As I speak, there are efforts afoot to change what America has taken for granted for so long…the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency, the currency in which most global trade and finance occurs.
Owning the world’s reserve currency grants America huge economic advantages. Among other things, it makes the goods we import cheaper. And it makes the cost of all manner of loans, from mortgages to credit cards to car leases, much more affordable than they would otherwise be.
America’s enemies have long wanted to steal away these economic advantages from Uncle Sam. So, they came together and devised a plan…
I first caught wind of this plan around a decade ago in a forested suburb of Estonia, from a former high-level Soviet official. When I first wrote about what I’d learned, few people wanted to believe me. The plans sounded too big, too ambitious. But now, the cat is out of the bag.
Last year, America’s biggest economic and military rivals formally announced the first aspect of their plan to attack the dollar.
But based on my interview over a decade ago, I know there’s much more to come. And if their plan succeeds (in fact, even if it only partially succeeds) in undermining the dollar, it will be devastating for the U.S. economy and our wealth.
That is the heart of this month’s issue of the Global Intelligence Letter. It begins in the woods of northern Estonia, with my meeting with a former member of the old Soviet Union’s highest political body. And it ends with a way you can protect your wealth from the plans now underway…using the same tool that will be used to target the dollar.
Get all the details in your January cover story.
Our second story this month comes from Igor Pejic, a banker and award-winning author.
Igor’s article centers on the rise of a new kind of crypto called central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs. These are crypto versions of the dollars or pounds or euros we use every day, but built and controlled by central banks.
These currencies will herald an entirely new era for money since CBDCs are programmable. This means governments could actually program money so that it can be spent only on certain items or at certain businesses. Or they could even “turn off” your money entirely.
Today, countries covering 95% of the world are building or studying a CBDC. By the end of the decade, we’ll all be living with digital dollars and euro and yen. But already one country is well along the road to CBDC adoption: China.
So, Igor looks under the hood of the Chinese experiment with CBDCs to give us a glimpse of where the world is headed, and to highlight the ethical and moral dilemmas the world faces as digital currency replaces physical bills and coins in the years ahead.
You can read Igor’s story in your January issue.
Finally, in this month’s Intel Updates, I draw your attention to a product that emerged at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas earlier this month. It’s a pair of eyeglasses that can translate written and verbal text on the fly. How very cool!
As someone who regularly finds himself in foreign lands, the ability to read menus and road signs, and to understand when people say things in their native tongue is, to me, one of the greatest products anyone could create.
Even more significantly, these glasses are a sign of how augmented reality and the metaverse will soon invade our real-world lives.
All of this and more is in your January issue.
