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Banking crisis 'by design' will lead to crisis, CBDCs, and ‘full surveillance economy' - Lynette Zang
The ongoing banking crisis in the United States, which saw the failure of three banks – Signature, Silicon Valley Bank, and Silvergate – was likely “by design,” and intended as a way to bring about Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and a “full surveillance economy.” That’s according to Lynette Zang, Chief Market Analyst at ITM Trading.
“They [the elite] need a big enough crisis, so that people will agree to this next iteration, the CBDCs,” she told Michelle Makori, Lead Anchor and Editor-in-Chief at Kitco News. “It also takes the world into a full surveillance economy that can be controlled directly by the central bank, if all of your wealth is held inside of the system.”
Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) are fiat tokens issued and controlled by central banks, and which operate as an official medium of exchange, like cash. Although CBDCs are intended to improve transaction speed and security, critics have warned that they can be used to track, trace, and sanction people, hindering privacy and civil liberties.
Zang, who has five decades of experience in finance, including as an investment banker at Larson Lehman and American Express, suggested that CBDCs are inevitable, and will be rolled out during a crisis to curtail economic fallout.
“In a big enough crisis, all of those protesters are going to be silenced if they can be convinced that this [CBDC] is going to save the day,” she predicted. “It is not. It is going to bring us into a full surveillance economy.”
CBDCs can also be used to fine-tune monetary policy, imposing negative rates on users; a person’s bank account can be programmed to dwindle as time goes by.
“[CBDCs] are really about control, and also about the ability to take away principal,” Zang claimed. “Negative rates attack your principal… When they come out with a CBDC it doesn’t mean that this crisis is over. It’s just the next phase of it.”
To find out why Zang thinks the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank is tied to CBDCs, watch the video above
De-Dollarization
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the United States and its Western allies imposed harsh sanctions on Russia, including freezing $600 billion of its assets abroad, as well as banning Russian banks from the global SWIFT payments system.
This, Zang observed, had hastened the efforts of Moscow and its allies to develop an alternative to the U.S. dollar for international trade. The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) alliance is meeting in August to reveal its plans for a new reserve asset.
“Battle lines have been established,” Zang stated. “We [The United States] have been so arrogant as a country to [tell] people that if you don’t do what we want, we cut you out of the global financial system.”
Zang forecast that the International Monetary’s Funds Special Drawing Rights (SDR), a basket-based reserve asset composed of different currencies, would form the new reserve currency and be the mechanism for de-dollarization.
“Any country that is holding dollar-denominated assets can just deposit them into the IMF, and then the IMF can convert them into SDRs, and then you can convert the SDRs into yuan or any other currency,” she said. “The weighting of those BRICS currencies can be much bigger inside of the SDR… It would be easier to do the de-dollarization using the IMF’s substitution fund.”
Gold
As the de-dollarization move continues to accelerate and the world moves towards adopting CBDCs, Zang advised investing in physical precious metals.
Zang pointed out that gold is the safest and most time tested way to hedge against the decline of the dollar, stressing that this is historical cycle that is bound to repeat itself.
“There have been over 4,800 currencies that have gone through what we’re going through right now,” she claimed. “We are at the end of this currency’s life cycle, so that’s why I’m in the gold business… Gold held at home does not run political risk.”
To find out Zang’s advice in case the government confiscates gold, watch the video above
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