Plans for a Digital Dollar Are in the Works
For years, several central banks have contemplated the introduction of a digital currency. These talks have never gone beyond the theoretical planning stage because it would be a huge move to switch to something that is outside the current banking system.
The Federal Reserve has been researching the nuts and bolts of a digital currency for some time. The Board of Governors has a technology lab that has been building and testing a range of distributed ledger platforms to understand their potential benefits and tradeoffs. Staff members from several Reserve Banks, including Cleveland Fed software developers, are contributing to this effort.
The business world has made huge advances in creating technology that makes a 100% digital currency system possible. You can now use your smartphone to conduct nearly any financial transaction. The day may soon come when children have no knowledge of paper currency.
The COVID-19 crisis has motivated the Federal Reserve to take a series of bold steps, and a digital dollar is now on the front burner. The Fed is planning to send money directly to Americans In The Next Crisis: “By getting money to consumers, you can limit the depth and duration of a recession.”
Former Fed official Simon Potter sees the Federal Reserve as being able to act faster than the government. If the economy goes to crash mode, the Fed can get money swiftly to people who need it most in a crisis.
Potter added, “It took Congress too long to get money to people, and it’s too clunky. We need a separate infrastructure. The Fed could buy the bonds quickly without going to the private market. On March 15 they could have said interest rates are now at zero, we’re activating X amount of the bonds, and we’ll be tracking the unemployment rate—if it increases above this level, we’ll buy more. The bonds will be on the asset side of the Fed’s balance sheet; the digital dollars in people’s accounts will be on the liability side.”
Cleveland Fed president Loretta Mester delivered a speech to the Chicago Payment Symposium titled “Payments and the Pandemic” in which, after going through the big picture boilerplate, Mester goes straight to the matter at hand.
In the section titled “Central Bank Digital Currencies,” the Cleveland Fed president writes that “the experience with pandemic emergency payments has brought forward an idea that was already gaining increased attention at central banks around the world, that is, central bank digital currency (CBDC).”
And in the shocking punchline, then goes on to reveal that “legislation has proposed that each American have an account at the Fed in which digital dollars could be deposited as liabilities of the Federal Reserve Banks, which could be used for emergency payments.”
The US Constitution states that all spending needs to be approved by the House of Representatives. There is no provision that authorizes the Fed to issue money in any form to the public. Since much of what the Fed does is illegal, it doesn’t matter what the founding fathers had to say.
The Fed realized that sending out cash doesn’t guarantee that will spend the money to reach the goal of boosting the economy. By having a digital dollar, they can add a time limit to each account. If you don’t spend the money in a set time period, it may disappear.
The Fed’s digital dollar will fit perfectly in with the coming mark of the beast. People will line up for days to receive a chip that will give you $1,200 a month for free. I can see now why the Book of Revelation makes such strong warning against people taking the devil’s mark.
“And another angel, a third, followed them, saying with a loud voice, ‘If anyone worships the beast and its image and receives a mark on his forehead or on his hand, he also will drink the wine of God’s wrath, poured full strength into the cup of his anger, and he will be tormented with fire and sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest, day or night, these worshipers of the beast and its image, and whoever receives the mark of its name’” (Revelation 14:9-11, ESV).
—Todd
God’s Staying Hand
Author’s note: While looking through correspondence from my friend Ed Merrick, a well-known school principal and public educator in our region, who died at age 83 on September 4, 2020, I came across an article he found to be especially compelling, and in his always encouraging way let me know. It was posted as a terryjamesprophecyline.com blog article on July 6, 2020.
It is an article I think needs looked at again as we rapidly approach November 3, 2020.
The past weekend this nation celebrated Independence Day 2020. The holiday is a sort unlike any celebrated by any other country in earth’s history. There will never be a holiday of its like again this side of Christ’s next intervention into the sordid and sorry affairs of man.
I can say this with certitude—at least within my own view—because America is the last hope, in human terms, for freedom to the extent America has enjoyed that blessing for 244 years. We are witnessing liberty’s last gleaming.
When thinking on this commentary, I first thought to title it “Why America Is Lost.” The thought was that the nation has since some time in the 1950s begun the dismantling of all that is good about her, as French philosopher and admirer of America, Alexis de Tocqueville, would have it.
By the late 1950s, influences by Karl Marx and especially of Charles Darwin, as well as by other anti-God minions, had so invaded the educational process in America as to weaken the undergirdings that held erect America’s “goodness.”
That “goodness” is the Judeo-Christian principles upon which the founding fathers placed the republic they created. By 1963, those principles had eroded to the point that prayer and Bible reading were banished in public classrooms. The Ten Commandments became anathema to the new masters of education. There were actually statements made to the effect that the commandments should not be posted anywhere in public places—especially not within public classrooms. The rationale? Because the children might actually read them and begin to think they have to obey and practice them. That insanity is recorded for anyone who cares to research it. I’m not making it up, as they say.
I remember a thirty-something-year-old professor standing before my political science class in my freshman year at college lauding the marvels that Marxism-Leninism offered as opposed to the evil presented by American adventurism and bloody war-making since the founding. By then, the erosion of American “goodness,” thus its “greatness,” was well underway.
So, as I say, I started to give this commentary the title, “Why America Is Lost.” I thought to present the fact that the disease of anti-God inculcation has so infected America at its core that the nation cannot be spared the inevitable fall that God’s righteousness—the only goodness that exists—ultimately demands.
As de Tocqueville and any observer within the realm of rationality would rightly conclude, America has lost her goodness, her godly foundational mooring. So she has lost her greatness (the gleaming of freedom as testimony to God providing certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness).
We have allowed the “wickedness in high places”—those principalities and powers in the lofty perches of academia and government—to replace the godly foundations. The nation has been and is at this moment being deconstructed by lawlessness in an avalanche of tearing down all values formerly held to as suitable for a good and moral people.
Founders like Franklin and Adams forewarned about dangers intrinsic within the populace ever abandoning the Judeo-Christian base they had erected. Any other people than a morally based, truly free people, they consistently forewarned, are unsuitable for God-given governance. Any people not firmly moored by such providentially influenced foundation are ultimately destined to lose their liberty, was the message.
That those liberties implicit and explicit within the Bill of Rights are even at this moment under assault cannot be denied. The anarchists, arsonists, and so-called deconstructionists of the radical left make liberty’s last gleaming a manifest destiny for Americans.
The Democrat party champions those who are fomenting a cultural revolution that mimics those of Mao and others. Lawlessness rules in major cities where the reprobate thinking of Democrat mayors and governors agrees with the Marxist demands that law enforcement be eliminated through defunding and other means.
The Republican Party for the most part refuses to stand up against the evil that has taken over much of the nation’s youth—the Millennial generation. From kindergarten through doctoral programs, these have been victims of a satanically influenced cabal of anti-God educators for more than six decades. The title, “Why America Is Lost,” therefore, would be appropriate for an article in this day and time.
But the impression struck as the depression deepened in thinking on these matters. “You have left out one ingredient to all this seeming madness afflicting the nation and world.”
Indeed, I had left out the most important ingredient when thinking on the insanity raging within our nation and beyond. That factor is God’s staying hand.
America, although it shows every indicator of precipitous decline from which there seems no escape, remains the freest nation on earth. Its economy, already untenable because of debt extrapolated into hundreds of trillions of dollars for future generations, remains intact, despite suffering a complete shutdown due to a largely contrived virus threat. Most of the nation’s heartland continues to function and show progress toward a return to a degree of normalcy, despite the most vicious attempts imaginable by globalist diabolists in DC and other capitals of the world to rip American sovereignty and autonomy to shreds.
It is incontrovertibly true from the perspective of Bible prophecy, within the observations of those spiritually attuned. God continues to restrain the raging efforts to bring down this supernaturally inspired experiment in liberty. America will be here, I’m believing, until that restraint is withdrawn when Christ calls all born again believers to Himself.
Meantime, it is incumbent to pray fervently that He who sits in Heaven—and obviously has the rebels of planet earth in derision as in Psalm 2—continues to restrain the satanically enraged evil with His omnipotent, staying hand.
–Terry