Project Embridge: Central Bank Digital Currency Revolution and Risks

Saudi Arabia's participation in Project embridge signals a potential challenge to the dominance of the US dollar in international trade.

### The Emergence of CBDCs and the Global Monetary Power Shift
* 🏦 " "Project Embridge" is a China-dominated Central Bank digital currency cross-border trial involving the central banks of China, Hong Kong, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, and now Saudi Arabia, aiming to **test CBDCs for cross-border trade and payments**.
* 💵  The US dollar's Petrodollar system has allowed the US to flourish for over 50 years, but countries are now seeking to be **less dependent on it**, leading to the rise of **CBDCs**.
* 🪙  Cryptocurrencies, with their decentralized nature and underlying technology, have influenced central governments to adopt **CBDCs into their systems**.
* 🌐  CBDCs are reshaping the world of finance by offering a new approach to **recording ownership of assets** and providing various benefits such as **direct stimulus relief during crises** and **lower transaction costs**.
* 🎈  The US dollar's ability to **export inflation through the Petrodollar system** acts as an "**exit valve**" for its economy, allowing it to **control inflation**.
* 🕰️  CBDCs empower countries with the ability to **monitor and control every transaction**, potentially posing risks to **privacy and individual freedoms**.
* 🇺🇸  The US, while launching its own instant payment system (FedNow), has expressed skepticism and concerns about CBDCs, with the Federal Reserve Chairman emphasizing that **individual accounts for all Americans is not something they would propose**.
* 🌍  While the US dollar remains the majority currency used in global trade, the emergence of CBDCs represents a **significant challenge to the existing Petrodollar system**, marking a **global competition for a new monetary system**.

all right, so the next phase of the changing World Order is starting. After Saudi Arabia drastically reduced their use of dollars, we're seeing another massive economic shift starting to take place. Because Saudi Arabia has joined a China-dominated Central Bank digital currency cross-border trial, and it's called Project embridge. This could be another step towards less of the world's oil trade being done in US Dollars. The Bank for International Settlements announced on Wednesday that Saudi Arabia is now officially a full participant in Project embridge. Now, this project, which started in 2021, is a collaboration between the central banks of China, Hong Kong, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates to test CBDCs for cross-border trade and payments. And they just reached what's called the MVP or the minimum viable product stage, which means this project is not just some conceptual idea or a prototype, it's happening for real this time. So let me show you exactly what's happening, why it's happening, and how this will affect us and our future generations. So let's get into it. Hi, my

name is Andre J. Hope you're doing well. Come for the finance and stay for another boring macroeconomics part three video. I'm starting to think these aren't so boring, but initiate dramatic music and storytelling. Here we go. So when countries trade with each other, at the center of their commodities trading of wheat and corn and energy is the Petro dollar system that powers the entire thing. Now, that system has allowed the United States to flourish for over 50 years, thanks to money flowing in from all over the world into US assets and treasury bonds, which has allowed the US to not only borrow money but to sell that debt to other countries as well. That's how the US has become famous for being the number one exporter of inflation, foreign aid, and US dollars. What's interesting is that there are now more $100 bills in circulation than there are $1 bills, but what's even more interesting is that there is more $100 bills in circulation outside the United States than there is inside of it. In fact, 80% of all circulating $100 bills are

now outside the United States, and that is partially why the United States is one of the few countries in the entire world that can control its Consumer Price inflation, and it does that using the Federal Reserve Central banking system. It's why this week the Consumer Price Index, which is how we measure inflation, went down just like everyone expected, partially because the US is able to give all of this excess money to other countries. Out of all the superpowers that the US has, this is one of the top three most important ones, and now there's a new player that's challenging the old system with a new one called embridge, which is a central bank digital currency. Now for decades, the US dollar has held the world Reserve currency status, much like the French lira and British pound did back in their time, but now countries want to be less dependent on the Petro dollar system, which is why we're seeing them shift their old currency into new digital currencies. Now you might be thinking, hold on, isn't money already digital? I use my credit cards, my mobile banking.

apps and to that extent, it's digital, but not exactly. We have more or less the same system that we've been using for hundreds of years. Imagine this: it's the 1600s, people are using gold coins to buy things with, but gold is heavy to carry, easy to steal, hard to divide, and not that hard to fake. So then comes the idea of paper money, and this was revolutionary. We could use this to represent this. We could deposit the gold in the bank to keep it secret, keep it safe for another time. Fast forward a couple of decades though, and the money is spent. Now these pieces of paper represent nothing other than debt itself. That was the 20th century when we got off the gold standard and we moved to digital banking. This is where our money is now represented by numbers on a computer screen, but behind the numbers are still traditional Banks and middlemen that have what's called counterparty risk. So let me give you an example: when you use apps like Apple pay, Venmo, and PayPal, and you're sending money to someone, you're

not sending them money in real time, you're just sending them an IOU or claims to money. But there has to be someone in the middle of those transaction actions that verifies that the money you're sending is there in the first place. Those Banks don't do those jobs for free, they charge us fees, and they don't want to work on weekends. That's the system we have in place right now. But then fast forward to the 21st century and we get the birth of cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrencies are, of course, completely digital. They're decentralized, they're not controlled by anyone, so there's no need for a middleman to verify anything. And over time, that system grows, it turns Skeptics into Believers, and Believers into investors. Now, of course, crypto has its own problems like volatility and Market manipulation, but the underlying technology that makes them work is better than the system we have today. And it's so much better that these benefits couldn't just be ignored by the central governments of the world. So they're

starting to adopt them into their own system, and that's where CBDCs come into play. Today, we are in the midst of a technological revolution that is fundamentally changing our world, reshaping how we communicate, access information, and purchase goods and services. Recently, the rise of distributed ledger technology, which offers a new approach to recording ownership of assets, has allowed for the creation of a range of new financial products and services, including cryptocurrencies. A CBDC is a true digital version of a country's fiat currency. Remember, fiat just means created by the central government, so think of CBDC as almost like another country's cryptocurrency. It uses the same technology to transfer value somewhere else. The question is, why are central governments around the world creating this system? Why are they participating in crypto technology? How is that useful? Well, imagine there's an earthquake somewhere or a natural disaster. We can have direct stimulus relief to people during a crisis without any sort of delay, and that means no lost checks in the mail. There's a lot of

different benefits to the system, but are they really doing it to benefit some people? What's the catch? The catch is that the next time a country needs to buy its energy and its oil from another country, like Saudi Arabia, it won't need to rely on the old Petro dollar system. Now, in the past, if that ever happened and countries traded, and they did that outside the US dollar, the US could still intervene. It could shut these transactions down immediately because everyone still uses the freeway of the traditional banking system. But this new system can exist outside that Highway. Once it goes live at scale, no more permission will be needed from US Banks. That's how these CBDCs could potentially challenge the dominance of the US dollar in International Trade. Remember this chart. It shows the dollar share as a global Reserve currency is at a 14-year low, and this pivot could definitely speed things up. This is where project Embridge comes in. What it is, is a central bank digital currency that allows the transfer of value across the world instantaneously, very, very cheaply.

and interestingly, how it does this is it uses something called DT or distributed ledger technology, which is the same technology that powers Bitcoin. It is a blockchain, but like all blockchains, it's limited by a law of nature. The speed of light, for example, has a cosmic speed limit. It can never be faster than 186,000 m a second. The law of gravity says what comes up must come down, unless another force acts upon it, and the law of conservation of energy says energy can never be created nor destroyed; it can only be converted. Blockchain technology also has sort of a cosmic limit, and that the law says blockchains can master three specific things, but they can only truly master two at any given time. We have never created a technology that has broken this law of blockchains. Now, Embridge is no different. They chose to master security and SC availability, but they left out decentralization. Now, for global trade between countries and central banks, decentralization is not all that important, but if you're a user of the currency, a lack of decentralization

comes with its own set of risks and downsides, and before I show you what they are, I just want to first show you how popular this mbridge system is actually becoming. So far, it has Switzerland's Bank for International Settlements. It has the central banks of China, Hong Kong, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates testing this technology right now, and they've given access to the sandbox version to 27 other official entities, including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the central banks of countries like Norway, South Korea, Turkey, along with banking and development from HSBC, Goldman Sachs, and the New York branch of the Federal Reserve. So there's some massive players involved in the development of these CBDCs, and you can actually see this for yourself, just how much the world of money is evolving in front of our very eyes. You can go to the Atlantic Council website, which tracks the development of these currencies all around the world. So far, roughly 134 countries and currency unions representing 98% of the global GDP who are exploring these right now, 44 of them

for example, are in the research phase. 30 countries are already in development, 36 of them are in the pilot testing phase, and three have already been launched. And as a side note, Switzerland's bis also announced that the embridge platform uses ethereum solidity smart contract language and the ethereum virtual machine. Kind of crazy to put into perspective how a crypto technology is being used as the basis for a new monetary system. The question now is how, how does a central bank digital currency affect everyone and what are the real risks. And let me break this down because it's different depending on where you live. If you live outside the US, it can be a good thing. According to the World Bank, there are 1.4 billion people that are unbanked. They have no bank accounts and no way to get a hold of these Payment Systems when they need the most. CBDs could give access to digital money to people without bank accounts. It could also lower transaction costs, which right now are super expensive. The average cost of sending $200

internationally, right now is about 65%. And CBDCs can significantly lower these costs. Now, if you're living inside the USA, it could also be a good thing in the same exact ways, but it could also be a bad thing because according to the Atlantic Council's prediction, it could fragment the global economy and threaten the US dollar. There's a lot of bad side effects of what could happen. And I did a detailed video somewhere up here, but just to recap, remember that all economies essentially work like a balloon. This is what a normal economy looks like in its normal state. And when a country needs to solve a problem, it throws money at the problem and it gets that money just by printing it. But printing money has the side effect of inflating that economy's balloon, and you can only inflate the balloon so high and cause the prices to go up so high before people can't afford to buy anything and the balloon and the economy explodes. Fortunately for the Petro dollar system, it has this exit valve.

right here without the Escape valve countries around the world have had their currencies and economies collapse their balloons exploded because they printed too much money and a major reason why that has never happened in the US despite having print printed trillions of dollars is because we export those dollars to countries for their energy global trade and conflict so the US money balloon is always able to deflate now in the same very nerdy analogy of mine lowering interest rates which is what the Federal Reserve is expected to do at least once this year in September means increasing the elasticity of this balloon. I don't know if youve ever tried blowing up a balloon but it's really hard to do on on that first expansion. It just makes it easier with lower interest rates and raising interest rates has the opposite effect. Now also along the same lines of this analogy a central bank digital currency that competes with this Petro dollar system has the effect of shrinking this balloon's exit valve potentially to a subatomic level to a tiny level which means if this balloon represents

inflation. It will take this balloon a lot longer to deflate back down to its original size. That just means inflation will stay around a lot longer than we want it to. And we've all seen what inflation does to our economy - what happens to affordability, home prices, asset prices, food, gas, and other cost of living items. But there's another bigger problem, and it will affect everyone that uses this new Central Bank digital currency system because it empowers the country or the bank that controls it with the ability to set an expiration date on money. This has happened in China before because the digital Yuan has an expiration date - use it by a certain date or you will lose it. Now hold on a minute, why would money ever have an expiration date on it? That makes no sense. Keynesian economics. But one of the reasons why is because it allows the government or the central bank to encourage people to artificially consume. Sounds complicated, but think of it like this: if there's a recession or worse, a depression, the way to get us out

of one is to encourage people to go out, borrow money, and spend that money. But whenever there's a recession, people are not spending money, they're saving money. They're scared of losing jobs. They are not spending money. And so, how do you get people to grow the economy if no one wants to spend? You put an expiration date on it, because that's what will artificially encourage people to go out, consume, and spend their money, or else they'll lose their savings. Now, that is a massive risk, and time will tell how the superpower will be used, but it's something important to pay attention to. But there is another risk, and that's the risk of privacy. And this is one of the reasons why the US is also sitting this one out. Now, in March 2024, this year, the chairman of the Federal Reserve said that they want nothing to do with Central Bank digital currencies for precisely all these reasons. First of all, I want to say that we're nowhere near recommending or let alone adopting a central bank digital

currency in any form. But the idea is that as technology has evolved, money has become digital. So, but the government doesn't issue digital money. It's digital. If you look at your bank account, people don't hold those physical dollars. They're digital. So, the thought was that the government could create a digital form of money that people could then transfer among themselves. Now, of course, that raises a concern that if you, if that were a government account, that the government would see all your transactions. And that's just something we would not, we would not stand for or do or propose here in the United States. That is how, how it works in China, for example, but that's not what if we were to ever to do something like this. And we're a very long way from even thinking about it. We would do this through the banking system. The last thing we would want, we, the Federal Reserve, would want, would be to have individual accounts for all Americans or any Americans for that matter. Only banks have accounts at the Fed. That's the way we're going to keep.

it people don't need to worry about a central bank digital currency. Nothing like that is remotely close to happening anytime soon. So what we're seeing happening right now is a competition on a global level for the better monetary system. Now, even though these CBDs empower these countries to go around the US petrodollar system, it also gives them a superpower that comes with its own set of risks, like the ability for them to monitor and control every single transaction, including controlling what's inside of your bank accounts. Now, in July last year of 2023, the Federal Reserve Bank of the US launched something called the FED now system in your bank account. The Federal Reserve announcing it has gone live with its new FedNow instant payment system. A system that should allow households and businesses to send payments and receive money immediately without those troubling three-day holds on checks and waiting for payments to clear in the sender's account and waiting for the bank to open on Monday or after a holiday. That system was not a CBDC.

was a settlement system for the banks not a digital currency based on blockchain. But people are still skeptical in right l so so pay attention to it for now. Data shows the US dollar is still used in the majority of all global trading happening in the world today. Now for now, I don't think the Petro dollar system is going anywhere based on the data that we have today. But the Petro dollar system is being challenged by another system that is not perfect. It's also flawed, but it's good enough that countries around the world are accepting it and they're testing it right now. Now on a global level, and we are watching it unfold. We are living in extremely interesting times in the world of Finance right now, and I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments down below what you think Saudi Arabia joining mbridge really means, what you think about Central Bank digital currencies in general, and if you think this new system is good enough to challenge the old Petro dollar system. I'd love to know your thoughts as always.

I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. Smash the like button, subscribe if you haven't already. Don't forget to grab your free stocks. Links are down below and track them automatically with a spreadsheet linked down below in my patreon. Thank you so much for watching this video. I'd love to see you back here on Monday and Friday, sometimes on Wednesday. I'll see you soon. Bye-bye.

After Ditching the Dollar - Saudi Arabia Joins mBridge (Central Bank Digital Currency)

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Saudi Arabia Joins China-Dominated Project embridge

Saudi Arabia's participation in Project embridge, a cross-border trial of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) dominated by China, marks a significant shift in the world's economic landscape.

The project, involving China, Hong Kong, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates, has moved beyond the conceptual stage to the minimum viable product (MVP) phase, indicating its real-world implementation.

This development reflects a growing effort to reduce dependency on the US dollar and the traditional Petrodollar system, challenging the long-standing dominance of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency.

The Evolution of Money: From Paper to Cryptocurrency

Paper money revolutionized the way we represent value, but it is now mostly a representation of debt.

Cryptocurrency has emerged in the 21st century as a decentralized and digital form of money, challenging traditional banking systems.

The rise of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) is changing the financial landscape, offering a digital version of a country's fiat currency and providing a more efficient way to offer stimulus relief and respond to crises.

The Impact of Project Embridge on the US Dollar Dominance

Project Embridge is a central bank digital currency (CBDC) that aims to revolutionize international trade by allowing instantaneous and cost-effective value transfers across the world.

The system uses distributed ledger technology, similar to Bitcoin, but sacrifices decentralization for security and availability, which may pose risks for users of the currency.

Project Embridge has gained significant traction, with the involvement of major financial institutions and the testing of the technology by several central banks, signaling a global evolution in the world of money.

The Impact of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC)

CBDCs are being developed and tested in numerous countries, with some already launched, using Ethereum technology.

Outside the US, CBDCs could provide digital money access to the unbanked and reduce international transaction costs.

However, inside the US, CBDCs may fragment the global economy and threaten the dominance of the US dollar, potentially causing negative effects.

The introduction of CBDCs could also impact the elasticity of the economy, potentially disrupting the current financial system.

The Potential Impact of Central Bank Digital Currencies

Central Bank digital currencies could prolong inflation due to the ability to set an expiration date on money, artificially encouraging spending.

The use of digital currencies also raises concerns about privacy and government surveillance of financial transactions.

The US Federal Reserve is hesitant to adopt central bank digital currencies due to these potential risks and is currently a long way from considering it.

The Global Competition for Monetary Supremacy

There is currently a global competition for a better monetary system, including the rise of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs).

The US Federal Reserve launched the FedNow instant payment system in 2023, but it is not a CBDC, causing some skepticism.

Despite challenges, the US dollar still dominates global trading, but the Petrodollar system is being tested and may face a challenge in the future.