Florida’s Republican leader is very against the threat that CBDCs pose to state surveillance.
The next Republican politician to speak out against Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) in the United States is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
The governor recently said that he thinks CBDCs should be banned in the state, calling them “tools of financial surveillance.”
Standing Against CBDCs
In a speech that DeSantis shared on Twitter on Monday, he talked about President Biden’s March 2022 executive order on digital assets, which told government agencies to look into making a CBDC.
“It provides the government with a direct view over all consumer activities,” said the governor, noting that CBDCs are “different” from cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.
“What the central bank digital currency is all about is surveilling Americans, and controlling behavior of Americans,” he continued.
Even though Bitcoin and other crypto networks are technically not private because all of their transactions can be seen on a public ledger called the blockchain, they are still anonymous. Anyone in the world can use the network without having to prove who they are or show their wallets.
Jerome Powell, the head of the Federal Reserve, has said in the past that a potential CBDC would be the opposite of that: all network users would be known and checked out, but their transaction history would be kept private.
Still, DeSantis compared a possible CBDC to the digital yuan in China, where the People’s Bank of China keeps track of how people spend their money and can “cut off access to goods and services.” He also used Nigeria as a warning. In Nigeria, the central bank has limited ATM withdrawals to get more people to use its eNaira currency. This led to riots last month.
The governor is worried that if this kind of currency caught on in the U.S., the government could use it to stop transactions they don’t like, like sales of guns and gas. “You’re opening up a major can of worms and handing a central bank huge amounts of power,” he continued.
DeSantis isn’t the first person to speak out against CBDCs. Last month, Republican congressman Tom Emmer introduced a bill to stop the Federal Reserve from giving consumers CBDCs, citing similar concerns about surveillance.
In March of last year, Senator Ted Cruz introduced a similar bill to make sure the government doesn’t “centralize and control cryptocurrency.”
Infractions by Bankers
Along with CBDCs, DeSantis criticized the Federal Reserve’s decision to save the depositors of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). The move was made for deposits above the standard $250,000 limit set by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which was criticized by many European regulators.
The governor thinks that the move shows that the Fed is willing to break the rules when putting in place a CBDC. “They will use that in ways that benefit their agenda,” he argued.
He also talked about the new Bank Term Funding Program from the Fed, which has been used to put $300 billion back into the economy in the week since SVB went bankrupt. DeSantis said that the move “wiped out” half of the Fed’s progress in lowering inflation over the past year by reducing the amount of money in circulation.
“Are you interested in giving these economic central planners more power over our economy? … No we cannot have that happening,” he said.
