Welcome back to the breakdown, an everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin, crypto, and beyond.

This episode is sponsored by BitStamp and Cipher Trace. The breakdown is produced and distributed by Coindesk.

And now, here's your host, NLW.

Welcome back to The Breakdown.

It is Thursday, June 18th, and today our main discussion is about jobless claims, and more specifically, what jobless claims can actually tell us about

the real economy. But before that, the brief. First up on the brief, Jerome Powell says

private entities shouldn't help design central bank digital currencies. So first, what happened?

In testimony yesterday before Congress, Republican representative Tom Emmer from Minnesota

asked Fed Chair Jerome Powell about recommendations from Christopher Giancarlo's Digital Dollar Project

that any digital dollar be issued by the Fed but designed in partnership with the private sector.

Powell responded pretty strongly that he did not believe that the private sector

really had a role here. He said, I do think that this is something the central banks have to

design. The private sector is not involved in creating the money supply. That's something the

central bank does. He also went on to say that he didn't believe that the general public would

be receptive to these sort of private actors being involved

because private employees who are responsible for the money supply are not accountable to

what Powell called the public good.

So why is this interesting?

Well, the answer to how a digital dollar gets designed and more specifically what role the

private sector has in it has a pretty outsized impact on both

the shape and timing of when we'd see a digital dollar, to say nothing of the processes by which it was

managed. So I actually think that this question of what role the private sector has to play in a

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