Unbeknown To Most, A Financial Revolution Is Coming That Threatens To Change Everything (And Not For The Better) | ZeroHedge
One of the most important benefits of cash is its universality, making it a vital public good, particularly for the poorest and most vulnerable in society. Also excluded in a purely cashless society would be anyone who objected to having others spy on their transactions (h/t hickory). As I note in my book, Scanned: Why Vaccine Passports and Digital Identity Will Mean the End of Privacy and Personal Freedom, if central banks and governments were to do away with cash or to vastly accelerate its demise by penalizing its use (while incentivizing the use of CBDCs), we would probably see a huge increase in financial exclusion:
Even proponents of CBDCs admit that central bank digital currencies could have serious drawbacks, including further exacerbating income and wealth equality.
The rich might be more capable than others of taking advantage of new investment opportunities and reaping most of the benefits, says Eswar Prasadm a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and author of The Future of Money: Hoe the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance. As the economically marginalized have limited digital access and lack financial literacy, some of the changes could harm as much as they could help those segments of the population.
So, not only will the introduction of CBDCs strip global citizens of one of the last vestiges of freedom, privacy and anonymity (i.e., cash), it could also exacerbate the upward transfer of wealth and power that many societies have witnessed since the COVID-19 pandemic began.
Lyons warns that CBDCs, if not deliberately and carefully constrained in advance by law,& have the potential to become even more than a technocratic central planner s dream. They could represent the single greatest expansion of totalitarian power in history.
Given how much is at stake, CBDCs are among the most important questions today s societies could possibly grapple with – not only from a financial or business perspective but also from an ethical and legal standpoint. They should be under discussion in every parliament of every land, and every dinner table in every country in the world.
Very, very, very bad idea.