The Federal Reserve’s FedNow payments system is under fire from presidential hopefuls Ron DeSantis and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. because they believe it would lead to the creation of a central bank digital currency.
In an April 11 Twitter thread, Democrat RFK Jr. — the nephew of former president John F. Kennedy Jr. — once again sounded the alarm bells over CBDCs, describing them as the “ultimate mechanisms for social surveillance and control” as he questioned the Fed’s claims that FedNow wouldn’t be used to facilitate a CBDC:
“The claim that FedNow is not the first step toward a CBDC would be more easily digestible were we not aware of the Biden administration’s steady barrage of hostile broadsides against cryptocurrencies.”
In his words, digital currencies like Bitcoin “give the public an escape route from the splatter zone when this bubble invariably bursts” and claimed that Joe Biden’s administration was “colluding with the banksters to keep us all trapped in the bubble of profiteering and control.”
A week ago, RFK Jr. said that CBCDs “grease the slippery slope to financial slavery and political tyranny.”
With the purpose of accelerating transfers between financial institutions and enterprises and offering a government-backed alternative to comparable networks offered by the private sector, FedNow is a 24/7 instant payments system that is scheduled to launch in July.
The Fed has rejected rumors that the system would be combined with a CBDC. It stated that “no decision” had been taken to issue a CBDC in response to a string of frequently asked questions on April 8 and that it “would not do so without explicit backing from Congress and the executive branch, ideally in the form of a particular authorizing law.”
In an April 11 tweet responding to the Fed’s statement, Florida’s Republican Governor DeSantis stated that it is “not merely ‘ideal’ that major changes in policy receive specific authorization from Congress; it is constitutionally required.”
source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/presidential-hopefuls-rfk-jr-and-desantis-rally-against-fednow
