A great summary of their dastardly plan. The creation of money by central goverment ( and through other avenues) has brought us to the brink of financial collapse, not the ‘little people’. However, the history of government IT systems is bad, very bad. If they even manage to launch this it only takes some kind of glitch, power outages or whatever and confidence is gone, no confidence and people will start looking of other stores of value and ways of exchanging goods and labour. Your suggestion to diversify your stores of value is an excellent one. Getting a little patch of land and learning to grow your cabbages isn’t a bad idea either 🙂
Yes - the only thing I would quibble over is whether it is a dastardly plan. It's important to remember that in their minds it is a necessary and benevolent plan.
History says quite a lot, e.g. NPfIT, but these days the government cranks out software quite effectively, which is not necessarily a good thing c.f. NHS COVID app. Let’s hope the BoE can build and operate something like this because if not the Real-Time Gross Settlement service (RTGS) which underpins all UK retail banking is in trouble. Card companies have operated systems like this for decades so there is plenty of expertise available (in exchange for eye-watering fees obvs).
The main danger of the cashless economy - CDBCs and digital currencies are just part of this - is that they require an internet connection to work. And that in turn, of course, requires electricity. If (when) the eco morons cause the electricity system to become intermittent the whole cashless thing falls to the ground in a heap.
Part of the design brief for CBDCs is to work out how to cope with power and network outages, cyber attacks etc. This is nothing new. All critical national infrastructure such as phone and broadband networks, electrical, gas and water distribution networks, police and military comms all face similar challenges. Google "Critical National Infrastructure", you will find an entire industry that has worked out how to be paid for worrying about it while never solving it to the extent that they are no longer needed.
How would you pay Dr McGrogan for his substack? He would have to setup a coin counting operation to keep track of all his subscribers who wanted to pay like that. Cash does not work on the internet. Companies larger than half a dozen people can’t work like that either. The banking and ecommerce sector is $6TN for a reason.
I agree there are many many conveniences to digital payments. But people wrote cheques and put them in the post for a couple of centuries to pay for things before electronic payments were a thing. It was slow and manual but it worked and supported quite large enterprises.
Indeed. The explosion of services such as SubStack and webmail where you are reading this and a hundred other online services you might use today would have been impossible under that kind of operational burden. You can try starting a service and running it like that, good luck getting investment. You will also need a bank account to cash the cheques so you will have to be a customer of something like NatWest Group. I don’t recommend telling them you read this blog or sharing any of your political opinions.
I expect the BoE does take a dim view of the public. Dealing with them is what retail banks are for. What they mainly worry about is criminality. They are right to because the average currency fraudster is smarter than most career civil servants tasked with figuring all this out. They know that which is why they give up and call in the consultants, who are no smarter either but agree to take on some risk in return for fees, thereby spreading future blame c.f. Fujitsu.
The main reason the Bank of England want a CBDC is that it would give them direct control of the money supply. Currently they can only change the central interest rate (which has a weak relationship with interest rates in the economy), and hope that will change the quantity of money created by commercial banks.
Most money today is not central bank money, but money created by banks issuing loans.
Cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, are more like gold than they are like what we currently think of as money. A CBDC would be like gold, with the Bank of England controlling every gold mine.
A CBDC would, as you suggest, eventually threaten commercial bank money. In fact its purpose would be to replace commercial bank money. Cash is irrelevant. It is on its way out anyway and being replaced by commercial bank money.
It suits the Bank of England to talk about cash all the time, and pretend a CBDC would be designed to replace cash, to distract us from the real issue. The real issue being: do we want to end the creation of money by free market transactions between commercial banks and private individuals, and replace it with creation of money by the State?
In passing, note the difference between bitcoin and a CBDC. Bitcoin is not legal tender. In other words, people can refuse to accept bitcoin. People would not be able to refuse to accept a CBDC in settlement of debt (or invoices).
It is also worth noting that the IMF is developing an international CBDC platform "to allow interoperability between national CDBCs".
Thus the Bank of England's proposed CBDC should be seen as part of a global network of interlinked digital currencies. Ironically the Bank's concerns about sovereignty should truly be attached to CBDCs, not to current money. CBDCs are being pushed by the global technocratic elite, not just by the British State.
Yes, but it's important to make clear that at this point the BoE is adamant that having more control over the money supply is not the intention. I fully agree that this is likely the direction in which things are going, but at the moment the idea is for the digital pound to be unremunerated and to be used only for relatively small retail transactions - according to the official position.
Indeed, that is the official position. However the official position is very clearly nonsense. Such a CBDC would have no advantages (either for the people or for the State) over currently available digital payment systems - cards and apps. It is very clear to me that the initial introduction is more like a pilot for the really intended system.
They do have to be careful in the transition from sterling to CBDC, not to destabilise the old currency before the new one is established, after all.
Not destabilising the currency, or at any rate not destabilising the banking system is the motivation behind "personal holdings would be limited somewhere between £10,000-£20,000". I don't suppose readers of this blog will be amongst them, but if CBDCs ever become wildly popular that would mean people withdrawing their deposits to convert them to CBDC, which is effectively a run on the banks. Hence the proposed limit.
As to whether CBDCs would have any advantages over currently available payment systems, those systems are owned and operated by companies like PayPal and NatWest Group. They have demonstrated their willingness to target their enemies, I mean customers, on blatantly political grounds. Because there is no online version of cash, no CBDC, we have no choice but to use the services of these dreadful companies. This is why it is important to get the design of CBDCs right, so that it is an apolitical alternative. Given the politicisation of absolutely everything combined with the ineptitude of our governing classes this looks extremely unlikely and we have a situation that Dr McGrogan is right to say is dangerous. IMHO more input from people who know what they are talking about is sorely needed.
Yes, that's the stated motivation - it's all in the documents while I linked to.
I basically agree with your concern as it is expressed here; the real issue is that the PIPs will function on exactly the same logic as PayPal and the banks - they will not be apolitical.
Yes, exactly. The market design and legislation around PIPs is still up for grabs so there is a tiny glimmer of hope that it can be influenced to allow for, I hesitate to use the word, a diverse range of providers. Could a hypothetical McGrogan Enterprises Ltd become a PIP and offer the products and services the readers of this blog might want or will the legislation inevitably mean it has to state its NetZero and DEI policies to be an operator. I am afraid we already know the answer.
I think the word functionality appeared in the software development. A software may have an overriding function but when designing it, there are many components of it and each of them came to be described as a functionality.
Just want to back up Adriana on this one: in programming, 'function' is a particular element of executable code, and 'functionality' is what emerges from the work of functions. This is the route of invasion for this change, but the mechanism is the usual scholarly desire for hierophantic terms - witness the substitution of 'pro forma' for 'form'.
Oh, and David: just because the phrase begins 'dollars' does not excuse you from your British obligation to spell the word 'doughnuts'. Consider this your warning. We will disconnect your digital pound service if you do not comply. 😝
The profound irony is the BoE is the main source instability in the economy because it sets the price of money through the base rate. No committee of ‘experts’ can ever get this rate ‘right’ and this is the source of the boom and bust cycle. The MPC is the archetype of central planning and anyone who blames Britain’s woes on capitalism merely shows their ignorance. In the 19th century the US grew from insignificance to the world’s second largest economy without a central bank; the Fed was set up in 1913. As with so many areas in life, the best outcome for Britain would be for government to leave the people alone. As David so clearly elucidates, in justification of itself, the Princely state will drive us to dystopia and so we will get CBDC.
Anybody who doubts this just needs to look at recent history - i.e. the past 24 months - and yet the message never quite gets through that the solution is not yet more tinkering.
I find that the most convenient way to analyze a new plan from the state is to imagine what will happen to that segment of the population most hated by the zeitgeist; say, white male Nazis who beat kittens and hate women. And eat meat, the cads.
What will the state do when one of those terrible people goes to the market with digital currency in hand? When the state has all its excuses ready at hand, how well will they be able to resist their centrist moralizing impulses?
Rest assured, that if it will be done to the most hated, it will also eventually be done to the less hated. And that means YOU. It is a mathematical certainty.
I am fully convinced that nobody at the Bank is consciously thinking in these terms. The Foucauldian point is the danger which is created: the mechanism by which something like that could happen. That's what we have to make ourselves robust against.
From Wikipedia on Gosbank, the only bank in the Soviet Union, which was both Central Bank and commercial bank. The problem with CBDC is not the digital bit, we already largely have digital money, it is the central bit and how the state uses it.
The Soviet state used Gosbank, primarily, as a tool to impose centralized control upon industry in general, using bank balances and transaction histories to monitor the activity of individual concerns and their compliance with five-year plans and directives. Gosbank did not act as a commercial bank in regard to the profit motive. It acted, theoretically, as an instrument of government policy. Instead of independently and impartially assessing the creditworthiness of the borrower, Gosbank would provide loan funds to favored individuals, groups and industries as directed by the central government.
I see Trump committed to never allow "the tyranny" of a CBDC in the US at his campaign rally yesterday in New Hampshire. He was asked to say that by Vivek Ramaswamy in return for his endorsement.
Something else that occurs to me. How do you pay a bribe with a CBDC and not have it immediately spotted and reported to the fuzz. I'm sure there will be ways but a bunch of bureaucrats and politicians are going to regret pushing for CBDCs if they can't do it easily
I'm aware that the official literature says it will not be anonymous. But too many people in power and near it need to make slush money payments to others in the same area for that to be actually true.
Someone is going to figure out how to create mystery accounts that don't quite belong to anyone or something so that payoffs can be made. I don't know exactly how it will work, I have ideas. But it will be a thing that happens because, while bribery and corruption is bad, the acceptable level of it is slightly above zero. A small amount greases the wheels and gets things done more efficiently than otherwise. Now sure, some of that small amount is tickets to sports events, concerts, gifts of this and that and so on, but sometimes a briefcase of cash or equivalent really is what is best.
Regarding ownership and the ledger, are there any comparisons to be drawn with other ledgers such as UK Land Registry, Companies House, DVLA or issuance of birth and death certificates?
Not really - those are all entirely sensible ways of preventing confusion between individuals, clarifying who owns what, who can inherit what, and so on. That is most certainly not what the digital pound ledger is all about.
The Ledger is the truly terrifying part and aligns with David’s core theme on this Stack. It brings all transactions in the whole economy into one ledger, transactions that are diffuse and mainly private(ish) now. That is more power than any government has ever had in human history, by a wide margin. It will be one hell of a technical feat, as if it crashes, the whole economy stops. Following another of David’s themes, the ledger will further empower those executive government agencies handed regulatory power by modern legislation to act, for example the UKHSA could end smoking by removing the ability to buy tobacco from the ledger. Dissent to government becomes impossible, because the finances of any dissenting person or group can be stopped, at will. This amount of power cannot in my view, be trusted to anyone, ever, because Lord Acton has been proved right time and again.
No, it does not bring all transactions in the economy onto one ledger, only ones involving digital cash, about 3% if it replaces physical cash. No, the economy does not stop if it crashes any more than the economy stops when VISA or PayPal or RTGS crash. No, they could not end smoking because payment systems do not know what is being paid for, so that is not the way to stop anything. That’s why retailers have loyalty schemes, to put that data back into their systems. Dissenting people and groups already have their accounts suspended by commercial banks and you have no alternative for online transactions.
Fair enough. That is unlikely because it would imply the demise of the entire banking sector and a rejection of fractional reserve banking. That's a whole other debate of course. Almost all money these days is created through loans made by commercial banks. They have nothing to do with CBDC. Physical cash represents just a few percent of currency. CBDCs might change that, for example by entering the world of eCommerce and generally being accepted as more convenient. A large swing in that direction is what the BoE calls disintermediation (a run on the banks) but unless capitalism itself goes out of business and things no longer need to be financed, I don't see CBDC usage going to 100%.
Wholesaling of the digital pound is also going to be a thing. Will we see the end of commercial bank money any time soon? No (and certainly not as a policy objective). The point of this post is that we will in the long term. It just depends what you mean by 'long'.
Wholesale CBDC puzzles me. Central banks have dealt with retail and commercial banks entirely digitally for decades: RTGS, CHAPS in the UK, TIPS in Europe, SWIFT for cross border etc. Other than modernising that infrastructure to reduce costs/fees and going along with the distributed ledger blockchain craze which seems to have passed, it is not clear whether wCBDC are actually anything different to what we already have.
"My immediate sense as an increasingly pessimistic heretic, is that this will inevitably lead to an spread of the black economy -with consequent falls in tax receipts-and might well provide increased opportunities for the various bad actors now at large : terrorists and other fanatics."
Correct. I imagine there will be a parallel economy that uses some kind of cashlike token. And of course this will help the crooks and terrorists because now they blend in with all the regular sorts who want to business without the government poking its nose in.
A great summary of their dastardly plan. The creation of money by central goverment ( and through other avenues) has brought us to the brink of financial collapse, not the ‘little people’. However, the history of government IT systems is bad, very bad. If they even manage to launch this it only takes some kind of glitch, power outages or whatever and confidence is gone, no confidence and people will start looking of other stores of value and ways of exchanging goods and labour. Your suggestion to diversify your stores of value is an excellent one. Getting a little patch of land and learning to grow your cabbages isn’t a bad idea either 🙂
Yes - the only thing I would quibble over is whether it is a dastardly plan. It's important to remember that in their minds it is a necessary and benevolent plan.
And post "Horizon" what could possibly go wrong with a government IT system?
History says quite a lot, e.g. NPfIT, but these days the government cranks out software quite effectively, which is not necessarily a good thing c.f. NHS COVID app. Let’s hope the BoE can build and operate something like this because if not the Real-Time Gross Settlement service (RTGS) which underpins all UK retail banking is in trouble. Card companies have operated systems like this for decades so there is plenty of expertise available (in exchange for eye-watering fees obvs).
The main danger of the cashless economy - CDBCs and digital currencies are just part of this - is that they require an internet connection to work. And that in turn, of course, requires electricity. If (when) the eco morons cause the electricity system to become intermittent the whole cashless thing falls to the ground in a heap.
Part of the design brief for CBDCs is to work out how to cope with power and network outages, cyber attacks etc. This is nothing new. All critical national infrastructure such as phone and broadband networks, electrical, gas and water distribution networks, police and military comms all face similar challenges. Google "Critical National Infrastructure", you will find an entire industry that has worked out how to be paid for worrying about it while never solving it to the extent that they are no longer needed.
I have an idea. We use paper and metal tokens. That we hand over in person.
How would you pay Dr McGrogan for his substack? He would have to setup a coin counting operation to keep track of all his subscribers who wanted to pay like that. Cash does not work on the internet. Companies larger than half a dozen people can’t work like that either. The banking and ecommerce sector is $6TN for a reason.
I agree there are many many conveniences to digital payments. But people wrote cheques and put them in the post for a couple of centuries to pay for things before electronic payments were a thing. It was slow and manual but it worked and supported quite large enterprises.
Indeed. The explosion of services such as SubStack and webmail where you are reading this and a hundred other online services you might use today would have been impossible under that kind of operational burden. You can try starting a service and running it like that, good luck getting investment. You will also need a bank account to cash the cheques so you will have to be a customer of something like NatWest Group. I don’t recommend telling them you read this blog or sharing any of your political opinions.
I expect the BoE does take a dim view of the public. Dealing with them is what retail banks are for. What they mainly worry about is criminality. They are right to because the average currency fraudster is smarter than most career civil servants tasked with figuring all this out. They know that which is why they give up and call in the consultants, who are no smarter either but agree to take on some risk in return for fees, thereby spreading future blame c.f. Fujitsu.
The main reason the Bank of England want a CBDC is that it would give them direct control of the money supply. Currently they can only change the central interest rate (which has a weak relationship with interest rates in the economy), and hope that will change the quantity of money created by commercial banks.
Most money today is not central bank money, but money created by banks issuing loans.
Cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, are more like gold than they are like what we currently think of as money. A CBDC would be like gold, with the Bank of England controlling every gold mine.
A CBDC would, as you suggest, eventually threaten commercial bank money. In fact its purpose would be to replace commercial bank money. Cash is irrelevant. It is on its way out anyway and being replaced by commercial bank money.
It suits the Bank of England to talk about cash all the time, and pretend a CBDC would be designed to replace cash, to distract us from the real issue. The real issue being: do we want to end the creation of money by free market transactions between commercial banks and private individuals, and replace it with creation of money by the State?
In passing, note the difference between bitcoin and a CBDC. Bitcoin is not legal tender. In other words, people can refuse to accept bitcoin. People would not be able to refuse to accept a CBDC in settlement of debt (or invoices).
It is also worth noting that the IMF is developing an international CBDC platform "to allow interoperability between national CDBCs".
https://www.reuters.com/markets/imf-working-global-central-bank-digital-currency-platform-2023-06-19/
Thus the Bank of England's proposed CBDC should be seen as part of a global network of interlinked digital currencies. Ironically the Bank's concerns about sovereignty should truly be attached to CBDCs, not to current money. CBDCs are being pushed by the global technocratic elite, not just by the British State.
Yes, but it's important to make clear that at this point the BoE is adamant that having more control over the money supply is not the intention. I fully agree that this is likely the direction in which things are going, but at the moment the idea is for the digital pound to be unremunerated and to be used only for relatively small retail transactions - according to the official position.
Indeed, that is the official position. However the official position is very clearly nonsense. Such a CBDC would have no advantages (either for the people or for the State) over currently available digital payment systems - cards and apps. It is very clear to me that the initial introduction is more like a pilot for the really intended system.
They do have to be careful in the transition from sterling to CBDC, not to destabilise the old currency before the new one is established, after all.
Not destabilising the currency, or at any rate not destabilising the banking system is the motivation behind "personal holdings would be limited somewhere between £10,000-£20,000". I don't suppose readers of this blog will be amongst them, but if CBDCs ever become wildly popular that would mean people withdrawing their deposits to convert them to CBDC, which is effectively a run on the banks. Hence the proposed limit.
As to whether CBDCs would have any advantages over currently available payment systems, those systems are owned and operated by companies like PayPal and NatWest Group. They have demonstrated their willingness to target their enemies, I mean customers, on blatantly political grounds. Because there is no online version of cash, no CBDC, we have no choice but to use the services of these dreadful companies. This is why it is important to get the design of CBDCs right, so that it is an apolitical alternative. Given the politicisation of absolutely everything combined with the ineptitude of our governing classes this looks extremely unlikely and we have a situation that Dr McGrogan is right to say is dangerous. IMHO more input from people who know what they are talking about is sorely needed.
Yes, that's the stated motivation - it's all in the documents while I linked to.
I basically agree with your concern as it is expressed here; the real issue is that the PIPs will function on exactly the same logic as PayPal and the banks - they will not be apolitical.
Yes, exactly. The market design and legislation around PIPs is still up for grabs so there is a tiny glimmer of hope that it can be influenced to allow for, I hesitate to use the word, a diverse range of providers. Could a hypothetical McGrogan Enterprises Ltd become a PIP and offer the products and services the readers of this blog might want or will the legislation inevitably mean it has to state its NetZero and DEI policies to be an operator. I am afraid we already know the answer.
Bingo.
I think the word functionality appeared in the software development. A software may have an overriding function but when designing it, there are many components of it and each of them came to be described as a functionality.
Just want to back up Adriana on this one: in programming, 'function' is a particular element of executable code, and 'functionality' is what emerges from the work of functions. This is the route of invasion for this change, but the mechanism is the usual scholarly desire for hierophantic terms - witness the substitution of 'pro forma' for 'form'.
Oh, and David: just because the phrase begins 'dollars' does not excuse you from your British obligation to spell the word 'doughnuts'. Consider this your warning. We will disconnect your digital pound service if you do not comply. 😝
The profound irony is the BoE is the main source instability in the economy because it sets the price of money through the base rate. No committee of ‘experts’ can ever get this rate ‘right’ and this is the source of the boom and bust cycle. The MPC is the archetype of central planning and anyone who blames Britain’s woes on capitalism merely shows their ignorance. In the 19th century the US grew from insignificance to the world’s second largest economy without a central bank; the Fed was set up in 1913. As with so many areas in life, the best outcome for Britain would be for government to leave the people alone. As David so clearly elucidates, in justification of itself, the Princely state will drive us to dystopia and so we will get CBDC.
Anybody who doubts this just needs to look at recent history - i.e. the past 24 months - and yet the message never quite gets through that the solution is not yet more tinkering.
I find that the most convenient way to analyze a new plan from the state is to imagine what will happen to that segment of the population most hated by the zeitgeist; say, white male Nazis who beat kittens and hate women. And eat meat, the cads.
What will the state do when one of those terrible people goes to the market with digital currency in hand? When the state has all its excuses ready at hand, how well will they be able to resist their centrist moralizing impulses?
Rest assured, that if it will be done to the most hated, it will also eventually be done to the less hated. And that means YOU. It is a mathematical certainty.
I am fully convinced that nobody at the Bank is consciously thinking in these terms. The Foucauldian point is the danger which is created: the mechanism by which something like that could happen. That's what we have to make ourselves robust against.
From Wikipedia on Gosbank, the only bank in the Soviet Union, which was both Central Bank and commercial bank. The problem with CBDC is not the digital bit, we already largely have digital money, it is the central bit and how the state uses it.
The Soviet state used Gosbank, primarily, as a tool to impose centralized control upon industry in general, using bank balances and transaction histories to monitor the activity of individual concerns and their compliance with five-year plans and directives. Gosbank did not act as a commercial bank in regard to the profit motive. It acted, theoretically, as an instrument of government policy. Instead of independently and impartially assessing the creditworthiness of the borrower, Gosbank would provide loan funds to favored individuals, groups and industries as directed by the central government.
I see Trump committed to never allow "the tyranny" of a CBDC in the US at his campaign rally yesterday in New Hampshire. He was asked to say that by Vivek Ramaswamy in return for his endorsement.
Something else that occurs to me. How do you pay a bribe with a CBDC and not have it immediately spotted and reported to the fuzz. I'm sure there will be ways but a bunch of bureaucrats and politicians are going to regret pushing for CBDCs if they can't do it easily
The transactions are not going to be anyonymous - it's worth reading the literature I linked to, as it sets it all out quite clearly.
I'm aware that the official literature says it will not be anonymous. But too many people in power and near it need to make slush money payments to others in the same area for that to be actually true.
Someone is going to figure out how to create mystery accounts that don't quite belong to anyone or something so that payoffs can be made. I don't know exactly how it will work, I have ideas. But it will be a thing that happens because, while bribery and corruption is bad, the acceptable level of it is slightly above zero. A small amount greases the wheels and gets things done more efficiently than otherwise. Now sure, some of that small amount is tickets to sports events, concerts, gifts of this and that and so on, but sometimes a briefcase of cash or equivalent really is what is best.
Regarding ownership and the ledger, are there any comparisons to be drawn with other ledgers such as UK Land Registry, Companies House, DVLA or issuance of birth and death certificates?
Not really - those are all entirely sensible ways of preventing confusion between individuals, clarifying who owns what, who can inherit what, and so on. That is most certainly not what the digital pound ledger is all about.
The Ledger is the truly terrifying part and aligns with David’s core theme on this Stack. It brings all transactions in the whole economy into one ledger, transactions that are diffuse and mainly private(ish) now. That is more power than any government has ever had in human history, by a wide margin. It will be one hell of a technical feat, as if it crashes, the whole economy stops. Following another of David’s themes, the ledger will further empower those executive government agencies handed regulatory power by modern legislation to act, for example the UKHSA could end smoking by removing the ability to buy tobacco from the ledger. Dissent to government becomes impossible, because the finances of any dissenting person or group can be stopped, at will. This amount of power cannot in my view, be trusted to anyone, ever, because Lord Acton has been proved right time and again.
No, it does not bring all transactions in the economy onto one ledger, only ones involving digital cash, about 3% if it replaces physical cash. No, the economy does not stop if it crashes any more than the economy stops when VISA or PayPal or RTGS crash. No, they could not end smoking because payment systems do not know what is being paid for, so that is not the way to stop anything. That’s why retailers have loyalty schemes, to put that data back into their systems. Dissenting people and groups already have their accounts suspended by commercial banks and you have no alternative for online transactions.
I think Dan is describing what will happen if the digital pound becomes the only or major form of money.
Fair enough. That is unlikely because it would imply the demise of the entire banking sector and a rejection of fractional reserve banking. That's a whole other debate of course. Almost all money these days is created through loans made by commercial banks. They have nothing to do with CBDC. Physical cash represents just a few percent of currency. CBDCs might change that, for example by entering the world of eCommerce and generally being accepted as more convenient. A large swing in that direction is what the BoE calls disintermediation (a run on the banks) but unless capitalism itself goes out of business and things no longer need to be financed, I don't see CBDC usage going to 100%.
Wholesaling of the digital pound is also going to be a thing. Will we see the end of commercial bank money any time soon? No (and certainly not as a policy objective). The point of this post is that we will in the long term. It just depends what you mean by 'long'.
Wholesale CBDC puzzles me. Central banks have dealt with retail and commercial banks entirely digitally for decades: RTGS, CHAPS in the UK, TIPS in Europe, SWIFT for cross border etc. Other than modernising that infrastructure to reduce costs/fees and going along with the distributed ledger blockchain craze which seems to have passed, it is not clear whether wCBDC are actually anything different to what we already have.
"My immediate sense as an increasingly pessimistic heretic, is that this will inevitably lead to an spread of the black economy -with consequent falls in tax receipts-and might well provide increased opportunities for the various bad actors now at large : terrorists and other fanatics."
Correct. I imagine there will be a parallel economy that uses some kind of cashlike token. And of course this will help the crooks and terrorists because now they blend in with all the regular sorts who want to business without the government poking its nose in.