Quick Take…what’s up with CBDCs?
Kit Knightly
Have you seen a mainstream headline about central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) so far this year?
Probably not.
What used to be a regular on the front page has been curiously absent. What stories there are have been tucked away, and the tone is decidedly changed:
Is a digital euro necessary for monetary sovereignty? Rethinking the CBDC debate
That’s from Santander, riffing off a report from the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), “Central bank digital currency and monetary sovereignty”, which concludes [emphasis added]:
the case for CBDC as a prerequisite for monetary sovereignty is weaker than often claimed. History suggests that sovereignty ultimately rests on legal authority and public balance sheets, not on universal access to public money. Confusing money with payments risks misdiagnosing the problem and misallocating policy effort. For Europe, the digital euro may play a useful symbolic role, but the effective defence of monetary sovereignty will continue to depend on regulation, fiscal capacity, and the central bank’s willingness to absorb risk when it matters.
Just a few hours ago, Forbes published this:
The Philippines Went Majority-Digital Without A Super-App Or A CBDC
Which talks up the Philippines’ approach, building digital financial infrastructure (“rails”) but letting private digital wallet providers compete to use it.
Recent years have already seen several major economies – notably Japan, Australia and Canada – pause or outright abandon CBDC development.
There’s a shift in the narrative here, but why? And what does it mean? Is it related to the emerging “multipolarity” we’re hearing so much about?
If countries do go ahead with CBDCs, it’s possible the dream of global interoperability is over, at least according to this piece in Forbes, which headlines:
After MBridge and Agora, Multilateral CBDC Interoperability Is Dead
And sub-heads:
The original BIS vision of a globally interoperable CBDC empire has fallen by the wayside as countries develop bloc by bloc.
It’s quite an interesting, if jargon-heavy read; here are some potential highlights [with emphasis added]:
ASEAN is building the same approach as a bloc. The 2023 Leaders’ Declaration on Regional Payment Connectivity has linked Thailand’s PromptPay, Indonesia’s QRIS, Singapore’s PayNow, and Malaysia’s DuitNow into an expanding mesh, with full ASEAN interoperability targeted by the end of 2025. Intra-regional local currency settlement has more than doubled, from about 7 percent of regional payments five years ago to over 15 percent today. Brazil’s Drex CBDC pilot and Pix’s continued export ambitions follow the same logic. Build bilaterally. Avoid the bloc choice. Hedge with non-CBDC rails that already work.
The infrastructure was never neutral, and pretending otherwise was the project’s foundational illusion. What comes next is a fragmented map of bilateral, bloc-specific, and corporate-built corridors, negotiated one pair of countries at a time. There is no single global rail in it.
To translate the Forbes-speak: The whole CBDC thing is getting rather more…complicated.
Or at least it appears to be.
Whether this represents any real change in terms of approach, or simply an adjustment of nomenclature designed to camouflage the unchanging globalist policy, remains to be seen.
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The groundwork has been done, the seeds planted, now we are in the growing stage where you don’t see the plant. If you think back, or care to research it, there were many virus scares before the big Lie. Swine flu, bird flu, all the TV shows and all those movies about virus zombies. Then it quietened down before the master stroke, so to speak. When it came though the people were conditioned to respond exactly as they did. That’s the Power of the Media, of movies, TV shows.
Same same with all those terrorist moves of the 80’s and 90’s depicting wild eyes arabs with nuclear weapons etc. “True Lies” was the first from memory, a fun comedy but there was nothing funny about the nuclear weapon scenes. The message? “We must counter this Evil, we must go over there and clean out the nest of vipers before they Get Us.”
There is even a more insidious meme out there and it involves the concept of the super-Hero. The Iron Man, Thor, name your super hero. It was codified I thought in the movie “V for Vendetta” where an entire population was oppressed by a tyrannical political party and the people were helpless little sheep. But fear not, ‘V’ comes to the rescue and rallies the people and single-handedly overthrows the regime and frees the people. That’s what people saw in trump and other figures. They are powerless, or so they have been trained.
The final scene in V is very disingenuous. It shows all the masses walking to the barricades where the armed forces are ready to gun them down, then the army stands down and they ‘peacefully’ cross over to watch V destroy the parliament building. In your dreams people, in your dreams.
Right so anyone dreaming of being a future hero is hitherto misguided. Got the message.
Yet might I still dream of better?
Or maybe the fevered imaginings of those would-be global technocrats are finally revealing themselves to be completely and utterly impossible to implement.
Humanity, and life in general, is far more complex and interesting than they have imagined. And Mother Nature always wins in the end.
Wins in some sense, but what’s her alternative?
OT:
Highlighting what may have been missed. White, then blue then red. Whose flag is that anyway? (not the Tricolor for starters) Yet she clearly deserved to win, politics aside. Just sayin’:
One Lady and a dog – BGT final 2026
To translate the Forbes-speak: The whole CBDC thing is getting rather more…complicated.
*
Speaking of complicated, Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump will find themselves in a far more complicated situation – after Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky honors the 34 murdered and survivor crew members of the U.S.S. Liberty on the floor of the United States Congress – at 12 o’clock noon, Monday June 8, 2026.
How will Netanyahu and Trump respond?
See: https://onenessofhumanity.wordpress.com/2026/06/07/u-s-s-liberty-military-crimes-scandal-goes-mainstream-on-june-8-2026-liberty-survivors-larry-bowen-mo-schaefer-phil-tourney-speak-out/
Not that complicated. Door A or Door B, you end up in the same place, a unit of their universal ledger. You know, the old fake binary routine.
I know, its’ not that simple, either. But I’m too tired of the general paralysis to carry on with much more analysis.
Choose both doors. That way you can’t lose.
Would it matter whether we are entrapped and controlled by our national overlords via a CBDC or by interoperability of the same international system? For, as our favourite villainous Bond caricature said, We (they) have infiltrated most Western governments ….
Infiltration seems preferable. Just sayin’.
So far anyway, “they” haven’t been able to figure out how to construct a CBDC that would provide for criminal activity as readily as cash? e.g. Money laundering. AI probably has a similar, inherent “flaw”? i.e. It’s “truthiness”.
I don’t think the whole digital landscape is reliable enough to be frank.
Think about it – how often it fails, freezes, glitches, 404, “sorry etc” – not all the time but I’ve been taking rough counts and by midday on a typical working day it’s let me down 5-6 times. We’re so acclimatised to it we mostly shrug and try again, especially youngsters.
No way is it ready to imprison us…yet. Perhaps the AI bolloks is meant to correct this issue.
Since when did anything we think have a bearing on these matters?
Or for that matter, since when did practicality have a bearing on major changes?
I can think of a few ways “unreliability” in a digital system can be used by governments to their benefit. And for corporations. “Outage imminent!” So we all rush down to the supermarket to fill our trolleys.
It’s only ‘the people’ who benefit from a sound currency, sound money.
It is so full of holes and backdoors and badgers and trojan horses and tracking. I dont trust it over my doormats.
It could be multipolarity that’s slowing it down or even killing it, and the likes of Russia and China are actively trying to avoid the Wests SWIFT payment system. Either way I hope the CBDC idea fails.
Perhaps when citizens become aware of how ‘fractional reserve banking’ operates, they may also become aware that CBDC is just another acronym for the same old ponzi scheme propping up the fictional world of finance.