Epocalypse Revisited Part Four: The Cashless Society and the New Digital Dollar Divide. It’s here!

In writing almost two years ago about the Epocalypse that would envelope the world when the Everything Bubble crashed, I wrote about crypto currencies and the central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) that would rise out of the ashes like the phoenix as the central banks’ own “fiat” currencies collapsed or their economies did:

Recapping my earlier predictions of a cashless society

The reason currencies will collapse is that the only value of money comes from trust. (See “What Gives Money Its Value?“) National currencies will lose the trust of their citizens because those currencies have already been manipulated to death, and are already in the throes of currency wars. Alternate electronic currencies will battle for significance as a solution. These are actually far less secure than the government-bankster-controlled currencies. So, I would expect, at least, one of those big-name electronic currencies to fail spectacularly, bringing losses to millions, or expect that one of them will prove to be hugely corrupted. This will demand a government currency solution.

Banks and governments want a currency they can directly control anyway. Their turf is enormously threatened by alternative currencies because controlling the currency has been the major money-maker for all of the major banks that own the Federal Reserve. It is ultimately those banks that decide to create new currency and give it to themselves. Banks already want a cashless solution because cash is awkward and costs more money to process. Governments also want a cashless financial system because cash cannot be controlled, other than for its overall value; it can’t be easily tracked; so, it cannot be easily policed or easily taxed.

“The Epocalypse is Different This Time, Yet Much as Predicted“

Several years before that (back in 2016), I laid out the move toward a global monetary system that was predicted in The Economist (see magazine cover above) clear back in 1988, which they set for 2018. I wrote to note the time was soon coming.

The global currency, which they called “the phoenix,” wasn’t imagined back in 1988 as cashless, but it was envisioned as part of the first New World Order that would emerge after the Cold War ended. Geo. Bush the First would openly but cryptically speak about that New World Order a year or two later. (See: “Cashless Society War Intensifies During Global Epocalypse.”) The Epocalypse was a little slow to come, and so was The Economist’s global currency, but neither were off by much. I’m writing today to tell you the year has now actually arrived — not predicting it this time, but reporting it.

Said The Economist back in 1988:

THIRTY years from now, Americans, Japanese, Europeans, and people in many other rich countries, and some relatively poor ones will probably be paying for their shopping with the same currency. Prices will be quoted not in dollars, yen or D-marks but in, let’s say, the phoenix. The phoenix will be favoured by companies and shoppers because it will be more convenient than today’s national currencies, which by then will seem a quaint cause of much disruption to economic life in the last twentieth century. At the beginning of 1988, this appears an outlandish prediction.

“Cashless Society War Intensifies During Global Epocalypse.”

The effective power of the sanctions that are proliferating in response to the present war leads naturally in evolution to the global, cashless, digital currency I wrote about in these Patron Posts and those earlier articles on my site. The world has been tilting in this direction a long time, and what could make sanctions easier next time a nation becomes overly violent than a unified global currency or financial transaction system that can be selectively turned off for any individual or an entire nation? Want to sanction the oligarchs more easily? Just turn off their money.

All of this I said, however, was not quite ready to happen back in 2020 when I wrote the article quoted at the top of this article:

Governments and banks, being the cronies they already are, will do the only thing that makes sense to them: they will create a single global currency because the problem is a global problem. (I am now, of course, getting far down the road.) That can’t happen, though, until the public is scared to death from the economic peril that increases daily and political upheaval that goes along with it because people like the freedom and anonymity that come with cash. Given enough insecurity, however, the public will embrace any solution, even a global cashless solution. Plus, many will like the simplicity of a global cashless form of money.…

I wouldn’t normally think the time for that rollout is quite here, and I don’t suppose it will happen in one fell swoop…. All of that is speculation about a more distant future trend.

So, I pointed out it was coming, but not just yet. “Far down the road” describes the rapid journey we have just taken through the Covidcrisis and into the broadest global sanctions ever decreed as we head into the biggest central-bank tightening the world has ever had to experience, which is already starting to crash the Everything Bubble during a time of the hottest inflation in forty hears. It hasn’t taken long since I wrote about that “more distant future trend,” for economic peril and political upheaval to get to that point where it is seriously scaring people, and we are taking actual steps into all that I described.

America at the breaking point

One study that just came out says,

American breaking point: 1 in 4 workers have quit their job over mental health

The Great Resignation is no myth. Americans are leaving the workforce in droves and a new study is revealing one of the main reasons for this exodus. It turns out more than one in four people have quit their job for the sake of their mental health….

The report shows that 55 percent of workers have experienced significant stress in the past year, while 38 percent report having symptoms of depression. A similar number of people say lack of motivation (37%) and anxiety (36%) are making work more difficult. Just under a third have dealt with feelings of anger (31%).

The survey also finds that stress from work ranks as having the second-worst impact on a person’s mental health — finishing only behind stress due to their finances (42%).

Study Finds

As stresses pile up, reaching an individual’s threshold, even little stresses become more significant as the individual reaches his or her tipping point. Another study finds that Covid has overstressed Americans:

63% of adults say stress levels at all-time high

A new survey of 2,000 Americans analyzed the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their mental health and found that despite policy changes like mask mandates slowly lifting throughout the country, 56 percent feel alone and struggle to share their struggles with friends and family.

Fifty-seven percent of those surveyed pointed to being less social as the top negative impact on their mental health.

Conducted by OnePoll on behalf of Cove by Feelmore Labs, the survey found 63 percent of respondents feel their stress levels are currently at an all-time high due to the pandemic.

Study Finds

The Epocalypse is starting to feel real

I think we all know people are getting exhausted from the endless mask requirements, the vaccination dope-pushing, the people they’ve known who were badly afflicted by Covid, daily seeing higher and higher prices, and the stresses they faced trying to outbid everyone in the housing market if they were in the market, and now the sanctions of war that are piling shortages on top of the shortages that were already forming, bringing still higher prices. Stocks have been falling and rebounding and falling again for months, and the bond market just entered its worst bear market in decades (as I said we’d see right now in an earlier Patron Post, so more on that to come in a regular post).

It’s starting to feel like endless upheaval; and, yet, we are still walking toward the worst of it. Wait until this summer when these sanctions have been stripping things down and pushing prices up for three or four months. And then wait until they’ve been dragging on for six months.

I’m not trying to be dismal, but I want you to get the sense of why and how we will get to point where people will reach desperately for answers as the financial system keeps crumbling. Most will take whatever they are given as a solution by the time we get to that point. When you realize we are just starting into the Big Bust — or the Epocalypse or Great Reset or Great Depression 2.0 or whatever you want to call it — then you’ll start to see how people grasp for whatever lifeline is thrown their way.

The global sanctions of this war now provide the catalyst that will finally make that public change possible. Two years ago, I said it would be awhile coming — that it would take more to get the public ready for it. Now we’re there. It’s starting to happen, and you can start to actually feel a sense of the acceleration into such times.

Central-bank digital currencies are becoming real

That’s why we finally witnessed this month actual news of the Biden Administration taking a significant step toward the introduction of a US CBDC from the Fed. This month we shifted from an internal central-bank-level discussion to having all government agencies join the conversation during the next six months about actual implementation and how introduction of a CBDC will impact their agency for better or for worse:

The [executive order] directs the U.S. Treasury, and other federal agencies, to study the development of the new CBDC and report back within 180 days of the potential risks and benefits of a digital dollar. The EO also directs the Treasury Department, Office of the Attorney General and Federal Reserve to produce a ‘legislative proposal’ to create a digital currency within 210 days, about seven months.

The digital dollar is coming, and it’s coming quick.

To be clear, the adoption of a digital dollar by the U.S. government, as Biden intends, would be one of the greatest expansions of federal power ever made. The digital dollar would be much different than a digital version of the existing U.S. dollar. It would also be much different than cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum, which are decentralized.

Digital dollars would be traceable and programmable. The Federal Reserve, or some other government agency, would have the ability to create digital dollars at whim. Moreover, the digital dollars could be programmed to have various rules and restrictions governing how and when they are spent….

The EO even states the CBDC and other policies governing digital assets must mitigate “climate change and pollution” and promote “financial inclusion and equity.”

Economic Prism

Very, VERY real! All the things I warned about in these Patron Posts, while saying they would be awhile, yet, in coming, are now slated by the president of the United States to be established in law this year.

Governments always feel the need to control people “for the greater good.” Thus the order states “the rules” must enable more “equitable redistribution of wealth” and better management of the earth’s ecology, precisely carrying out the Davos crowd’s Global Reset. The only thing limiting how money can be digitally manipulated will be the restraint of government and public reaction/political backlash … as we saw during the Covidcrisis where backlash grew against austere mandates. Still, a great amount of restriction was readily accepted by the public at large on the basis that it was “for the greater good.”

Those (like myself) who rebelled were seen by most of society as being the neanderthals or being needlessly fearful, and our words were outlawed. I know I was told by two large publishers I wrote for that had to stop writing about Covid. One said it was because Google was punishing them heavily for the articles I and two or three other writers were putting out. The Google punishment was costing them well over half a million reads per day. That was a Norwegian publisher. The other one of those publishers had loved my articles about Covid, even interviewing me on international television about my own experience when I rejected the vaccine. Then … radio silence on that subject with word they had changed their guidelines on that subject. That one was Russian — RT. Don’t know if their issue was Google or a mandate from Putin on high, given his rather intense paranoia about Covid, to stop using that word in critical articles like people were later commanded not to use the word “war.” So, I’ve experienced the censorship directly.

[When I quit RT months later it was not over that censorship, but just over my not wanting the US government to see money deposited directly from Moscow to my bank, as had been happening. (I made that decision before the sanctions were imposed, which likely would have ended those transfers anyway, had they still been happening.) I told RT my decision was equally about my not wanting to do anything that might help Putin now that he was back to invading other countries and slaughtering people in an unjustifiable war against a nation that has never once attacked him. I wasn’t going to take his money when intending to lay into him with my own criticism. I also wouldn’t want to help supply RT as Putin’s US-hated mouthpiece to the English-speaking world, given RT had told me my articles were their sixth-most popular. You can see an example of one of those on my own site here: “Want to Know Where Your Money Goes? Sex, lies and the United States Navy — Meet ‘Fat Leonard.'” They were fun articles to write, and they helped make up for the loss of my other job over the vaccine, and I’m more than willing to be critical of all dumb or corrupt or equally hostile warlike actions by the US, as I have been about the vaccine, the Fed, and “Hillary’s Wars,” or anything else; but not if it helps Putin make the US look bad at a time when he’s acting just as bad as the US at its worst.]

How long before we see a global CBDC?

One step at a time: so, just as it took two years from the time when I seriously laid out the discussions between central banks that were happening about creating CBDCs to the present year where President Biden is ordering the US take that step to created a legally tender digital dollar this year, I suspect it will be “a little further down the road” before digital dollars and digital euros, etc become melded into a global currency to solve a now fully global crisis. After all, the Epocalypse is not going to unfold in a day, albeit things are moving quickly and relentlessly at this point like the current of a river picks up as you are approaching the waterfall rapids.

Without even going into the conspiratorial, World-Economic-Forum, Bilderberg, Davos-crowd kind of thinking, look simply at the practicality. These global sanctions — at a time when I was already showing here how the Everything Bubble Bust was starting to supernova — are going to create global financial problems that reach for global financial solutions. I believe the financial problems that precipitate out of these sanctions during a time when the Everything Bubble was already starting to blow will scream for a global solution, and we’ll see millions accept whatever our governments and banking experts propose, just as hundreds of millions — no, billions — around the world accepted being injected with an experimental vaccine. (I’m not criticizing anyone’s individual choice. Hopefully, it works out well for them. I’m just pointing out that it was a rapidly developed, totally experimental technology with inadequately known risks, and billions of people accepted it!)

While I’ve laid out quite a conglomeration of problems in these posts in the Everything Bubble Bust series and now in this Epocalypse Revisited series, so many other likely, yet unexpected problems can come up from all of this that I cannot even envision them all at this point. No one can. I’m just laying out the things that are foreseeable with strong likelihood of happening:

We have the global Everything Bubble starting to supernova (as laid out in the previous series); we have the tightening of central banks across the world likely to pop that global balloon full of for bubbles; we have the fact that the world was already sliding into recession before central banks did any tightening, as they merely tapered their expansionary policies; we have a global plague that is apparently still raging in parts of the world; we already had supply shortages and supply-chain disasters, and now we’re doubling down on creating those; now we have a war that many are saying may become World War III while some say it already is the start of World War III (and I’m talking major politicians around the world saying that, not your garden-variety crackpots, but high-paid crackpots); we may soon have an international cyberwar on financial systems, as well as other critical systems; we’ve had horrible fire seasons and will soon be going into the next one; and we have the start of the most comprehensive global sanctions ever laid down in history. I cannot see how that turns out to be anything other than a global financial train wreck.

While the dollar is holding stronger than it has in a couple of years, fully on par with all its peers, due to capital flight as the yuan and ruble struggle mightily, this does not mean the dollar is not vulnerable to cyberwar (to which a CBDC would likely be even more vulnerable). The point I made in my last post was that the dollar won’t be torn down by the competition because everything else is failing worse, the yuan and ruble most of all. The dollar is the best horse in the glue factory right now, even with its new threat of sanctions, which are not a threat to those who do not grossly misbehave. However, all currencies are so digitally dependent now that the prevailing global currency is vulnerable to cyber attacks that would destroy the SWIFT international banking system as well as the data systems within central banks and/or within their member corporate or private banks. So, a global currency collapse is highly possible, but it certainly won’t be one that ends with the ruble or yuan becoming the replacement. (The manifold reasons for that were laid out in my last article: “Epocalypse Revisited Part Three: Monetary War in the new New World Order.“)

So, I’m pointing out that the opportunities right now for a major black swan to come swooping down are extremely high. We don’t know at this point what it will be (which is what makes it a “black swan”), but we can certainly see a line up of situations around the full horizon that are raising the odds something will swoop in on us by the time Biden is ready to release that CBDC, giving all the more momentum to its broad acceptance. Likewise with the ultimate step of taking it global.

I think the likelihood of WWIII being a catastrophic cyberwar is more likely than of it being a nuclear war because Putin knows that assured mutual destruction is still fully on the table, and he doesn’t want to see his beloved St. Petersburg and Moscow and Sochi vaporized in retaliation. So, unless he has fully cracked and gone full commietard, he’s not going to use the nuclear missiles he keeps flaunting, even if he is desperately losing. Their power for him is for intimidation, which is working nicely.

The conspiracy theorists have ideas of who wants a global financial answer and who wants a global reset (and I’m not saying they’re wrong). I don’t follow those conspiracies much; I follow trajectories of trends and connect the dots in the news; and that causes me to see things somewhat the same way: a global financial solution will be wanted by many, after all of this. With Biden now moving toward making a digital dollar legal tender, that time has arrived. There may be some implementation time between the introduction to congress at the end of this year, the approval of that proposal, and the actual roll-out; but the process of taking this from central bank theory and discussion to reality began last month!

As I’ve laid out, nations have been experimenting with their own CBDCs for a few years now. China already has one and has been publicly testing the beta version for almost a year, and we know it wants the yuan to break up dollar hegemony, but the Western world isn’t likely to go for that, and China is falling apart right now under its zero-Covid rules; so the world will seek something that is neither yuan or ruble. The article above summarizes what I was reporting two years ago as it developed:

Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) are coming.  And they’re coming much faster than most people care to think about.  Are you ready?

At the moment, roughly 90 central banks â€“ including the European Central Banks and the Federal Reserve – are either experimenting with, or are in varying stages of CBDC implementation.  Moreover, these CBDC friendly central banks include all G20 economies.  And together, represent more than 90 percent of global GDP.

With global sanctions now pressing Western nations and as many other nations as they can rally to their side of the sanctions table, it may not be all that long before everyone of the entities mentioned in that quote will compromise on a re-invention that is neither euro nor dollar. It is not at all clear to me what specifically will emerge as the answer, but only that the new monetary answer will be digital and, before long, global; and it will not be on an axis connecting China’s yuan and the Russian ruble.

Not quite in conclusion

This post became so involved, I decided I needed to cut it down the middle to create more digestible chunks of this meaty subject. I may not provide a lot of Patron Posts (and I’ve never promised I will as it’s not really a subscription service), but I try to make them a substantial meal as my appreciation for your support. Minimum $5 for a feast isn’t that bad, even if all you get is one a month, especially if you consider that the objective in seeking your donation is really to help keep ALL my writing going. You are the ones who make all of it possible. I now pay double that price for a MacMeal as a lunch that takes about the same amount of time to eat as this does to read. So, this was your five-buck Happy Feast to mentally digest while you eat your ten-buck MacMeal, but it’s got a second entree coming … at no extra cost! Tomorrow’s lunch is on me. (And it’s not like writing just one of these kinds of articles doesn’t take a ton of time for research by a team of one before I can even put it together in writing, as they are more than just op-eds.)

I’ve made Part One available to all Patrons, even at the $1 level, as I do about once year just to say thanks for the tips and to give them a sense of what is available, but Part Two will be only for the $5-and-up folks. Thanks to all. Even the tips are certainly thoughtful, so I wanted to let you know they are appreciated. The five-buck-and-up group really keep this going, so …

In my next Patron Post — out tomorrow if all goes well — we’re going to dive into the deep oooeeeoooo realm of some spooky stuff that will be the climax to this series. I’m going to bring it all together by asking, “Are we talking 666 and the ‘mark of the beast’ yet?” You may be surprised! Or you may have seen it coming. (Or you may not have a clue what I’m talking about if your reading and/or scary movie watching is culturally thin.) I won’t leap to conclusions in that inquisitive conclusion to this series, but there are a few interesting facts to bring together around this guy that are, for a fact, happening right now: