This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, June 18th, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Careful listeners of this program are well aware of the risks posed by Central Bank Digital

Currencies or CBDCs. They're more than a new kind of money. They're powerful

tools for financial surveillance and control that could destroy financial privacy.

And perhaps that's precisely why there is such a push to adopt them in the U.S.

Nick Anthony's new book is Digital Currency or Digital Control,, decoding CBDC and the future of money.

The book is out today.

Nick, one thing I really like about this book here is how upfront you are about addressing the arguments

presented on behalf of CBDC's Central Bank digital currencies and I think readers will walk away from reading this book wondering why do we need this thing why are the people who are pushing

this why are they so excited about it that was exactly what I wanted from this. It's easy to perhaps get a

little carried away with how dark and grim all of this is because it is so concerning on the front of

financial privacy, financial freedom, financial markets, and the like, but there is

that more grounded fundamental concern of why are we even doing this in the first place?

Who is this going to help?

What citizens is that's going to provide a benefit for? And that's why I made that one of the first

chapters of saying okay here are all the arguments that come up time and time again

from central, from organizations promoting CBDCs, from tech companies looking

for CBDC contracts, here are the arguments, and frankly, they really don't stand up to scrutiny.

Well let's take some of those in turn because we've discussed them here.

You've written about them elsewhere but this book provides kind of just a fairly

complete rundown of the arguments, the credible arguments in favor of CBDCs and just knocks them down one after the other.

...