall see in the near future IF this will become a part of ENFORCING the Mark when it comes...remember, this would NOT be the Mark of the Beast, but could be a way to Enforce it...

"Simon Potter (who was also the former head of the Fed's Plunge
Protection Team for many years) and Julia Coronado - who have tremendous impact and influence on prevailing thinking at the Federal Reserve, and who hinted at the Fed's last ditch reflationary strategy: wiring digital money into Americans' financial apps, bypassing the reserve system entirely, and sparking an inflationary conflagration. .... "the two propose creating a monetary tool that they call recession insurance bonds, which draw on some of the advances in digital payments, which will be wired instantly to Americans."
"One of the issues Congress had in passing the Cares Act is identifying who’s got mainly tip income, who doesn’t have sick days. If society wanted, you could use large datasets to direct fiscal transfers to those people." - Bloomberg Interview with Coronado And Potter
And while this idea may have seemed absolutely ludicrous as
recently as just one year ago, the fact that the just as ludicrous Helicopter Money is now de facto policy means that direct deposits of cash by the Fed into individual accounts is becoming increasingly probable, the only thing missing is the "digital currency" that would be used by the central bank.

Addressing this issue, on Thursday afternoon, Federal Reserve Governor Lael Brainard hinted once again at the coming monetary revolution when she said that the Fed is studying the opportunities and challenges presented by central bank digital currencies.
"To enhance the Federal Reserve’s understanding of digital currencies, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston is collaborating with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in a multi-year effort to build and test a hypothetical digital currency oriented to central bank uses."
The objectives of our research and experimentation across
the Federal Reserve System are to assess the safety and efficiency of digital currency systems, to inform our understanding of private-sector arrangements, and to give us hands-on experience to understand the opportunities and limitations of possible technologies for digital forms of central bank money. These efforts are intended to ensure that we fully understand the potential as well as the associated risks and possible unintended consequences that new technologies present in the payments arena.
In prepared remarks of a speech titled simply enough "An Update on Digital Currencies" and prepared for delivery Thursday at a Fed technology event, Brainard said that "a significant policy process
would be required to consider the issuance of a CBDC, along with extensive deliberations and engagement with other parts of the federal government and a broad set of other stakeholders."

As Coronado explains the details, 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.

As Potter then elucidates, "it took Congress too long to get money
to people, and it’s too clunky. We need a separate infrastructure. The Fed could buy the bonds quickly without going to the private market. On March 15 they could have said interest rates are now at zero, we’re activating X amount of the bonds, and we’ll be tracking the unemployment rate—if it increases above this level, we’ll buy more. The bonds will be on the asset side of the Fed’s balance sheet; the digital dollars in people’s accounts will be on the liability side."

And that, in a nutshell, is how the Fed will stimulate the economy in the next crisis in hopes of circumventing the reserve creation process: it will use digital money apps to transfer money directly to US consumers."
ZeroHedge