GLOBAL BANK CONNECTED “TASK FORCE” RECOMMENDS OUTLAWING PRIVATE CRYPTO TRANSACTIONS. A global entity called the “Financial Action Task Force” (FATF) has come out with new draft guidance calling for crypto regulation that would further tighten recommended protocols requiring detailed reporting on transactions.
According to theblockcrypto.com, previous guidance by the FATF in 2019 already obligates virtual asset service providers (VASPs) to share originator and beneficiary information during transactions greater than $3,000.
The new FATF guidance expands the definition of VASPs and regulations surrounding them.
What the FATF proposes is consequential because the U.S., along with 38 other nations, is a member of the globalist organization. Dozens of monetary control bodies are also on board, including the World Bank, the European Central Bank, the African Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the International Organisation of Securities Commissions, the U.N., etc.
At a 7 April meeting of G20 Finance Ministers & Central Bank Governors, an official communique expressed support for the FATF as “the global standard-setter to prevent money laundering, terrorist financing, and proliferation financing.”
It’s clear the FATF is being used to percolate regulations that protect the powers of international banking authorities under the rubric of combating scourges like drug dealing and human trafficking. The organization’s homepage alludes to the problems of “virtual assets,” linking to an entire section devoted to outlining abuses of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
But it’s telling that the homepage says virtually nothing about the current American border crisis, which has seen a tragic surge in human trafficking and dangerous drugs. Data just released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection showed a 233 percent increase in fentanyl smuggled over the southwest border compared to the first quarter of 2020.
Also missing from the FATF homepage: info China’s reprehensible slave trafficking of Uighurs or the funding mechanisms fueling a relentless tide of Islamic radicals into Europe.
The FATF may pretend to be purely motivated by humanitarian concerns, but their utter lack of independence from the world’s money control cartel renders its moral authority, not to mention objectivity, questionable at best.
WILL THE WORLD LEARN TO LOVE CHINA’S DIGITAL YUAN? The U.S. and the Eurozone may be sounding alarms about the potential of China’s digital yuan to disrupt the PetroDollar World Order. But the truth may be that China’s centralized, completely controlled computer currency may be the secret envy of central banks and authoritarian regimes the world over.
Experts seem to agree the yuan doesn’t present an immediate existential threat to the U.S. dollar. “The digital yuan appears potentially more geopolitically significant as leverage over multinational companies and governments that want access to China’s 1.4 billion consumers,” Bloomberg recently pointed out.
But the technical features of the digital yuan may end up being more significant for the world than China’s ambitions alone. As the WSJ and Technocracy News recently detailed, “The location and ownership of each individual unit is recorded and monitored. It can also be selectively switched off for any reason.”
Two Sides Currency Tech: Blockchain vs. Big Brother Coin
That kind of granular data mining potential and monetary control will likely prove impossible for increasingly totalitarian-tilting western governments to resist. That includes the U.S.
“If you think that the United States has a lot of power through our Treasury sanctions authorities, you ain’t seen nothing yet,” said former Trump administration U.S. deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger at a hearing last week of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. “That currency can be turned off like a light switch.”
Pottinger and others say that with total currency control, China might do things like putting an expiration date on issued yuan to stimulate spending within a certain time frame. They would have economic and social credit analytics that would take economic planning and political manipulation to new levels.
And that is the irresistible attraction that will probably sway other nations in building their dream digital currencies.
The elites of the west have finally caught on that decentralized blockchain currencies aren’t just digital play money – at least not all of them. They weren’t created to promote private corruption. They were designed to thwart government monetary corruption.
But governments literally can’t afford to lose the back door inflationary pipeline to siphoning wealth to pay its bills and bribe constituents via control of the money printing press. That’s why they’re using puppet organizations like the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to paint decentralized, privacy-minded blockchain currencies as hotbeds of money laundering and criminality.
And it’s why the digital yuan may be closely watched as a test case in how the flip side of technology, which might free the world from money manipulation, might also end up binding the world into centralized, digital-currency-powered slavery.
CRYPTOS SET UP FOR A FALL IN TURKEY? Following Turkey’s announced ban on using cryptocurrencies for payment, the founder of Theodex, one of the country’s largest exchanges, absconded last week, roiling crypto prices in general. Theodex went dark, and Turkish officials found their villain to supply the reason for their crackdown.
Turkey’s crypto payments ban is set to go into effect on 30 April. So the Theodex event comes at a very opportune time. Estimates of how many Theodox investors may have lost money are still unknown.
U.S. media and Turkish authorities seized on the news. Cemil Ertem, a senior advisor to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, told Bloomberg, “Turkey will undoubtedly carry out a regulation that’s in line with its economy, but also by following global developments.”
MSN at least pointed out that cryptocurrencies have drawn investment from Turks because of corrupt and inept government monetary policies:
“[Turkish] Inflation hit 16.2% in March, more than three times the central bank’s target of 5%. The Turkish lira has weakened 10% against the dollar this year, its ninth consecutive year of losses…
Concern about the country’s dwindling foreign-exchange reserves, which are negative when money borrowed by the government from private banks via swap agreements are factored in, has fueled concern about both lira and dollar deposits—and pushed savers into alternative investment vehicles.”
Crypto investors don’t have to leave their money on exchanges, though many do. And assets left at top exchanges like Coinbase or Binance are generally considered very safe. But crypto assets can be sent to software or hardware-based wallets that provide investors with much greater control.
According to some estimates, Theodex investor losses could be as high as $2 billion and affect 390,000 users. But exchange founder Faruk Fatih Ozer has disputed those numbers. In a statement on the company’s website, Ozer promised to repay investors and to return to Turkey to face justice. The government, meanwhile, moved to block the company’s accounts and detained at least 62 people for questioning.
The Theodex collapse conveniently occurred as the volume of trade in Turkish crypto markets was exploding. According to coingecko.com, trade volume in cryptos was approaching $1.1 billion, or as much as a third of the traditional Turkish stock market’s benchmark index of $3 billion.
Interestingly, Ozer’s family has direct ties to the Turkish government. His father and three siblings have been civil servants. Ozer’s exact whereabouts are currently unknown, though some reports have said he fled to Albania, and Turkish authorities are pressuring Albania to find and hand him over.
MOVERS OF THE WEEK. Top Blockchain currencies and technologies mostly succumbed to the momentum of Bitcoin’s dive. News of various kinds, including the Turkish Theodex saga, weighed on cryptos in general. Bitcoin plummeted from recent highs in the $65,000 range, back under $50,000, perhaps indicating that “digital gold” isn’t immune from manipulations that powerful interests exert on physical gold.
No doubt a surging American economy is keeping money in the stock market and may be lessening interest in cryptos, especially Bitcoin.
Right now, new home building and re-opening of state economies are buoying the U.S. outlook. Consumers are unlocking their savings to get out of chaotic, crime-ridden, and riot-prone metro areas. And warp-speed vaccines, though addressing a largely phantom menace for people under the age of 70, are lessening the COVID paralysis.
So far, cryptos like Maker and Ethereum have weathered the crypto vicissitudes better than others, likely because they represent blockchain technologies that support hundreds, or in the case of Ethereum, thousands of other blockchain apps and projects.
