The tension between decentralized digital money and state-issued CBDCs is at the heart of the ongoing global shift toward digital payment rails. Last week marked the first-ever instance of a sitting U.S. member of Congress taking a formal stance against the Federal Reserve’s potential retail CBDC move.
Sovereign digital fiat will undoubtedly be more convenient than its analog predecessor, yet the privacy costs of such convenience might be enormous. If all money is CBDC, the government’s financial surveillance capacity will become virtually unlimited, denying people the anonymity that cash transactions once afforded. Representative Emmer cited these privacy concerns as a rationale for introducing the bill that would ban the Fed from issuing a CBDC directly to consumers and acting as a retail bank.
While it may take a long time before Emmer’s initiative reaches the House floor, the mere articulation of such a position by a member of Congress can have a significant impact on the course of the policy conversation around a potential CBDC. This is especially true in the light of some top Fed officials’ stated willingness to defer to Congress on the issue.
Elsewhere in the world, the signals that various regulators have been sending over the past week ran the gamut from potentially banning crypto transactions in Pakistan to considering the replication of El Salvador’s Bitcoin-as-legal-tender move in Tonga. Pakistan’s drive toward a blanket ban follows a familiar scenario where it is the nation’s central bank that is actively committed to outlawing crypto transactions and penalizing crypto exchanges. The task of determining the legal status of cryptocurrencies fell to the High Court of the province of Sindh, yet the judges refrained from making the final call and passed the issue on to the specialized government ministries.
On the opposite side of the regulatory spectrum, the island nation of Tonga could be embarking on the Bitcoin adoption trail soon. An announcement by Lord Fusitu’a, a former member of the Tongan parliament and chairman of several regional interparliamentary groups, suggested that the country could make Bitcoin legal tender as soon as late 2022. Given Tongans’ heavy reliance on remittances, replicating El Salvador’s move almost identically seems logical.