[adament]

I think if we want to argue that central banks will soon be pushing for CBDCs to let people have accounts directly with the central bank we need to argue why they at the same time are opposing* narrow banks, which to me seems to be a different technical tool achieving an equivalent goal?

* At least the Fed seems to be: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-08/the-fe...

[notahacker]

The main reason the Fed is rejecting this is that it doesn't want to give banking privileges to entities which don't perform the core function of commercial banks from the Fed's point of view (lending) and really dislikes the idea of the public getting reasonably high interest rates for zero risk and zero contribution to the economy for reasons discussed in your article. If that's proposed as a goal for CBDCs, they won't happen (at least not without far more significant reform of regulations and incentives surrounding lending)

In theory, CBDCs could be just a back end representation of the existing financial system for more efficient settlement though, which would be a different technical tool to achieve the Fed's current goal. That looks considerably more likely to happen than removing financial intermediaries from the picture.

[adament]

I agree. In which case I think the question as posed in a sibling thread is central: How do CBDCs differ from the current digital settlement system already available at several central banks? The sibling thread mentions the Bank of England and the Danish central bank has a similar digital settlement system. Is it “just” a fancy term for a technical upgrade or is there a substantive difference in function?

[jrs235]

I assume the FED is rejecting it because the owners of the FED are the member banks which stand to lose from this implementation.