Connect with us

Bank Of England Governor Signals Central Bank Digital Currency Is Coming

Bank Of England Governor Signals Central Bank Digital Currency Is Coming

Published

4 years ago

on

Bank Of England Governor Signals Central Bank Digital Currency Is Coming Tyler Durden Sun, 07/19/2020 - 09:20

Authored by Steven Guinness,

As confirmed by several economic outlets, including Bloomberg, Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey took part in a VTALK with students this past Monday for Speakers for Schools. When the subject of digital currency came up, Bailey said:

We are looking at the question of, should we create a Bank of England digital currency. We’ll go on looking at it, as it does have huge implications on the nature of payments and society. I think in a few years time, we will be heading toward some sort of digital currency.

The digital currency issue will be a very big issue. I hope it is, because that means Covid will be behind us.

Whilst only a short quote, there are several strands to pick up on here.

Firstly, Bailey stating that the BOE are looking into creating a CBDC is not a new revelation. I posted a series of articles in May which looked extensively at a discussion paper published by the bank days before the Covid-19 lockdown was enforced. The paper, ‘Central Bank Digital Currency – Opportunities, challenges and design‘, went as far as detailing the possible technological composition of a future CBDC. It was in 2014 when the BOE first began discussing digital currencies in their September quarterly bulletin.  Six years on, those discussions have advanced notably.

Secondly, if Bailey’s assertion is correct that ‘in a few years time, we will be heading toward some sort of digital currency‘, this would align with the BOE’s Real Time Gross Settlement renewal programme. In August 2019 I posted an article that outlined what the renewal will consist of (Working in Tandem: The Reform of Payment Systems and the Advance of Digital Technology). From 2023 onwards, the bank wants renewed services of RTGS to begin coming online, and by 2025 for it to be fully rolled out and operational.

Consider that this is taking place amidst the Bank for International Settlements ‘Innovation BIS 2025‘ initiative, something which I have regularly written about. This is the ‘hub‘ which brings all leading central banks together in the name of technological innovation.

The RTGS ‘renewal‘ will allow for the bank’s payment system to ‘interface with new payment technologies’, which given the information that the BOE has so far disseminated would likely include distributed ledger technology and blockchain.

For the bank to introduce a CBDC accessible to the public, they will require the reformation of their systems, which is exactly what is happening.

Thirdly, Bailey admits that introducing a CBDC would have ‘huge implications on the nature of payments and society‘. On the payments front, the BOE are pushing the narrative that any CBDC offering would be a ‘complement‘ to cash. It would not, according to them, mean that cash would be withdrawn from circulation. But as I have noted previously, the General Manager of the BIS, Agustin Carstens, made clear in 2019 that in a CBDC world ‘he or she would no longer have the option of paying cash. All purchases would be electronic.‘

The trend of digital payments outstripping cash has been present for several years now. My position is that instead of simply outlawing cash, the state will allow the use of banknotes to fall to the point that the servicing costs of maintaining the cash infrastructure outweigh the amount of cash still in circulation and being used for payment. They will take the gradual approach as opposed to prising cash away from the public. In the end it has the same effect but appears less premeditated. From the perspective of the state, it is much more desirable if people are seen to have made the decision themselves to stop using cash, rather than the state imposing it upon the population.

The societal aspect is equally as serious, because those who depend on using cash are finding that access to it is growing more restrictive. This is something I have also posted about (Access to Cash: The Connection between Bank Branch Closures and the Post Office). Rural communities in particularly are being compromised, with some entirely dependent on their local post office to withdraw funds. Matters are made worse when the Post Office network itself is coming under increasing strain.

It was also revealed this week that during the Covid-19 lockdown, over 7,000 ATM’s across the UK were closed due to social distancing measures. This represents over 10% of the UK’s ATM network. Some of these ATM’s still remain out of use, particularly at supermarkets and outside certain bank branches. Equally, some of these branches remain closed four months after the lockdown was introduced, and those that are open are only allowing in a couple of people at a time.

You will recall the hysteria around the supposed dangers of using cash as Covid-19 was labelled a pandemic. On no scientific basis whatsoever, people have been led to believe that handling cash can transmit the virus. This is primarily why cash withdrawals at ATM’s crashed leading into the lockdown by around 50%. This time last year transaction volume was at 50.9 million. Today it is 30.8 million, a 40% drop. From personal experience as a cash office clerk, cash use is now beginning to pick up, but remains well below pre-lockdown levels.

Finally, Bailey commented that he hoped ‘the digital currency issue will be a very big issue‘, because if it was it would mean that ‘Covid will be behind us.‘ A valid question to ask here is why when Covid-19 is ‘behind us‘ should that make the case for a CBDC stronger? The answer lies partly in the growing narrative of life after the pandemic, which plays directly into the World Economic Forum devised ‘Great Reset‘ agenda. Part of the ‘Great Reset‘ includes Blockchain, Financial and Monetary Systems and Digital Economy and New Value Creation.

On first glance, you can see how Covid-19 benefits the drive towards central bank digital currencies.

We are told at every turn that life cannot possibly go back to how it was pre coronavirus, including our relationship with money. Predictably, it did not take global institutions like the BIS long to begin reaffirming the cashless agenda. In April they published a bulletin called, ‘Covid-19, cash, and the future of payments‘ where they stated:

In the context of the current crisis, CBDC would in particular have to be designed allowing for access options for the unbanked and (contact-free) technical interfaces suitable for the whole population. The pandemic may hence put calls for CBDCs into sharper focus, highlighting the value of having access to diverse means of payments, and the need for any means of payments to be resilient against a broad range of threats.

Global planners are seizing on the opportunity that Covid-19 has created. But no one should be deceived into thinking that their prescription for a digital monetary system, with CBDC’s at the center, is only coming to light because of the pandemic. This has been in the works for years.

The banking elites are hoping that once global payment systems have been reformed, CBDC’s will not be far behind. Judging by their own timelines, by 2025 a global network of CBDC’s is a real possibility. The more people that turn away from using cash today, the easier the transition away from tangible assets will prove for those who are angling for it to happen.

Read More

Related Topics:
Continue Reading

Uncategorized

Simple blood test could predict risk of long-term COVID-19 lung problems

UVA Health researchers have discovered a potential way to predict which patients with severe COVID-19 are likely to recover well and which are likely to…

Published

8 mins ago

on

March 15, 2024

By

UVA Health researchers have discovered a potential way to predict which patients with severe COVID-19 are likely to recover well and which are likely to suffer “long-haul” lung problems. That finding could help doctors better personalize treatments for individual patients.

Credit: UVA Health

UVA Health researchers have discovered a potential way to predict which patients with severe COVID-19 are likely to recover well and which are likely to suffer “long-haul” lung problems. That finding could help doctors better personalize treatments for individual patients.

UVA’s new research also alleviates concerns that severe COVID-19 could trigger relentless, ongoing lung scarring akin to the chronic lung disease known as idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, the researchers report. That type of continuing lung damage would mean that patients’ ability to breathe would continue to worsen over time.

“We are excited to find that people with long-haul COVID have an immune system that is totally different from people who have lung scarring that doesn’t stop,” said researcher Catherine A. Bonham, MD, a pulmonary and critical care expert who serves as scientific director of UVA Health’s Interstitial Lung Disease Program. “This offers hope that even patients with the worst COVID do not have progressive scarring of the lung that leads to death.”

Long-Haul COVID-19

Up to 30% of patients hospitalized with severe COVID-19 continue to suffer persistent symptoms months after recovering from the virus. Many of these patients develop lung scarring – some early on in their hospitalization, and others within six months of their initial illness, prior research has found. Bonham and her collaborators wanted to better understand why this scarring occurs, to determine if it is similar to progressive pulmonary fibrosis and to see if there is a way to identify patients at risk.

To do this, the researchers followed 16 UVA Health patients who had survived severe COVID-19. Fourteen had been hospitalized and placed on a ventilator. All continued to have trouble breathing and suffered fatigue and abnormal lung function at their first outpatient checkup.

After six months, the researchers found that the patients could be divided into two groups: One group’s lung health improved, prompting the researchers to label them “early resolvers,” while the other group, dubbed “late resolvers,” continued to suffer lung problems and pulmonary fibrosis. 

Looking at blood samples taken before the patients’ recovery began to diverge, the UVA team found that the late resolvers had significantly fewer immune cells known as monocytes circulating in their blood. These white blood cells play a critical role in our ability to fend off disease, and the cells were abnormally depleted in patients who continued to suffer lung problems compared both to those who recovered and healthy control subjects. 

Further, the decrease in monocytes correlated with the severity of the patients’ ongoing symptoms. That suggests that doctors may be able to use a simple blood test to identify patients likely to become long-haulers — and to improve their care.

“About half of the patients we examined still had lingering, bothersome symptoms and abnormal tests after six months,” Bonham said. “We were able to detect differences in their blood from the first visit, with fewer blood monocytes mapping to lower lung function.”

The researchers also wanted to determine if severe COVID-19 could cause progressive lung scarring as in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. They found that the two conditions had very different effects on immune cells, suggesting that even when the symptoms were similar, the underlying causes were very different. This held true even in patients with the most persistent long-haul COVID-19 symptoms. “Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis is progressive and kills patients within three to five years,” Bonham said. “It was a relief to see that all our COVID patients, even those with long-haul symptoms, were not similar.”

Because of the small numbers of participants in UVA’s study, and because they were mostly male (for easier comparison with IPF, a disease that strikes mostly men), the researchers say larger, multi-center studies are needed to bear out the findings. But they are hopeful that their new discovery will provide doctors a useful tool to identify COVID-19 patients at risk for long-haul lung problems and help guide them to recovery.

“We are only beginning to understand the biology of how the immune system impacts pulmonary fibrosis,” Bonham said. “My team and I were humbled and grateful to work with the outstanding patients who made this study possible.” 

Findings Published

The researchers have published their findings in the scientific journal Frontiers in Immunology. The research team consisted of Grace C. Bingham, Lyndsey M. Muehling, Chaofan Li, Yong Huang, Shwu-Fan Ma, Daniel Abebayehu, Imre Noth, Jie Sun, Judith A. Woodfolk, Thomas H. Barker and Bonham. Noth disclosed that he has received personal fees from Boehringer Ingelheim, Genentech and Confo unrelated to the research project. In addition, he has a patent pending related to idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Bonham and all other members of the research team had no financial conflicts to disclose.

The UVA research was supported by the National Institutes of Health, grants R21 AI160334 and U01 AI125056; NIH’s National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, grants 5K23HL143135-04 and UG3HL145266; UVA’s Engineering in Medicine Seed Fund; the UVA Global Infectious Diseases Institute’s COVID-19 Rapid Response; a UVA Robert R. Wagner Fellowship; and a Sture G. Olsson Fellowship in Engineering.

  

To keep up with the latest medical research news from UVA, subscribe to the Making of Medicine blog at http://makingofmedicine.virginia.edu.

DOI

10.3389/fimmu.2023.1308594

Read More

Continue Reading

Government

Looking Back At COVID’s Authoritarian Regimes

After having moved from Canada to the United States, partly to be wealthier and partly to be freer (those two are connected, by the way), I was shocked,…

Published

1 hour ago

on

March 15, 2024

By

After having moved from Canada to the United States, partly to be wealthier and partly to be freer (those two are connected, by the way), I was shocked, in March 2020, when President Trump and most US governors imposed heavy restrictions on people’s freedom. The purpose, said Trump and his COVID-19 advisers, was to “flatten the curve”: shut down people’s mobility for two weeks so that hospitals could catch up with the expected demand from COVID patients. In her book Silent Invasion, Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, admitted that she was scrambling during those two weeks to come up with a reason to extend the lockdowns for much longer. As she put it, “I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them.” In short, she chose the goal and then tried to find the data to justify the goal. This, by the way, was from someone who, along with her task force colleague Dr. Anthony Fauci, kept talking about the importance of the scientific method. By the end of April 2020, the term “flatten the curve” had all but disappeared from public discussion.

Now that we are four years past that awful time, it makes sense to look back and see whether those heavy restrictions on the lives of people of all ages made sense. I’ll save you the suspense. They didn’t. The damage to the economy was huge. Remember that “the economy” is not a term used to describe a big machine; it’s a shorthand for the trillions of interactions among hundreds of millions of people. The lockdowns and the subsequent federal spending ballooned the budget deficit and consequent federal debt. The effect on children’s learning, not just in school but outside of school, was huge. These effects will be with us for a long time. It’s not as if there wasn’t another way to go. The people who came up with the idea of lockdowns did so on the basis of abstract models that had not been tested. They ignored a model of human behavior, which I’ll call Hayekian, that is tested every day.

These are the opening two paragraphs of my latest Defining Ideas article, “Looking Back at COVID’s Authoritarian Regimes,” Defining Ideas, March 14, 2024.

Another excerpt:

That wasn’t the only uncertainty. My daughter Karen lived in San Francisco and made her living teaching Pilates. San Francisco mayor London Breed shut down all the gyms, and so there went my daughter’s business. (The good news was that she quickly got online and shifted many of her clients to virtual Pilates. But that’s another story.) We tried to see her every six weeks or so, whether that meant our driving up to San Fran or her driving down to Monterey. But were we allowed to drive to see her? In that first month and a half, we simply didn’t know.

Read the whole thing, which is longer than usual.

(0 COMMENTS)

Read More

Continue Reading

Uncategorized

The hostility Black women face in higher education carries dire consequences

9 Black women who were working on or recently earned their PhDs told a researcher they felt isolated and shut out.

Published

1 hour ago

on

March 15, 2024

By

Isolation can make opportunities elusive. fotostorm via Getty Images

Isolated. Abused. Overworked.

These are the themes that emerged when I invited nine Black women to chronicle their professional experiences and relationships with colleagues as they earned their Ph.D.s at a public university in the Midwest. I featured their writings in the dissertation I wrote to get my Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction.

The women spoke of being silenced.

“It’s not just the beating me down that is hard,” one participant told me about constantly having her intelligence questioned. “It is the fact that it feels like I’m villainized and made out to be the problem for trying to advocate for myself.”

The women told me they did not feel like they belonged. They spoke of routinely being isolated by peers and potential mentors.

One participant told me she felt that peer community, faculty mentorship and cultural affinity spaces were lacking.

Because of the isolation, participants often felt that they were missing out on various opportunities, such as funding and opportunities to get their work published.

Participants also discussed the ways they felt they were duped into taking on more than their fair share of work.

“I realized I had been tricked into handling a two- to four-person job entirely by myself,” one participant said of her paid graduate position. “This happened just about a month before the pandemic occurred so it very quickly got swept under the rug.”

Why it matters

The hostility that Black women face in higher education can be hazardous to their health. The women in my study told me they were struggling with depression, had thought about suicide and felt physically ill when they had to go to campus.

Other studies have found similar outcomes. For instance, a 2020 study of 220 U.S. Black college women ages 18-48 found that even though being seen as a strong Black woman came with its benefits – such as being thought of as resilient, hardworking, independent and nurturing – it also came at a cost to their mental and physical health.

These kinds of experiences can take a toll on women’s bodies and can result in poor maternal health, cancer, shorter life expectancy and other symptoms that impair their ability to be well.

I believe my research takes on greater urgency in light of the recent death of Antoinette “Bonnie” Candia-Bailey, who was vice president of student affairs at Lincoln University. Before she died by suicide, she reportedly wrote that she felt she was suffering abuse and that the university wasn’t taking her mental health concerns seriously.

What other research is being done

Several anthologies examine the negative experiences that Black women experience in academia. They include education scholars Venus Evans-Winters and Bettina Love’s edited volume, “Black Feminism in Education,” which examines how Black women navigate what it means to be a scholar in a “white supremacist patriarchal society.” Gender and sexuality studies scholar Stephanie Evans analyzes the barriers that Black women faced in accessing higher education from 1850 to 1954. In “Black Women, Ivory Tower,” African American studies professor Jasmine Harris recounts her own traumatic experiences in the world of higher education.

What’s next

In addition to publishing the findings of my research study, I plan to continue exploring the depths of Black women’s experiences in academia, expanding my research to include undergraduate students, as well as faculty and staff.

I believe this research will strengthen this field of study and enable people who work in higher education to develop and implement more comprehensive solutions.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

Ebony Aya received funding from the Black Collective Foundation in 2022 to support the work of the Aya Collective.

Read More

Continue Reading

Trending