US Congress hearing: Central bank digital currency ‘one of the worst financial ideas’
Alex Pollock, senior fellow at the R Street Institute, argued that “to have a central bank digital currency is one of the worst financial ideas of recent times, but still it’s quite conceivable…” Pollock said that central bank digital currencies would only increase the size, role, and power of the bank, adding that the Federal Reserve adopting a CBDC would result in it become the “overwhelming credit allocator of the U.S. economic and financial system.” He continued:
“I think we can we can safely predict that its credit allocation would unavoidably be highly politicized and the taxpayers would be on the hook for its credit losses. The risk would be directly in the central bank.”
Pollock explained that if fiat money becomes digitized, its nature will not be changed, and will still be issued by a central bank. While Pollock can envision some type of private digital currency backed by assets, he concluded that it will not be “private fiat currency” like Bitcoin. In Pollock’s view, cryptocurrencies are essentially the same as scrip.
