Unfortunately, we think the answer to this is probably YES.
Not only has US bank SVB gone down recently (apparently its UK business has transferred seamlessly to HSBC without any cost to the taxpayers, so phew) but Credit Suisse shares have plunged in price, causing further worry.
The Bad Cattitude newsletter writes that it’s “bank crisis groundhog day” – this is well worth a read. A quote from which possibly sums things up:
the simple fact is that banking is largely opaque. we could sit down with every piece of public and regulatory data about deutche bank and spend a month going over it and still wind up with what ultimately amounts to a black box bet on the soundness and hedging of a derivatives portfolio nearly 3 orders of magnitude larger than their total equity.
Richard Vobes interviewed Justin Walker (co-founder of HARE – the Hardwick Alliance for Real Ecology) on his YouTube channel yesterday – the episode is called Stop the Collapse! Justin tells some very interesting stories, and suggests that some people want a financial collapse, as an excuse to bring in CDBCs (central bank digital currencies).
Justin says there is an alternative to CDBCs – the Bradbury Pound, as introduced in 1914. He has written about this on UK Column. His document Sovereign Money is available here: https://richardvobes.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/SOVEREIGN-MONEY-Original.pdf
If CDBCs are brought in, governments and banks will be able to track every single transaction. Not only will there be no privacy, but the potential (likely?) next step is to use the CDBC to control you. For example, you might have already used up your budget for petrol for the month, so you would not be allowed to buy any more fuel. Perhaps you won’t be allowed to buy meat, if the government decides that you shouldn’t. Perhaps you will only be allowed to purchase certain things from “authorised suppliers”.
There’s also a very real possibility that if you do something you don’t like – perhaps you speak up against a pro-vaccination narrative, or drop litter – the CDBC system will be used to punish you. This already happens in China – social credit scores have prevented people from using their money to buy plane or train tickets.
There’s a good article which goes into the good, the bad and the ugly about CDBCs on crunchbase.com.
Is there anything we can do about this? To fight back against CDBCs, the best thing is to use cash as much as possible – the more cash is being used, the harder it is for the government to bring in a CDBC to replace it. Try to use #CashEveryDay.
Suggestions for further reading:
#CashFriday and #CashEveryDay
https://rescue.substack.com/p/stop-digital-dictators-with-cashfriday
The Solari Report on how to stop CDBCs https://home.solari.com/i-want-to-stop-cbdcs-what-can-i-do/
Peak Prosperity – Chris Martenson writes on the economy and the site has a wealth of information on prosperity and resilience.
As always, don’t just believe us – look into the issue yourself. But we do think this is something to be pretty concerned about.