by Turd Ferguson, TF Metals Report:
John Titus has been a friend of the site for quite a while but we’ve not had an opportunity to visit with him for a couple of years. We fix that issue today and what great timing! With all of the current banking “stress”, I can’t think of a better guest for this week’s Thursday Conversation.
You’ll likely recall John from all of the forensic analysis he provided on TARP and QE a few years back. All of that great content is still available on John’s YouTube channel so you should be sure to check it out when you get a chance. He’s also on Substack, Rumble and just about everywhere else. You can also find his work at Catherine Austin Fitts’ Solari Report.
When it comes to who’s behind the push to sneak in Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) legislation on the state level, we need to look no further than the Uniform Law Commission (the “ULC”… stinking lawyers). The response from many lawmakers when people are questioning these bills is that it’s a conspiracy theory to suggest these Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) bills will facilitate CBDC.
Catherine Austin Fitts (CAF), Publisher of The Solari Report, financial expert and former Assistant Secretary of Housing (Bush 41 Admin.), says the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) is much easier said than done. There is a monster fight behind the scenes between commercial banks and central banks. CAF explains, “You have bubbled an entire economy, and now you are bringing out something (CBDC) that could shrink the bubble dramatically, and it can put a lot of banks out of the game and out of the business. If the central banks are going to compete directly for retail accounts, it’s going to shrink the fees and business for a lot of banks. You are talking about cutting their income or putting them out of business. So, CBDC is highly controversial. One reason is people are beginning to wake up and realize, oh, I am no longer an insider. CBDC is going to turn me into a slave, and they are going to be able to take all my assets. You think they could lock you down during the pandemic? The CBDC is the ultimate lockdown tool, and they can lock anyone down whenever they feel like it.”
By the time MiCA makes it through the EU, will it be enough to effectively regulate the crypto industry on the continent?
On December 21, Big Law firm Sullivan & Cromwell filed a conflict disclosure with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware, where it was hoping to be officially appointed as lead counsel for the bankruptcy estate of Sam Bankman-Fried’s collapsed crypto house of cards – FTX, Alameda Research and its more than 100 opaque affiliates. Judge John Dorsey signed the order making Sullivan & Cromwell lead counsel on January 20, despite a mind-numbing list of conflicts of interests, including extensive past legal work for the FTX group and personal legal work for its now indicted kingpin, Sam Bankman-Fried. The disclosure showed that in addition to FTX and Alameda Research, Sullivan & Cromwell had 10 other current crypto clients, including four major crypto competitors to FTX — BlockFi, Coinbase, Gemini, and Kraken.
The price of one Bitcoin (BTC) in Nigeria has skyrocketed to the equivalent of $38,000 in the local currency, the naira.
At this point, the test network for the Norwegian CBDC uses not the public Ethereum ecosystem, but a private version of the enterprise blockchain Hyperledger Besu.
