War on cash: “absolute control”. By Clint Siegner.

The General Manager for the Bank of International Settlements — the central bank of central bankers — is planning for “absolute control” of the money we all spend. Augustin Carstens: …

“We don’t know who’s using a $100 bill today and we don’t know who’s using a 1,000 peso bill today. The key difference with the CBDC is the central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability, and also we will have the technology to enforce that.”

Carstens views CBDC, Central Bank Digital Currency, as a tool for eliminating privacy and for central bankers to force citizens to use currency exactly when, where, and how they are told.

Dozens of central banks around the world are working on CBDCs, including the Federal Reserve. The effort represents a major escalation in the War on Cash.

It is one thing to discourage people from using cash. It is something else entirely to introduce digital money which gives bureaucrats the power to monitor and control the spending of everyone who adopts it.

Novel ideas are already being floated. For example, the Federal Reserve could issue stimulus funds with an expiration date, forcing people to spend rather than save.

Officials could limit spending to certain geographic boundaries, and thereby impose a restriction on travel. They could pick winners and losers, favoring some merchants or industries or crushing others.

Or cut off the finances of dissidents, or anti-vaxxers, or readers of unauthorized blogs.