US Congress S.3571 Banking for All Act
congress.gov
congress.gov
Digital dollars is just a deposit account held at the Fed. Instant payments are coming for everyone in 2023-2024; the heavy lifting is enacting legislation to reduce the burden of providing accounts to everyone. You have to turn banking in the US into a utility like Europe did, and drive down it's parasitic drag.
TLDR Fight incumbents on every front.
There's a standard playbook incumbents in every industry use to prevent, delay, and castrate any threats to their moats. While I'll always take advantage of any publicity to nudge the Overton window, real change, for the silent majorities, is stalled out due to a long list of systemic issues across all governmental bodies.
“ Basically, the Fed functions at the moment as a sort of bank for the banks. And then the hope is that all Americans have their own banks. And so there’s a kind of one-step removal between us and the Fed. What we’re advocating here is cutting out that middleman to the private sector banking institution. And in a sense what the Fed would do is offer digital wallets to all small businesses and citizens and approved residents of the United States in the way that it currently does for banks, right?
I mean, what it offers to the banks right now are Fed accounts. Right? Accounts with the Fed, they’re called reserve accounts. And what we’re saying is that the reserve accounts that are only for banks should be replaced by digital wallets for all citizens, small businesses, and again, legal writ.”
Someone will need to teach millions of of Americans how to use this newfangled technology. I can't in good faith expect volunteers, friends and family to do this for everyone professionally, orderly, and accurately.
So, if the fed gets into consumer and smb banking are they going to outsource customer service or what? Maybe I'm misunderstanding the premise of this bill but it seems like an aca level headache that Republicans will propagandize against, obstruct, and sabotage at every opportunity; if the aca is anything to go by.
What's concerning is that in order to offer FedAccounts, the particular postal office has to partner with a bank. Does this mean if you go to a post office in another area you won't be able to access your account? With the prevalence of online banking, do the already busy USPS offices really need to be a retail location for a bank?
Why can't the USPS just offer these services themselves? Especially since the bill reimburses member banks for operating costs related to FedAccounts. Might as well cut out the middleman.
Otherwise this digital dollar is nothing more than a cheap marketing trick to counter the rise of crypto.
Even if banks continue to exist as they are, there is one meaty impact that a purely digital dollar would create: it would allow the Fed to implement negative interest rates without creating a flight to cash[0]. I'm not sure if that's good or bad thing, but it seems more impactful than branding a bank account "Americoins".
[0] https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/rogoff/files/dealing_with_...