While the world’s financial industry moves stealthily toward a cashless society, Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, said in a meeting of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that they need to do “’extensive’ public consultation with stakeholders” before completing the move.
According to ZeroHedge, “Powell also listed the main reasons why central banks are obsessed with [this] … [to] improve the payments system, which include faster and cheaper transactions, addressing a decline in the use of physical currency and modernizing the payments infrastructure.”
The main reason for moving to digital dollars, though, is "’reaching consumers who have been traditionally underserved by financial institutions,’ which is another way of granting the Fed permission to make targeted direct deposits to virtually anyone, anywhere in the world at any given moment in time, ZeroHedge said.
Apparently, Powell’s precautionary advice didn’t make IMF officials happy, who responded in a tweet directed at Powell, “Central bank digital currencies could improve the payment system.” A second IMFLive tweet added, “To make #CrossBorderPayments successful, we need international cooperation among a wide range of parties, including private sector, central banks, @FinStbBoard and the IMF.”