Swiss National Bank’s dangerous move toward digital assets. Would you trust them?

Ordinarily, digital assets tend to be the preserve of numpties and ne’erdowells, however it is becoming increasingly alarming that central banks are embracing what initially began as a maverick-led dangerous path to obscurity.

The Swiss National Bank (SNB), the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and SIX have carried out a proof-of-concept experiment that integrates tokenised digital assets and central bank money.

Project Helvetia – part of a partnerships between SNB and the BIS Innovation Hub – explored the technological and legal feasibility of transferring digital assets through issuing a wholesale CBDC onto a distributed digital asset platform as well as linking the platform to the existing wholesale payment system.

The PoC “demonstrated the feasibility and legal robustness of both alternatives in a near-live setup,” say the partners.

However, while a wholesale CBDC has potential advantages when settling digital assets, it would raise “major policy and governance hurdles”. Meanwhile, linking existing systems to new DLT platforms would avoid many of these problems, but would forgo the potential benefits of full integration.

The partners say that they now need to do more work to get a better understanding of the practical complexities and policy implications of wholesale CBDC.

“Irrespective of which technologies the financial markets adopt next, the safety and reliability of Swiss financial infrastructure must be preserved. If DLT can deliver significant improvements in securities trading and settlement, then the SNB will be prepared,” says Andréa M Maechler, member, governing board, SNB.

Nevertheless, a statement stresses, the experiments “should not be interpreted as an indication that the SNB is to issue wholesale CBDCs onto SIX Digital Exchange’s platform or to allow settlement of SDX transactions in the Swiss Interbank Clearing system”.

Let’s hold back the applause and digest what this really means.

Recently, the clever and calculated initiator of Orwellianism, the Chinese government, which has spent most of 2020 rolling out its totalitarianism to the world without any hint of resistance – actually quite the opposite – unveiled its latest move, this time relating to the global currency markets.

No, it is not FX. China made its stance clear with regard to FX trading, a business that is totally opposed to China’s capital controls and isolationism from global markets, by forcibly removing most FX brokerages with overseas origins from their China offices three years ago.

It was inevitable that the communist government would take that stance. Chinese FX trading was massively popular and people from Shanghai to Shenzhen flocked toward the free market opportunities of global electronic brokerages, often doing tens of thousands of lots per month as this was their only outlet from government controlled bucket shops masquerading as regional exchanges, which not only stole their money but had no access to asset classes outside Chinese stocks – also controlled by the state.

Chinese communism is a clever form of dictatorial government.

It is the type which makes people believe they are getting the best deal ever, when in reality the opposite is true.

To keep people malleable, they allow state investment into startups, which really means the government is your boss, they allow people to drive luxury cars with the same brand names as Western ones – although theyre all made under license in China – and they allow rampant consumerism, making it look to the untrained eye that China’s population live a capitalist lifestyle.

Nothing could be further from the reality.

Thus, to be able to instil further control over a highly educated and astute, well dressed population that are now used to luxuries, the communist party needs to ‘sell’ ideas that appear innovative and cool when they are trying to curtail liberties.

This week’s roll out of such a thing comes in the form of a government backed digital currency.

It is the first in the world of its type. No other nation has launched a sovereign digital currency.

Wow, how avantgarde, I hear you say…

Perhaps even more unbelievably, it is the People’s Bank of China, the company’s central bank that is unleashing it onto the ‘market’,

The People’s Bank of China intends to overtake other countries and be the first to issue its digital currency (CBDC) reported Reuters with reference to the Central Bank comment.

And there you have the mainstream media totally misunderstanding this and considering it to be ‘overtaking other countries’ when reality it is another draconian effort to control the spending habits and investment opportunities of the population.

According to the central bank, the right to issue digital assets will become a “new battlefield” between states. Winning the race will allow China to strengthen the yuan’s position on the world stage and break the dollar’s dominance.

“China has many advantages and opportunities in issuing fiat digital currencies, so it should accelerate the pace to seize the first track,” the bank said in a statement.

China also needs to establish a new payment system network to break the dollar monopoly as a key part of the yuan internationalization, the article said.

This demonstrates another artform that the communists have always been very good at – propaganda.

If a country can remove all Fiat money, replace it with a digital currency, then turn it on and off according to your behavior, they’ve got you by your little toe.

In Western countries, viewpoints such as Bill Gates developing a chip to implant into the human population which tracks everything we do and then allows governments to outlaw fiat currency, replace it with digital currency and then switch you on and off so that you starve if you do not comply with dictatorial rules has more often than not been written off as fringe opinion, so why when China does exactly this is it considered a step toward modernity?

A nation whose ‘technology’ industry is either not allowed to export its products or import components, or steals software code and databases from Western customers is neither modern nor avantgarde.

We have all seen the fake Microsoft Windows operating systems running unlicensed MetaTrader terminals in IB offices across the country. We have all seen the pillaging of client databases by Chinese partners, but what we have not seen is any form of innovation.

Instead, Chinese consumers and B2B clients are absolutely thirsty for the opportunity to buy Western products or trade western markets, this being a final government attempt to curtail these attempts.

Brokerages looking to make a fast return could potentially get in early, and have this traded against Western stocks or equities for example, however when a communist government and its own central bank puts a digital currency in place, the world should run a mile from it.

Governments do not enter into things like this for your benefit. They do it to gain greater control and increase tyranny.

Remember the dark days of the 1970s when cars were made by communist governments. You had to pay the full amount in advance, prove to the trade union official that you needed a car and then do extra work, volunteer for various unpaid jobs, sidle up to the union representative and say yes sir to everything for 10 years whilst you waited for your Lada or Vaz to be delivered.

Yes, 10 years. After paying for the entire car in advance. No finance options, no quick delivery, no choice of specification and no choice of model. Just a good shafting from the government, a ten year wait and then a shoddy, badly made, rebadged 1950s Fiat which you were not allowed to replace, and if you dared attempt to drive it across a national border, big trouble was in store.

Bearing all of this in mind, and now Switzerland – the country whose central bank is largely privately owned and accountable to absolutely nobody at all, and where billions and billions of Chinese communist government assets are hidden, er, I mean stored, and the country which destroyed many firms five years ago by suddenly removing the peg on the EUR/CHF pair – is going down this dangerous route.

There is also talk of a digital Euro, with left-wing politicians in the left-wing EU heralding such a possibility.

Who is pulling the strings? Ironically, the freedom-seeking fraudsters who have either had their sites seized or ended up in jail for emptying the non-existent ‘currencies’ from their fake exchanges leaving retail customers who thought cryptocurrency was the next big thing have now had their ideas seized by the most illiberal and totalitarian regime on earth – the Chinese government, which is now using entities such as the SNB and European Central Bank as puppets in the cause of totalitarianism.