Tag: Federal Reserve

The White House Has Just Called For The Creation of a “Digital Dollar”

– Sepember 18, 2022

The United States is making progress toward the creation of a digital currency, which the administration of President Joe Biden believes would assist in enhancing the country’s position as a worldwide financial leader. It announced the issuance of a framework that outlines the regulation of digital assets, which includes bitcoin and other objects of value that exists purely in digital form.

The framework consists of a number of different approaches that may facilitate the management of these assets and make the digital asset space more resistant to fraud, or so they say.

Government agencies have been hard at work over the last six months, since since President Biden issued Executive Order 14067 on March 22 with the title “Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets,” in order to develop the framework.

The framework recommends the establishment of a central bank digital currency (CBDC), also known as a central band for a digital version of the United States dollar, in order to facilitate the processing of digital transactions more easily. The CBDC has the potential to make possible an efficient payment system, create technical innovations, and facilitate cross-border transactions, all while fostering environmental sustainability, according to a fact sheet that has been released to describe how agencies have responded to the executive order.

In point of fact, digital U.S. dollars already do exist in commercial bank accounts all around the nation. These dollars are backed by reserves in accordance with a method of banking known as fractional-reserve banking.

The Federal Reserve insists that banks only keep a small percentage of their total deposit obligations in cash. Transactions are conducted digitally and do not entail the physical movement of “bags” containing cash.

A theoretical electronic dollar would, in the same way that the physical dollar is controlled, get the complete faith and support of the central bank.  Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, has said on many occasions that the primary objective of digital money issued by a central bank would be to do away with the need for cryptocurrencies.

https://themindunleashed.com

Deutsche Bank becomes the first big bank to forecast a US recession by 2023

Ricky Scaparo – April 5, 2022

The Federal Reserve’s fight against inflation will spark a recession in the United States that begins late next year, Deutsche Bank warned on Tuesday. The recession call — the first from a major bank — reflects growing concern that the Fed will hit the brakes on the economy so hard that it will inadvertently end the recovery that began just two years ago.

“We no longer see the Fed achieving a soft landing. Instead, we anticipate that a more aggressive tightening of monetary policy will push the economy into a recession,” Deutsche Bank economists led by Matthew Luzzetti wrote in the report. 

‘The US economy is expected to take a major hit from the extra Fed tightening by late next year and early 2024,’ the bank’s economists said in a note to clients Tuesday.

‘We see two negative quarters of growth and a more than 1.5 percent point rise in the US unemployment rate, developments that clearly qualify as a recession, albeit a moderate one.’

The prediction comes as the Fed voted to raise interest rates last month by a quarter-point for the first time in three years to curb inflation, which is at nearly 8 percent and the highest its been in 40 years. It also comes as a 2-year Treasury yield momentarily surpassed the 10-year yield last week, a classic sign that has preceded every US recession.

While the Federal Reserve is aiming to raise interest rates by 2 percent by the end of 2022, Deutsche anticipates the Fed will go beyond that and raise rates to 3.5 percent into 2023.

The central bank projects overall inflation will be up 4.3 percent just this year. Meanwhile, economic growth is projected at 2.8 percent this year, a steep drop from the 4.0 percent growth projected in December.

https://endtimeheadlines.org

‘The fire has been lit’: U.S. Federal Reserve’s push for digital dollar worries Wall Street

Joe Light – March 22, 2021

The financial services industry, braced for what could be its biggest disruption in decades, is about to get an early glimpse at the Federal Reserve’s work on a new digital currency.Wall Street is not thrilled.Banks, credit card companies and digital payments processors are nervously watching the push to create an electronic alternative to the paper bills Americans carry in their wallets, or what some call a digital dollar and others call a Fedcoin.

As soon as July, officials at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which have been developing prototypes for a digital dollar platform, plan to unveil their research, said James Cunha, who leads the project for the Boston Fed.

A digital currency could fundamentally change the way Americans use money, leading some financial firms to lobby the Fed and Congress to slow its creation — or at least ensure they’re not cut out.

Seeing the threat to their profits, the banks’ main trade group has told Congress a digital dollar isn’t needed, while payment companies like Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. are trying to work with central banks to make sure the new currencies can be used on their networks.

“Everyone is afraid that you could disrupt all the incumbent players with a whole new form of payment,” said Michael Del Grosso, an analyst for Compass Point Research & Trading LLC.

https://financialpost.com

Mainstream Economists Are Struggling to Hide the Incoming Economic Collapse

Brandon Smith – December 1, 2021

For many years now there has been a contingent of alternative economists working diligently within the liberty movement to combat disinformation being spread by the mainstream media regarding America’s true economic condition. Our efforts have focused primarily on the continued devaluation of the dollar and the forced dependence on globalism that has outsourced and eliminated most U.S. manufacturing.

The problems of devaluation and stagflation have been present since 1916 when the Federal Reserve was officially formed and given power, but the true impetus for a currency collapse and the destruction of American buying power began in 2007-2008 when the Financial Crisis was used as an excuse to allow the Fed to create trillions upon trillions in stimulus dollars for well over a decade.

The mainstream media’s claim has always been that the Fed “saved” the U.S. from imminent collapse and that the central bankers are “heroes.” After all, stock markets have mostly skyrocketed since quantitative easing (QE) was introduced during the credit crash, and stock markets are a measure of economic health, right?

The devil’s bargain

Wrong.

Reality isn’t a mainstream media story. The U.S. economy isn’t the stock market.

All the Federal Reserve really accomplished was to forge a devil’s bargain: Trading one manageable deflationary crisis for at least one (possibly more) highly unmanageable inflationary crises down the road. Central banks kicked the can on the collapse, making it far worse in the process.

The U.S. economy in particular is extremely vulnerable now. Money created from thin air by the Fed was used to support failing banks and corporations, not just here in America, but around the world.

Why does it matter where those dollars came from?

Because the dollar has been the world reserve currency for the better part of the past century, the Fed has been able to print cash with wild abandon and mostly avoid inflationary consequences. This was especially true in the decade after the derivatives crunch of 2008.

Why? The dollar’s global reserve status means dollars are likely to be held overseas in foreign banks and corporate coffers to be used in global trade. However, there is no such thing as a party that goes on forever. Eventually the punch runs out and the lights shut off. If the dollar is devalued too much, whether by endless printing of new money or by relentless inflationary pressures at home, all those overseas dollars will come flooding back into the U.S. The result is an inflationary avalanche, a massive injection of liquidity exactly when it will cause the most trouble.

We are now close to this point of no return.

https://alt-market.us

The Inflation Train Is Still Gaining Speed

Peter Reagan – September 2021

Federal Reserve Chairman Powell and other members of the Fed have been using the term “transitory” to downplay the threat that the last 16 months of skyrocketing inflation would last.

But inflation has been sharply on the rise since March 2020, with only a minor pause toward the end of last year before rising even more sharply since January 2021. Two Fed officials dissented in June of this year, but Powell’s money-printing habit hasn’t slowed.

The “light at the end of the tunnel” for the Fed? A miniscule .1% (one tenth of one percent) down tick in the official monthly inflation report this August.

You can almost hear the relief in the Fed’s chatter… “See, we were right! It was only transitory inflation, and it’s already going down! There’s nothing to see here, move along, buy more stocks.”

Don’t crack open the champagne just yet.

Unfortunately for us, the Fed’s optimism seems misplaced. That 0.1% reduction in monthly official inflation leaves us with a 5.3% annual inflation rate, more than 2 1/2 times higher than the Fed’s official inflation target.

And if you think everyday folks have it rough, small businesses have taken a major hit:

Inflation for businesses reached a year-over-year rate of 8.3% — the metric’s highest level since at least 2010.

On top of that, consumers are waking up to the reality that inflation won’t be “transitory,” but instead will likely stick around for a few years.

https://www.newsmax.com

WEF Warns of Cyber Attack Leading to Systemic Collapse of the Global Financial System

Whitney Webb – April 7, 2021

A report published last year by the WEF-Carnegie Cyber Policy Initiative calls for the merging of Wall Street banks, their regulators and intelligence agencies as necessary to confront an allegedly imminent cyber attack that will collapse the existing financial system.

In November 2020, the World Economic Forum (WEF) and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace co-produced a report that warned that the global financial system was increasingly vulnerable to cyber attacks. Advisors to the group that produced the report included representatives from the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the International Monetary Fund, Wall Street giants likes JP Morgan Chase and Silicon Valley behemoths like Amazon.

The ominous report was published just months after the World Economic Forum had conducted a simulation of that very event – a cyber attack that brings the global financial system to its knees – in partnership with Russia’s largest bank, which is due to jumpstart that country’s economic “digital transformation” with the launch of its own central bank-backed digital currency.

More recently, last Tuesday, the largest information sharing organization of the financial industry, whose known members include Bank of America, Wells Fargo and CitiGroup, have again warned that nation-state hackers and cybercriminals were poised to work together to attack the global financial system in the short term. The CEO of this organization, known as the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC), had previously advised the WEF-Carnegie report that had warned much the same.

Such coordinated simulations and warnings from those who dominate the current, ailing financial system are obvious cause for concern, particularly given that the World Economic Forum is well known for its Event 201 simulation about a global coronavirus pandemic that took place just months prior to the COVID-19 crisis.

https://www.activistpost.com