Central bank digital currencies (CBDC) are being sold with the narrative of protecting consumers who are increasingly moving to cashless payments. Some say that these cashless payments will rob us of the privacy advantages of cash while exposing us to bank runs, payment network blackouts, and foreign financial adversaries.

Yet while these risks are real, they would be negligible had it not been for the central banking and financial regulators’ interventions into the market. CBDCs make these interventions worse and introduce some new, much bigger ones.

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On July 2, 2019, President Donald Trump nominated Mrs. Judy Shelton to join the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. She has a distinguished career as an economist and even co-authored a book called Roads to Sound Money, which supports ideas such as sound money and individual liberty.

While GMU economist Tyler Cowen may have dismissed the idea of more pandemic lockdowns as being “a straw man” and saying that the extreme measures that started in March of this year “are now behind us,” it seems that governors and other politicians around the country have failed to get the message. More and more states have begun to once again impose ruinous lockdowns.

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[Editor’s note: this is a special preview—for Mises Wire readers—of Europe’s Century of Crises under Dollar Hegemony: A Dialogue on the Global Tyranny of Unsound Money, a dialogue book by Brendan Brown and Philippe Simonnot newly published by Palgrave Macmillan.]