Nigeria launched their CBDC and then proceeded to have mass nationwide power blackouts. "Critical Thinkers" might consider that to have been a trial run of some sort or another 🪖 🥸🤷♂️
CBDCs - specifically the Retail rCBDCs that you’re talking about - are, and will continue to be, IRRELEVANT. Agree with everything here. But there’s a bigger picture … Remember rCBDCs were initially conceived by Central Bank’s as a knee jerk reaction to Facebook’s Libra - a private coin designed to disrupt the payment world. Central Banks wanted to try to stay relevant. They are not. Nor are their CBDCs.
It’s actually all about power dynamics … and the Commercial Banks have the power. So here’s the actual reason why rCBDCs will never happen beyond the current pilot trials:
🔹Commercial Banks, not Central Banks, create the majority of money supply (97%).
🔹Central banks only create 3% of money - Cash. Notes ad coins.
🔹rCBDCs would initially only replace a tiny proportion of this 3% cash - it’s these tiny volumes that make rCBDCs utterly IRRELEVANT!
🔹If Central Banks want a bigger slice of the money pie, by trying to replace bank money - ie try to take back some of the 97% - with rCBDC then (i) it would mean reducing bank lending (how bank money is created) which could be an economic systemic risk, or (ii) banks will simply fight this because it would mean reducing their profitable bank lending. It’s almost Darwinistic for both banks and Central Banks to want to protect M2 money supply to stop banks and the economy failing!
🔹In other words, Banks have all the power. Even if the Central Banks try to reduce this the they still need banks to run rCBDCs, so immediately give the power back. You see this playing out in rCBDC pilot trials with talk of rCBDC “Holding Limits” that mean at most about £3K rCBDC limit per bank customer to protect bank deposits from being impacted. Similarly for current trials of $, € and ¥ holding limits.
🔹The Central Banks also need commercial banks to manage the flows of stimulus money (QE) during each debt ceiling cycle — giving more influence to the banks. And we know more debt is coming (just to pay debt servicing, let alone forecast government spending).
As an aside …
🔹Wholesale wCBDCs are essentially monetary reserves and will end up as part of the intra-bank system with no real impact. History will forget these CBDCs.
🔹Checks and cash don’t change - they’re bank money.
🔹Stablecoins and tokenised deposits offer a way to improve payments & settlements. Commercial Banks will (are already starting to) issue their own fiat-backed versions, interchangeable with each other & fiat currency at par. It’s more bank money and more bank profit!
But what about Bitcoin (and maybe ETH)?
🔹Crypto isn’t part of any of the above. But, ironically, ever increasing M2 money supply needs to flow somewhere - so vast sums are heading next into bitcoin ETPs, ETH ETFs, etc.
🔹 There’s a possible investment play here (but this is not advice as such) to invest either in Bitcoin (directly buy, not ETPs) or follow the firms that do invest in Bitcoin or other crypto ETPs or ETFs. A clear example of this is the MicroStrategy strategy and share price. So does that mystery share price climb suddenly make sense now?!
Orwell stopped at Big Brother, & left it at that, didn’t he? Of course that’s not the whole family, is it?
It’s said that inflation is a tax stealthed out in jargon’s clothing. Or maybe it’s gorgon’s clothing - & a lot of pancake cosmetics, good lighting, camera angles.
Well, that stealth tax is not a bug of big bro’s incompetence. It’s a feature of obese Big Daddy’s pathological appetite. As is the overt income tax rider atop the fedres trojan horse.
(Both pale riders came together in the wee hours of Dec 23, 1913. Credit money debt - convertibility decommissioning fait accompli to come a little later - out of thin air, & interest on it out of the thinning backsides of citizen-collateral-to-be-damaged-continuously.)
And so is his prodigal son’s “incompetence.” (There’s probably a Biden father/son joke, or two, to fit here.)
“Waste” (incompetence) is the payment channel that makes rivulet of SWIFT by comparison.
Or, SWIFT is a straw pipeline under the septic ocean. Like the one natgas was pumped thru From Russia, With Love, to Europe.
(Bond, James Bond; Connery was the best. Died in his sleep at his home in Lyford Cay, Nassau, Bahamas on 10/31/20. He was somewhere on the “Tax exile” continuum.)
Change a few words:
You might say public schooling was a government IT project. It was. The U.S. government - via Prussia, Carnegie, Rockefeller, et al - provided crucial funding that led to the development of key protocols like twelve years to learn a year or two’s worth of material - but mostly to insinuate into most cortexes the core tenants of submission to “authority.” But the pubschool system succeeded because of the immense infrastructure (that) of millions of people, mostly working in “their own” programmed self-interest - - & allowing their kids to be escorted, at bayonet, to school, in the launch of that particular “public good” - - since built over many decades on top of it.
Populism positivized is an unwarranted optimism, it surely seems.
Or maybe optimism in general is a warrant for arrest duly exercised.
‘“Markets” can stay irrational a lot longer than you can stay solvent’ but optimism circuits, & desperation grips, are impervious … which can, & will, be used against you in a Big Bro court of legality.
Hey, Dom, five exclamation points is essentially - very distilled essence - Melville.
3rd party access/ingress is another way to catch a ride into those bounding mains from which all life came, or supposedly came. Here's DH Lawrence:
“So ends one of the strangest & most wonderful books in the world, closing up its mystery & its tortured symbolism. It is an epic of the sea such as no man has equalled; & it is a book of esoteric symbolism of profound significance, & of considerable tiresomeness.
But it is a great book, a very great book, the greatest book of the sea ever written. It moves awe in the soul.
The terrible fatality.
Fatality.
Doom.
Doom! Doom! Doom! Something seems to whisper it in the very dark trees of America. Doom!
Doom of what?
Doom of our white day. We are doomed, doomed. And the doom is in America. The doom of our white day.
Ah, well, if my day is doomed, & I am doomed with my day, it is something greater than I which dooms me, so I accept my doom as a sign of the greatness which is more than I am.
Melville knew. He knew his race was doomed. His white soul doomed. His great white epoch, doomed. Himself, doomed. The idealist, doomed. The spirit, doomed.
The reversion. ‘Not so much bound to any haven ahead, as rushing from all havens astern.’
That great horror of ours! It is our civilization rushing from all havens astern.
The last ghastly hunt. The White Whale.
What then is Moby Dick? He is the deepest blood-being of the white race; he is our deepest blood-nature.
And he is hunted, hunted, hunted by the maniacal fanaticism of our white mental consciousness. We want to hunt him down. To subject him to our will. And in this maniacal conscious hunt of ourselves we get dark races & pale to help us, red, yellow, & black, east & west, Quaker & fire-worshipper, we get them all to help us in this ghastly maniacal hunt which is our doom & our suicide.
The last phallic being of the white man. Hunted into the death of the upper consciousness & the ideal will. Our blood-self subjected to our will. Our blood-consciousness sapped by a parasitical or ideal consciousness.
Hot blooded sea-born Moby Dick. Hunted by monomaniacs of the idea.
Oh God, oh God, what next, when the Pequod has sunk?
She sank in the war, & we are all flotsam.
Now what next?
Who knows? Quien sabe? Quien sabe, senor?
Neither Spanish nor Saxon America has any answer.
The Pequod went down & the Pequod was the ship of the white American soul. She sank, taking with her negro & Indian & Polynesian, Asiatic & Quaker & good, business-like Yankees & Ishmael: she sank all the lot of them.
Boom! As Vachel Lindsay would say.
To use the words of Jesus, IT IS FINISHED.
Consummatum est!
But Moby Dick was first published in 1851. If the Great White Whale sank the ship of the Great White Soul in 1851, what’s been happening ever since?
Post-mortem effects, presumably.
Because, in the first centuries, Jesus was Cetus, the Whale. And the Christians were the little fishes. Jesus, the Redeemer, was Cetus, Leviathan. And all the Christians all his little fishes.
~ Studies In Classic American Literature, DH Lawrence
This is great news and I remain positive. However, I am concerned with all the non-retail buying and I have questions. What's to stop JPM et al 1. cornering the market and 2. putting BTC behind a layer-2 or something that they control. I'm not a specialist in this area and hopefully this isn't possible but I do worry. Life raft and paddles at the ready 🛟
To improve the image, accurize-the-prospects of seeing far enough forward & back to maybe not wipe out, I suggest chainsaw wielders, & chainsaw cheerleaders/hitchhikers use mindseyes to put a surfboard underfoot, rather than dismal swamps in process of rabbit-outta-the-hat reclamation.
There are no billionaire libertarians. Hell, there are barely any libertarians of any bank account status.
Shape the chessboard, with all its seen (& unseen, too) pieces being moved about by off-board players ("hate the game - not the player"? I don't think so. But I don't think "the nation preceded the states," either ~ a la magician Lincoln) into your surfboard, hang ten, & best of luck.
"The Chainsaw & The Swamp: A Tale of Two Economies & One Endless Series of Waves
*Dickens had a dickens of a time in Corporate-Criminal America. I guess he tried to surf. But he was closer to "Charlie" (Apocalypse Now) than "Charles" when it came to hanging ten.
Nigeria launched their CBDC and then proceeded to have mass nationwide power blackouts. "Critical Thinkers" might consider that to have been a trial run of some sort or another 🪖 🥸🤷♂️
Total disaster it was!
CBDCs - specifically the Retail rCBDCs that you’re talking about - are, and will continue to be, IRRELEVANT. Agree with everything here. But there’s a bigger picture … Remember rCBDCs were initially conceived by Central Bank’s as a knee jerk reaction to Facebook’s Libra - a private coin designed to disrupt the payment world. Central Banks wanted to try to stay relevant. They are not. Nor are their CBDCs.
It’s actually all about power dynamics … and the Commercial Banks have the power. So here’s the actual reason why rCBDCs will never happen beyond the current pilot trials:
🔹Commercial Banks, not Central Banks, create the majority of money supply (97%).
🔹Central banks only create 3% of money - Cash. Notes ad coins.
🔹rCBDCs would initially only replace a tiny proportion of this 3% cash - it’s these tiny volumes that make rCBDCs utterly IRRELEVANT!
🔹If Central Banks want a bigger slice of the money pie, by trying to replace bank money - ie try to take back some of the 97% - with rCBDC then (i) it would mean reducing bank lending (how bank money is created) which could be an economic systemic risk, or (ii) banks will simply fight this because it would mean reducing their profitable bank lending. It’s almost Darwinistic for both banks and Central Banks to want to protect M2 money supply to stop banks and the economy failing!
🔹In other words, Banks have all the power. Even if the Central Banks try to reduce this the they still need banks to run rCBDCs, so immediately give the power back. You see this playing out in rCBDC pilot trials with talk of rCBDC “Holding Limits” that mean at most about £3K rCBDC limit per bank customer to protect bank deposits from being impacted. Similarly for current trials of $, € and ¥ holding limits.
🔹The Central Banks also need commercial banks to manage the flows of stimulus money (QE) during each debt ceiling cycle — giving more influence to the banks. And we know more debt is coming (just to pay debt servicing, let alone forecast government spending).
As an aside …
🔹Wholesale wCBDCs are essentially monetary reserves and will end up as part of the intra-bank system with no real impact. History will forget these CBDCs.
🔹Checks and cash don’t change - they’re bank money.
🔹Stablecoins and tokenised deposits offer a way to improve payments & settlements. Commercial Banks will (are already starting to) issue their own fiat-backed versions, interchangeable with each other & fiat currency at par. It’s more bank money and more bank profit!
But what about Bitcoin (and maybe ETH)?
🔹Crypto isn’t part of any of the above. But, ironically, ever increasing M2 money supply needs to flow somewhere - so vast sums are heading next into bitcoin ETPs, ETH ETFs, etc.
🔹 There’s a possible investment play here (but this is not advice as such) to invest either in Bitcoin (directly buy, not ETPs) or follow the firms that do invest in Bitcoin or other crypto ETPs or ETFs. A clear example of this is the MicroStrategy strategy and share price. So does that mystery share price climb suddenly make sense now?!
Thank you. Great comment!
Well said Dominic..
Orwell stopped at Big Brother, & left it at that, didn’t he? Of course that’s not the whole family, is it?
It’s said that inflation is a tax stealthed out in jargon’s clothing. Or maybe it’s gorgon’s clothing - & a lot of pancake cosmetics, good lighting, camera angles.
Well, that stealth tax is not a bug of big bro’s incompetence. It’s a feature of obese Big Daddy’s pathological appetite. As is the overt income tax rider atop the fedres trojan horse.
(Both pale riders came together in the wee hours of Dec 23, 1913. Credit money debt - convertibility decommissioning fait accompli to come a little later - out of thin air, & interest on it out of the thinning backsides of citizen-collateral-to-be-damaged-continuously.)
And so is his prodigal son’s “incompetence.” (There’s probably a Biden father/son joke, or two, to fit here.)
“Waste” (incompetence) is the payment channel that makes rivulet of SWIFT by comparison.
Or, SWIFT is a straw pipeline under the septic ocean. Like the one natgas was pumped thru From Russia, With Love, to Europe.
(Bond, James Bond; Connery was the best. Died in his sleep at his home in Lyford Cay, Nassau, Bahamas on 10/31/20. He was somewhere on the “Tax exile” continuum.)
Change a few words:
You might say public schooling was a government IT project. It was. The U.S. government - via Prussia, Carnegie, Rockefeller, et al - provided crucial funding that led to the development of key protocols like twelve years to learn a year or two’s worth of material - but mostly to insinuate into most cortexes the core tenants of submission to “authority.” But the pubschool system succeeded because of the immense infrastructure (that) of millions of people, mostly working in “their own” programmed self-interest - - & allowing their kids to be escorted, at bayonet, to school, in the launch of that particular “public good” - - since built over many decades on top of it.
Populism positivized is an unwarranted optimism, it surely seems.
Or maybe optimism in general is a warrant for arrest duly exercised.
‘“Markets” can stay irrational a lot longer than you can stay solvent’ but optimism circuits, & desperation grips, are impervious … which can, & will, be used against you in a Big Bro court of legality.
!!!!!
Hey, Dom, five exclamation points is essentially - very distilled essence - Melville.
3rd party access/ingress is another way to catch a ride into those bounding mains from which all life came, or supposedly came. Here's DH Lawrence:
“So ends one of the strangest & most wonderful books in the world, closing up its mystery & its tortured symbolism. It is an epic of the sea such as no man has equalled; & it is a book of esoteric symbolism of profound significance, & of considerable tiresomeness.
But it is a great book, a very great book, the greatest book of the sea ever written. It moves awe in the soul.
The terrible fatality.
Fatality.
Doom.
Doom! Doom! Doom! Something seems to whisper it in the very dark trees of America. Doom!
Doom of what?
Doom of our white day. We are doomed, doomed. And the doom is in America. The doom of our white day.
Ah, well, if my day is doomed, & I am doomed with my day, it is something greater than I which dooms me, so I accept my doom as a sign of the greatness which is more than I am.
Melville knew. He knew his race was doomed. His white soul doomed. His great white epoch, doomed. Himself, doomed. The idealist, doomed. The spirit, doomed.
The reversion. ‘Not so much bound to any haven ahead, as rushing from all havens astern.’
That great horror of ours! It is our civilization rushing from all havens astern.
The last ghastly hunt. The White Whale.
What then is Moby Dick? He is the deepest blood-being of the white race; he is our deepest blood-nature.
And he is hunted, hunted, hunted by the maniacal fanaticism of our white mental consciousness. We want to hunt him down. To subject him to our will. And in this maniacal conscious hunt of ourselves we get dark races & pale to help us, red, yellow, & black, east & west, Quaker & fire-worshipper, we get them all to help us in this ghastly maniacal hunt which is our doom & our suicide.
The last phallic being of the white man. Hunted into the death of the upper consciousness & the ideal will. Our blood-self subjected to our will. Our blood-consciousness sapped by a parasitical or ideal consciousness.
Hot blooded sea-born Moby Dick. Hunted by monomaniacs of the idea.
Oh God, oh God, what next, when the Pequod has sunk?
She sank in the war, & we are all flotsam.
Now what next?
Who knows? Quien sabe? Quien sabe, senor?
Neither Spanish nor Saxon America has any answer.
The Pequod went down & the Pequod was the ship of the white American soul. She sank, taking with her negro & Indian & Polynesian, Asiatic & Quaker & good, business-like Yankees & Ishmael: she sank all the lot of them.
Boom! As Vachel Lindsay would say.
To use the words of Jesus, IT IS FINISHED.
Consummatum est!
But Moby Dick was first published in 1851. If the Great White Whale sank the ship of the Great White Soul in 1851, what’s been happening ever since?
Post-mortem effects, presumably.
Because, in the first centuries, Jesus was Cetus, the Whale. And the Christians were the little fishes. Jesus, the Redeemer, was Cetus, Leviathan. And all the Christians all his little fishes.
~ Studies In Classic American Literature, DH Lawrence
This is great news and I remain positive. However, I am concerned with all the non-retail buying and I have questions. What's to stop JPM et al 1. cornering the market and 2. putting BTC behind a layer-2 or something that they control. I'm not a specialist in this area and hopefully this isn't possible but I do worry. Life raft and paddles at the ready 🛟
Thank you as always - merry Christmas xxx
To improve the image, accurize-the-prospects of seeing far enough forward & back to maybe not wipe out, I suggest chainsaw wielders, & chainsaw cheerleaders/hitchhikers use mindseyes to put a surfboard underfoot, rather than dismal swamps in process of rabbit-outta-the-hat reclamation.
There are no billionaire libertarians. Hell, there are barely any libertarians of any bank account status.
Shape the chessboard, with all its seen (& unseen, too) pieces being moved about by off-board players ("hate the game - not the player"? I don't think so. But I don't think "the nation preceded the states," either ~ a la magician Lincoln) into your surfboard, hang ten, & best of luck.
"The Chainsaw & The Swamp: A Tale of Two Economies & One Endless Series of Waves
*Dickens had a dickens of a time in Corporate-Criminal America. I guess he tried to surf. But he was closer to "Charlie" (Apocalypse Now) than "Charles" when it came to hanging ten.
https://creativelawcenter.com/dickens-american-copyright/
Up the frisby!!!