From the pay-walled banker article:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-21/digital-dollar-gets-little-urgency-from-treasury-s-liang?leadSource=uverify%20wall
The US Treasury's top official soft-peddles the President's urgent executive order to get up to pace on crypto-currencies.
Regulators need to examine whether a central bank digital currency — or CBDC — would actually improve the speed or cost of real time interbank payments, which the Federal Reserve is aiming to introduce in 2023, said Nellie Liang, undersecretary for domestic finance at the Treasury.
When asked about impact to the US Government's government control through manipulation of its USD currency
“My view is our global leadership doesn’t come from our technology,” she said in an interview at Bloomberg News’s Washington office Monday. “It comes from our governance system, the rules that govern our financial markets, our rule of law and the safety and soundness of our institutions.”
She pretends it doesn't need it, through the backwards conclusions made by previous required research
If after five or more years many countries have introduced a CBDC, she added, that might become a factor in pushing the US to adopt one. But she emphasized the US government’s study of a potential CBDC was mainly to be prepared for a need that didn’t currently exist.
“The Federal Reserve does not intend to proceed with issuance of a CBDC without clear support from the executive branch and from Congress, ideally in the form of a specific authorizing law,” the white paper said.
She refers to the Treasury's September report, where it lauded what the current and most up to date digital transactions systems are, how much they are used, and how a US digital currency could be so much more than a currency, but a national clearing house for digital contracts, securities, titling, and other documents as well. Then basically said, "meh".
https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/Future-of-Money-and-Payments.pdf
She also refers to the January Fed 'white paper', which contemplates what a national US digital currency might look like and the pros and cons. This basically outlines how it fills in all the gaps the current currency system is missing, like to the under-banked poor and minorities, speed especially crossing borders, and lowered fees. It focuses heavily on shoe-honing in the current terrible implementations, where banks and establishments are intermediates, who are forced to treat everyone as a criminal with know your customer verification. Yet, they make it plain and clear that a national cryptocurrency MUST be a privacy coin with strong privacy....as politicians race to ban all privacy coins and privacy tools.{1}
https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/money-and-payments-20220120.pdf
Like all assessment set out to find cryptocurrency bad, before the start, they generally highlight several deceptive talking points.
First, they say crypto is too slow and generally doesn't have not enough transaction capacity....but neglect to explain how cryptocurrency is a full and complete zero-trust settlement system, while most credit card and government transactions rely on trusted-only IOU systems, which require the settlements to be processed by each bank later, taking 1 to 30 days. They neglect to mention that we have nearly a dozen completely different and huge entire payment systems in use. Most of them focusing on IOU's, some on the snails pace settlements, and some just for faster slow-settlement of federal inter-banking. The concept of an ecosystem of cryptocurrencies, all with their strengths and weaknesses working together, is purposely avoided.
Second, environmental impacts of cryptocurrency are scrutinized, but never ever ever shall they ever assess the environmental impact of the current banking industry. To do so would make the deceptive hypocrisy of criticizing Bitcoin Mining's energy impact appalling. With 200K+ daily workers, hundreds of skyscrapers, many thousands of office buildings and public bank buildings, and extreme single purpose infrastructures to support them, their environmental impact is likely that of an entire continent, rather than a tiny country. Not to mention the costs for security and the $100's of millions per HOUR that is eaten to fraud, which climbs in amount each year, and likely has a large impact on the entire global economy.
Third, they love to acknowledge the need for financial privacy, but ignore that the current system have very little. They probably enjoy governments, intelligence, and law enforcement having access to your history of every non-cash purchase. The AI can then find patterns and make predictions. While ignoring this lacking in the Swiss cheese of glued and taped together government payment spy systems, they like to concern and fear over the potential of crypto currency to obscure that spy access to your banking. They imagine what horrible things you might do and some have done, with their wealth, through crypto currency, which are still done daily with their banking systems, like money laundering and buying drugs.
there doesn't seem to be anything here