A Unified Ledger – A 21st Century Global Domesday Book

Here is the title of the Bank for International Settlements’ latest annual report on their newly-minted central bank digital currency (CBDC) regime, entitled, “Blueprint for the future monetary system: improving the old, enabling the new”.

The old they wish to improve is the entire global economic system. The new they wish to enable is a unified system of financial control, with them at the helm.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has long been regarded as a secretive and shady organisation (and as we know, evil and corruption thrive in the dark). At its core, it represents a collection of central bankers and high-flying financiers. Traditionally, their role is that of “the lender of last resort” for the world’s national central banks – underwriting the activities, and liabilities of central banks, promising to back any of their actions. In return the BIS has a hold over the policy direction of those central banks.

Over the last few years they have been lobbying for and pursuing various different CBDCs. These would be a digital form of national currency held on a blockchain. They would be an entirely new form of asset, and a liability on the balance sheet of central banks, somewhat similar to how they print money today. However, a CBDC would effectively sideline retail banks, those high-street banks or international banks who currently hold accounts for people. The CBDC would represent a direct interaction – between central banks and citizens. We must bear in mind that presently most central banks are not directly an arm of government. The Federal Reserve in the USA is an incorporated private central bank, given license by government to issue the dollar currency. Likewise the Bank of England is a supposedly independent institution, although we can see a short leash held by the treasury, and very often governments work in lock-step with their central banks to control the supply and distribution of currency.

The BIS have been undertaking experiments across the world in CBDCs: Operation Helvetia in Switzerland, Operation Genesis in Hong Kong, Dunbar in Singapore and in the UK Project Rosalind, to name only a few. Each of these projects utilise a different aspect of CBDC architecture. Project Rosalind for example built-up an API (Application Programming Interface) to allow for the interaction between CBDCs and private company programs for retail ‘customers’. In my opinion, they are not really customers, because if a CBDC were adopted it would be a state service – and possibly mandated too, but that’s their terminology. Here we witness the birth of their ‘new’ system, or at least one aspect of it: a centrally controlled digital currency, available through a private company’s computer program, for the citizenry to use. Which is all well and in theory, yet when we expand the philosophy behind the curtain, things look a little more dystopian. We should bear in mind too, that the name Rosalind comes from the scientist Rosalind Franklin, the first to photograph DNA’s double-helical structure using X-rays. Not to derogate her work at advancing science, but symbolism matters, and it’s perhaps a revealing choice of name for a worldwide scheme of control; to record the minutiae of the world’s financial DNA.

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