Also: “Tiered remuneration” means no privacy and negative interest rates.
The IMF is warning that with all these CBDCs about to launch, there need to be global inter-operability standards between them all, and they’re working on a global platform to facilitate just that.
Speaking at a conference of African central banks in Rabat, Morocco, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said that there needs to be agreement among CBDC implementations,
“on a common regulatory framework for digital currencies that will allow global interoperability. Failure to agree on a common platform would create a vacuum that would likely be filled by cryptocurrencies”
Not to be outdone, the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) worked with seven central banks to publish YARP (Yet Another Research Paper) on CBDC policy, entitled “Central Bank Digital Currencies: ongoing policy perspectives”… (*yawn*).
The central banks involved were: Japan, Sweden, Switzerland, England, the United States, Canada, and the European Union.
The paper is mostly a snoozer:
“Development of CBDC work requires careful consideration and engagement with a wide range of stakeholders, including the private sector and legislators”…
“To successfully meet its public policy objectives, a CBDC ecosystem should allow a wide range of private and public stakeholders to participate and, in doing so, deliver services which benefit end users.”…
“The complex design questions and the potential risks arising from the implementation of any CBDC require careful consideration.”
Until you get to the rather innocuous sounding Annexes, like “Box 2: Legal Considerations”.
This is where it starts to get interesting.
What are retail CBDCs, exactly?
The paper wonders: Are they cash? Deposits? Or something else entirely?
This is quite the question, because if CBDCs aren’t cash, there has to be a reason why they wouldn’t be. When you start to see where CBDCs are going: expiry dates, programability, social credit scores – what we’re talking about is almost a kind of anti-cash (my observation, not the paper’s).
Further, the paper wonders, would there need to be changes to banking charters, legislation or even the constitutions of the countries issuing them:
“Legislation may need to be enacted or adjusted to specifically authorise the issuance and distribution of a retail CBDC (eg changes to central bank charters/statutes, legislation in other areas related to payments or to the constitution itself)”
