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Quite an interesting and insightful piece of reporting from the Wall Street Journal into what is going on with the Biden campaign.
Put this up on the screen.
He's getting advice from an interesting place. The headline here is Jeffrey Katzenberg's very Hollywood advice for Joe Biden. Entertainment Mogul is a campaign advisor with Harrison Ford and Mick Jagger as presidential role models.
Here's what they mean by that.
Apparently, the movie Mogul has joined with other advisors in counseling President Biden to quote own his age and turn it into an asset. If Harrison Ford, eighty years old, can start in a new Indiana Jones movie and the Rolling Stones MC Jagger, who turns eighty next month can strut around the stadium stage. Katzenberg says, then Biden should lean into his longevity as a sign of wisdom and experience,
while offering a sense of humor about it. They go on to say that that's one of the things Katzenberg has brought to bear. The primary thing he's brought to bearra's massive fundraising. Yeah, also muddling in a campaign that yeah, is going to need it and doesn't have a lot of grassroots fundraising support. So that's probably the most important piece of what he's offering here. But what do you think of the advice?
Sager?
Yeah, Look, whenever we're looking at this one, you have an eighty year old who is literate, what is it an eighty year old who is looking to inspiration to other eighty year olds. I think that there might be maybe crystal a slight difference between Biden and Mick Jagger and some others, apparently George Harrison Ford from some of it might be a drug cocktail, to be quite honest, Yeah, exactly, I guess might start shooting whatever these guys are taking.
But also, look, you know what we've always talked about is like being eighty itself is not necessarily disqualification. It's about, well, when you're at that age, the risk of being mentally incapacitated as much higher, and are you beginning to show the signs of potentially getting to that point? And I think it's quite obvious if you look at Harrison Ford. The new trailer for Indiana Jones looks decent. I'm, you know, personally gonna I'm gonna wait until we actually see.
The whole movie.
Just like the last one Judgment, well, it's just the last one with such a disaster was screw It was horrible, the Crystal Skull. Well, Mick Jagger, of course, you know, has shown his proven ability, but with Biden, like we literally have him on camera every single day, so we know, you know what exactly it looks like and what some of the missteps are. So thus the comparison is just not the same. Both with Harrison Ford and with Mick Jagger.
The proof is in the performance, and the performance here is just not even comparable. So you can't take advice, Yeah, people.
Right, that's the thing is like, it's probably the best.
Advice you could do, for sure.
I agree, it's just.
The ability to execute on that advice that remains in significant doubt. So here's part of what Biden said about his age when he was asked about it. He was actually asked about a press conference with the South Korean president, and he said, quote, with regard to age, I can't even say, I guess how old I am. I can't even say the number. It doesn't register with me. I respect them taking a hard look at it. Talking about voters.
I take a hard look at it as well. I took a hard look at it before I decided to run. And I feel good. I feel excited about the prospects. I mean, one thing we have always said is if he had the ability to get out there on a debate stage and tangle with Bobby Kennedy and Marion or whoever and prove that he's up to the jug, then
he should do that. But they're probably they're probably I don't think this is the right ethical, moral strategy, but they're probably executing the best possible political strategy in keeping him out of the cameras and kind of hiding from people how he is actually doing at this point. So yeah, it'd be nice if he was in a position to avail himself of this advice and lean into his age or own his age, as they say, and demonstrate that he's still just as sharp and wily as ever.
But I just I don't know that you can really execute on this advice.
Yeah, I agree, And you know, look, Jeffrey Katzenberg complicated history. So on the one hand, I personally owe a lot of my childhood guy like Katzenberg. He was responsible for some of the greatest hits in Disney animation history. But also this is the guy who just did Quibbi, so maybe we should hold off on a he was more recent advice on communications, specifically in allaying younger people's fears, because it's not exactly like he knows what they want.
And I'm people what Quibbi was.
It was like a one billion dot maybe more boondoggle in terms of like short form content within an app. It included like the punked Rebuke and sixty minutes did deal it was time.
Yeah, they was a growing cash of people.
And they shut down almost overnight.
A bunch of high level what's that lady's name that I don't know anyway, so former Republic that's the one for resident. Yeah anyway, Yeah, that was kind of a disaster. I forgot about that. But anyway, the Biden White House is apparently listening because he's also bringing cash to the table and that's what it takes to get an audience with the president.
So there you go, folks, a stunning news story out of the SEC and JP Morgan. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen, guys. So SEC is finding JP Morgan subsidiary for deleting forty seven million emails, some related to an ongoing subpoena. The broker deal subsidiary of JP Morgan Chase four million dollars for accidentally deleting forty seven million emails for early twenty eighteen. Some of these emails were stopt by subpoenas in at least a
dozen regulatory investigation. The firm in late twenty twenty one agreed to pay one hundred and twenty five million in penalties for failing to preserve text messages and other electronic communications sent from January twenty eighteen and November of twenty twenty. So they are willing to pay over one hundred and twenty five million plus another four million or one hundred and twenty nine million dollars for a loss of forty seven million emails.
Do you believe a lost yeah, quote unquote, do you believe.
For one second that these emails were not deeply incriminating. And here's the thing, right, you're going to pay one hundred and twenty five million just for losing the emails. How much were they going to pay for keeping the email?
Yeah? Well, yeah, that's the real question.
I mean, here's what's amazing.
And the way that I mean, white collar crime just it's a cost of doing business. I mean, that's the way they've used. If you this penalty, this latest one of just four million dollars nothing to them, four million dollars for them, nothing, and they get to claim that they lost these millions and millions of emails. This is the third time that this hasn't It happened in late
twenty twenty one, as you reference. It also happened in two thousand and five when they were supposed to preserve electronic records from mid ninety nine to mid two thousand and two. JP Morgan's spokeswomen declined to comment on the latest sanction. And they claim, you know, oh, they began a project to delete their older communications and documents no longer required to be retained and oopsie, they just accidentally deleted tens of millions more that were the subject of
ongoing investigations, et cetera. Is just astonishing, Like these people they literally get away with anything.
They really do, they really do.
Yeah, I mean, look, when you have it here in front of you that you can have three separate instances where you delete emails for the SEC and you have to fined every single time, do you really believe that it can be an accidental loss. That's the other thing I have with CNBC, like, how can you in good conscience call this an accidental loss and just take them
at their word. They say that there were glitches in their project which identified documents not in fact being expunged, and that while troubles shooting that issue, employees of the firm executed deletion task on electronic communications from the entire first quarter of twenty eighteen. That these employees erroneously believed that all of those documents were coded in a way to prevent permanent deletion, even though that permanent deletion had happened multiple times before and since.
So here's here's the other part I like this settlement was actually they let the firm JP Morgan themselves suggest what settlement they wanted.
As one does, and then the.
SEC is like, all right, sure, but don't worry guys. As part of that settlement, the SEC also ordered the firm to cease and desist from committing any future violations.
So I'm sure they're.
Going to clean up their act here. They're going to fly right from here on out. They've learned their lesson with this, you know, pathetically small fine in the grand scheme of their massive wealth, and it'll all be good from here on it.
Right, very very intelligent people who are running this country inmates, truly are the ones who are running the asylum.
Fascinating moment.
US Envoy for Climate Change John Kerry appeared on French television, presumably to talk about some of his climate initiatives, but he was asked about the war in Ukraine, about whether Putin was a war criminal, and also about war crimes trials. When the French host decided to hit back a little bit and say, yeah, but what about Bush and Iraq and the war that you voted for.
Let's go and put this up there on the screen.
Unfortunately it was dubbed, so we only have subtitles in terms of what was asked here, and so he says, well, he didn't know that that was a lot referencing here post. You know the evidence that was produced, people couldn't have known that there was a lie. So no, again, I think they're stretching something that's not a constructive thing. Whenever he's asked there about Iraq, it's not constructive, he says, Sir, I am not going to read debate the Iraq war
here right now. We've spent a lot of time doing that. Previously, I was opposed to going in not true, thought it was the wrong thing to do, not true, but we gave the president the power regrettably the Congress based.
On a lie.
And when we knew it was a lie, people stood up and did the right thing.
Many many years did you set up and do the right thing?
That's interesting, so interesting enough.
I believe Carrie does speak fluent French in terms of that debate, in terms of that appearance, but I think that is a perfect view of the hypocrisy of the way that we look and that what we talk whenever we conduct ourselves in international affairs, and that's not China, that's not India. That's not an adversary or somewhere that's non Western.
That's France.
That's a country which obviously rejected going into Iraq with US, but that's a country which is in NATO ostensibly our ally right, these are the people who should see things somewhat our way. But even our version of events, though whenever it comes to the way that we want to cast certain events well certainly doesn't go over that way
with the rest of the world. And that is why I increasingly believe that the great divide right now is between like Western liberal thinking in terms of NATO, international World order and all that stuff, and then every other country on Earth, and increasingly the rest of the world is trending much more towards realism, towards multipolarity, towards a very traditional conduct of relations between states, whereas we're still stuck in like nineteen ninety one where we think it's
the unipolar moment and we have an invaded Iraq and had the devastation of Afghanistan. I've been humiliated and yeah, you know, and had all.
This other thing.
We still have some kind of moral authority. I mean, you really squandered that a Raq listen, it's the least devastating part of Iraq. But you know, any idea that we have moral authority on Russia invading Ukraine was really destroyed by that moment. And Bush and Cheney obviously the number one culprits and all of their architects and enablers, etc. But it was truly a bipartisan effort. I mean, Joe Biden was really central. John Carey, he's such a mess.
I don't even know.
How he could really say, like, I opposed it, and I thought it was wrong at the time, he voted for the authorization, and he was still I looked it up, he was still defending it even when he was running for president, So like, it's such an attempt to rewrite history that like, oh, you had it right all the
way along. And then he also offers, in the same breath the cope that you hear from Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and other Democrats in particular, but across the board who voted to justify what ended up being totally unjustifiable, which is that like, well, we couldn't have known, we couldn't have known it was a lie at the time. Oh really, because there were people who were out there, who were raising a hell of a lot of red flags.
At the time, there were a few very lonely journalists who had the story one hundred percent correct, that this was all the weapons, mass destructions and stuff was complete bullshit, and if anyone had had any curiosity at the time, you know, there were also plenty of young people like myself in college who thought this is bullshit and this is not a remote justification for you know, this up ending of the entire world, in this massive war that you were getting us into, which you know, more than
twenty years later, we're still still dealing with the aftermath of So it's kind of astonishing to me, honestly, Sager that I mean, number one, just the dishonesty of Kerry.
But why do you feel the need to defend Bush at this point.
Well, because it's about you know, it's it's not about Bush. It reflects on him, about him. Yeah, that's what dude. Yeah, I mean I think that that's the ultimate problem. I mean, like you referent, like I was eleven years old whenever the US invaded Iraq, and even I remember the day.
I remember exactly where I was sitting. I remember the newspaper.
I remember the teacher social studies teacher, and I was, you know, shitster even at that time. And I said, wasn't this about bin Laden And she was like, well, you know, according to the president, so doam was supporting bin Lott. And I was like, well, what about weapons of mass destruction? I was like, what does that have to do with anything? And everybody's just giving me a
very nasty look. I'm from a hometown where if George H. W. Bush has his library, so the Bush family they are like gods, or they were at that time where I was.
And yeah, it didn't take a genius to figure it out.
Yeah, you know it was.
You don't have to be as smart.
You don't have to be smart to think, oh, this whole smoking gun is mushroom cloud based on yellow cake and fake intel around al Qaeda, like this, this doesn't add up.
It seems fishy.
And you know, a lot of people had questions secretly at the time, they just didn't voice them.
Well, also a lot of people have said, you know what, even if.
It's even if it's true, not worth not worth it.
You know, I also think it's worth reflecting this for a minute on the decision was made after Bush is you know, out of office and Democrats are in charge, and there was an opportunity of like, maybe we should investigate what happened here, maybe there should be charges against the you know, most pre eminent work criminals who brought us to this catastrophe, and Bush in particular, And the decision was made that for the good of the country
and the healing and bringing together of the country, that there should be no elite accountability for those things. And
it was the easier path at the time. It definitely you know, probably smoothed the transition into democratic power, etc. But I think it left a real lasting damage on the body politic because it just showed that even the most brazen of lies and criminality, if you had the right amount of power and you had the right friends or enough powerful people were sort of complicit with you, which was the real problem for them, You're going to
get away with it. And so even as we you know, look at like the Trump indictments now and the charges that he's facing for actual real criminality that I think he more than deserves, we may have been in a better position to convince more than half the country that
holding elites accountable for their crimes. Is the thing to do if we had you gone after the Bush Erab people, gone after other American presidents who arguably created committed worse crime, certainly than you know, holding onto classified documentary.
I that's very well sided, Crystal, Fox and Friends is reacting to some of what continues to come out, including that tape CNN got of Donald Trump and the classified documents who was allegedly waiving around that factors into some of the prosecution on those charges of Special Council prosecution on those charges. Let's actually, Crystal, I can't even describe it. You can never capture these things with words.
Let's just play the clip.
You know, regarding the leaking of this particular tape, when you look at what Gillian just said where she said Trump posted on true Social the deranged Special prosecutor Jack Smith, working in conjunction with the DOJ and FBI, illegally leaked and spun a tape and transcript of me, which is actually an exoneration. So you know what, if Trump thinks it's an exoneration of him, perhaps somebody on his side actually did the leaking. To CNN and Maggie.
Haberman that's amazing, Cokee.
This is actually it's an exoneration, so actually it was probably good for Trump there Pal linked it.
The metals part of that is actually quite interesting though, where he's saying this is Steve Doocey is saying, he's admitting he's got classified documents and quote, clearly Mark Meadows has oh this is from Brian kill Meat. He says, clearly Mark Medos has flipped, he has disappeared as chief of staff. He knows everything, and he seems to be in control of these tapes. He would think, or his biographer does in a book that nobody read, Kill Me to Ads.
And that's what's interesting.
To me from their theory is that Mark Meadow's biographer is allegedly the person who is you know, we've heard from the indictment that the other person on the tape is a writer, and nobody's really been able to figure out who that writer is. You know, he's a journalist. I heard someone throwing around like different names. I won't
even name them because it's not substantiated, but journalists. And in fact, it actually could just be that this was a Meadows ghostwriter, and that's actually been reported out that this was apparently somebody who was helping a Mark Meadows memoir. So then it raises this question of has Mark Meadows flipped in all of these because apparently Trump is also being investigated for well we know that he is for January sixth stuff, but the Special Council is apparently looking
into January sixth stuff too. Mark Meadows is obviously a huge part of all of that, is chief of staff at the time. We've seen some of the text messages, and so for this to then make it not just to see an end but into the Special Council, into their indictment.
That's kind of interesting.
Yeah, I mean, if I was a medowside flip, right, I mean, for real, he's I'm sure in legal jeopardy, you know, and no guarantees that Trump would win and be in a position to pardon him, no guarantees that he would pardon him if he did get, you know, back into the White House, so you know, if he was offered a deal to cooberate. First of all, I mean, it is a big problem for Trump because we've been right understandably talking about the classified document stuff recently because
that's what the latest charges came down. But they're moving forward with you know, investigations into January sixth and fake electors and whatever. Mark Badows was there for all of this stuff, so he no doubt knows the you know, inner mindset and potentially has some you know, other information that he could provide her other recordings or whatever. So the theory is basically that it was Mark Badow's ghostwriter that was the one and the other person in the room.
That's the writer that's in the room.
Because you hear a Trump.
Aid who is embarrassingly sickophantic. You hear Trump being classic quintessential Trump doctor amount Anthony Wiener and like asking for the diet coke?
Can we get some cokes in here? I mean it said before. I've heard it too. Crystal will sometimes just.
Be like just demand it on.
Yeah, like we need some cokes in here.
When you need a diet coke, you need a die of coke.
There's there's a button under the.
But yeah, that would be if I know truly did flip that. I have to think is an issue for Trump, but he has struggled to explain away this tape.
He's claiming.
Trump is claiming that the papers you hear.
Rustling like it was just bravado. He didn't really have these classified documents. Didn't he say they were like building plans or something like that.
That's what I was just going to pivot to.
Here is Donald Trump himself, speaking of copes, gives an interview on his plane to Semaphore and ABC News I believe on I believe this was on Tuesday night. He says, quote, I would say it was bravado, if you want to know the truth, it was bravado. I was just talking and just holding up papers and talking about them. But I had no documents. I didn't have any documents, he said. I just held up a whole pile of my desk is loaded up with papers. I have papers from twenty
five different things. And yeah, this is yeah, he's selling.
A locker room talk defense, right, isn't it sophisticated locker room.
It's the same though. It's like, yeah, it was just you know, it's just bullshit.
Well, so he had told Fox On this was all so Tuesday quote that he had plans building plans, did I And then he goes to seem Before and ABC News and says, did I use the word plans? What I'm referring to his magazines, newspapers, plans of buildings, plans of buildings, you know, building plans.
I had plans of a golf course. So it's just a what to make of it? Who knows?
At this point, Yeah, right, it's I mean, if this was the only piece of evidence that they had against some of the classified documents, then you might be like, maybe you can try to create some reasonable doubt and maybe he's got a shot at But given that they appear to have a lot more than that, including you know, surveillance tapes of movement boxes around and getting his lawyers to lie and all this sort of stuff, or at least lying to his lawyers and then getting them to
repeat the lie, you know, just wiggling out of this one potentially, I think it's not going to be enough. But this one is also pretty damning. I mean, you got the papers rustling in the background. You have him actually saying, yeah, these I could have declassified these documents when I was president, but I didn't, and they are still secret and confidential because I did not declassify them. Like right, that's devastating for the defense they were planning to mout.
But at this point I mean.
I think all he really cares about is like the political defense because in terms of a case, you never know, maybe you get a juror who's just like super pro Trump and they're not going to convict him no matter what. But if you take him out of it, the details of the case a pretty.
Open and shit, right.
And I think that's why there's so much focus on this audio. Like, first of all, media is always going to gravitate towards something when there's audio of it actually happening, like that's fun.
Yeah.
But secondly it's because he says the thing about these documents not being declassified, right, I could have declassified them. And what people are trying to ascertain now is the severity, like, because there's such an overclassification problem, is what he's waving around with this writer about I mean about.
Iran and what he's talking about with Mark Millie.
Is it about golf courses or is it what we've heard from the Special Council was in those stacks of papers that were being shuffled around mar al Lago and actually pertaining to.
A nuclear secrets.
That's a pretty legitimate question because it gets to how Donald Trump was actually using the classified information he had at mar A Lago, a den of spies, an obvious den of spy activity. Yes, so there's a pretty legitimate question.
And people have floated these theories that he was using it to give to foreign leaders and he was selling it for Trump organization business ideas, or is he just keeping it as trophies or is it a little bit of both I don't know, or is he keeping it Like the most legitimate defense he has is that he's keeping it for his own records, because the intelligence community
has tried to screw him over so many times. He wants to know what everything said, what was said, and what they may be using against him.
Now, see, if I were Donald Trump.
That is the most legitimate argument that I would have, and I would focus on it.
I don't think that's the case.
Well, here's the thing.
The remember, early on when there was a discussion about these classified documents, there was a theory that all the classified documents had to do with Russia Gate, and so he was keeping them because a proof of whatever deep
state plot, et cetera, et cetera. But now that we know what was in the documents, I mean that the documents, some of them may have had to do with Russia, Gabe, but there was a lot else that was in there, including you know, very highly sensitive information that isn't the type of stuff that's just like, oh it's overclassified that if anything should be a government secret, the stuff about our nuclear weapons program should probably be a government secret.
Like that's a pretty legit one that I think everyone would pretty.
Much agree on.
So I give less credence to that argument about Trump's mentality. There's no evidence that he was actively like selling this information. Not that I put it past him, but just you know, you gotta like get there was nothing offered in this
indictment that would lend credence to that view. But in some cases, the risk that you have all this so easily accessible in a wildly insecure place where you have all these people, some of them already documented as being FOREGN spies coming and going, I mean, it could be just as damaging and ultimately to national security.
So uh yeah, not a good, not a good set of effact.
I was gonna say, Yeah, it's not good either way. There's there's no uh, there's no real cope here that's good.
It's not going to work out for it just.
Yeah, this particular case, it's just it's too hard for him to wriggle out of Yeah on that point. Wow, the question of whether metals flipped is interesting, but we'll keep an eye on that for sure.
Imagine a future where every transaction you make, every set you spend, is monitored, trapped, and controlled by a single entity. There will be no fear mongering in this segment. But this dystopian reality could be a lot closer than you think with the introduction of bed now, a new digital payment system that could give the federal government a direct line into your financial transactions, which could fundamentally impact all
of our privacy and freedom. So what exactly is fed now while launching July first, twenty twenty three, pretty much as we speak. Fed Now is a new instant payment system run by the Federal Reserve. It's designed to enable banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions to deliver end to end payment services to their customers twenty four to seven, three hundred and sixty five days a year. They say
the service will roll out in stages. The initial launch will include core clearing and settlement functionality, requests for payment capability, and tools to support reconciliation, basically the processes that take place behind the scenes that you probably don't even think about at all, with making sure that the money that is zipping around the country is being accounted for properly
and no fraud is happening. Future phases will introduce additional capabilities that are more consumer facing, such as instantaneous peer to peer account transfers and online bill pay. All good stuff, right, a much needed advancement in technology. Some are saying.
Today, when you, for instance, to posit a check, it takes three to ten days for the check to clear the other bank, and that system is operating like the nineteen thirties right now, and they're trying to move it into the digital world. In a digital world that should take three to ten seconds. Overall, this is good. Overall, this is good.
So you might be thinking, instant payments, don't we already have something like that? The answer is yes, we do. Back in November of twenty seventeen, the Clearinghouse introduced the first real time payment service in the United States, called the RTP network, and since it's launched, the network has steadily grown. In Q three of twenty twenty two, forty five million transactions for a total of close to twenty
billion dollars were processed through the RTP network. If you are a free market proponent, the introduction of FED noow to compete with RTP could be seen as a good thing, spurring innovation and price competition. That being said, while the clearinghouse is RTP and FED now are very similar in its capabilities and fee structure, there is one major difference governance clearing houses. RTP is operated by a consortium of banks and fednow is essentially controlled by one bank, the
Federal Reserve Bank. This has raised some eyebrows among folks who are distrustful of centralized financial planning, one of them being Professor Richard Werner and economists well known for his research on monetary policy, banking systems, and economic development.
You know, the central bankers want to compete against banks, so we can't really trust them anymore to really take the benevolent you know, policies that are good for society and create stability. And maybe there's a different agenda.
Interesting what agenda might that be? Because on one hand, real time transactions can be a boon for fraud prevention. Like I previously mentioned, if something suspicious does occur, it can be identified and dealt with immediately. But on the flip side, this real time logging of transactions means that a detailed record of your financial activity is being created and stored. Every purchase, every bill paid, every penny sent to a friend for that pizza last night. It's all logged in
real time by a government backed entity. To reiterate, fed now is run by the Federal Reserve Bank, which in theory operates independently from the federal government, but it does maintain a close relationship with them, so it's not inconceivable that transaction data could be shared under certain circumstances. The question then becomes under which circumstances might this data be shared?
For criminal investigations, for tax purposes, economic analysis. These are all questions that we don't yet have answers to the past few years, the Chinese government has trialed similar technologies in an attempt to expand its surveillance.
State cosmetics, groceries, a new phone, a year's worth of launching deterchents. Citizens of the Chinese city of Sucho entered an official lottery to win up to two one hundred yen or roughly thirty dollars from the government in order to spend it in any way they like. But the money that the people won was not physical cash, it was digital un China's actually already pretty advanced in this regard, and that many people hardly use cash at all in
their daily lives. They mostly pay for things through alley Pay, which is owned by ant Group, or under beechat Pay, which is owned by ten Cent. Our understanding is that what the People's Bank of China wants to do is quite similar, except that it wouldn't happen necessarily through alley Pay or through WeChat Pay. It would happen through a separate app that the PBOC has created that would allow
people to pay that way on a micro scale. And this is something that many in the West would probably not be comfortable with and many in China frankly would not be comfortable with.
Is that it would allow.
Authorities to be able to track precisely how you or my neighbor, or the personnel the street they're spending the money, or they're spending their money on buying things they shouldn't be buying, whatever however you define that are they are they gambling with their money? Are they doing this or that with their money?
Sound is still be in well, well, this can become a reality with a centrally run system like fednow. For the record, FED officials and banking experts say the new fed now service does not give the agency additional surveillance and enforcement authorities. Quote. While there are many sound concerns around fednow being a necessary expansion of the Federal Reserve footprint, I do not share that same concern that fednow will expand surveillance. I don't know would you expect them to
say anything different? Let me know what you think. But a closer look at fednow's published privacy policy reveals that the terms that have been laid out are very vague, perhaps by design, similar to private networks. Fednow is quote authorized to collect and use your personal information for a variety of purposes, one of them being to comply with legal requirements. But if the FED is buddy buddy with the folks who make the law, you can see why some people are getting concerned.
So the Central Bank, which is the bank regulator, used to be an an umpire, is suddenly stepping into the arena, into the game, is participating, is competing against the banks.
That's an extraordinary development.
You see, as with many cases relating to centralized expansion of power, they claim to not have such an authority until all of a sudden they do. Another important point. Typically, when it comes to private digital payment systems, you have the power to choose which platform you want to use or not use any of them at all. But with FED now, the choice isn't entirely in your hands in the first phase. It's up to the banking institutions whether
or not they decide to implement FED now. If your bank decides to use FED now, your transactions will be processed through this system, whether you're comfortable with it or not. So yes, While the FED continues to assure and reassure us that there is quote unquote nothing nefarious about VED now, it would also behoove us to pay attention to what else they've been cooking in the oven. Could FED now
be just a precursor to something even bigger? As presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Junior astutely observed, could FED now be just a stepping stone, a first step towards the implementation of a US central bank digital currency? What is a central bank digital currency? And how would an introduction of such a digital currency impact our financial privacy and our
ability to control our own money. Well you can find out in part two of this deep dive into fed now hosted on my channel fifty one to forty nine with James lee Or. We're going to tackle these questions head on, so join me by clicking on the link below. But before you do so, don't forget like this video so more people see it and also subscribe to Breaking Points if you haven't done so yet. Thank you for your time today and I hope to see you in the next video.