(The Epoch Times)—The International Monetary Fund (IMF) released a handbook for global central banks regarding the development and implementation of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).
The IMF’s “Central Bank Digital Currency Virtual Handbook” published last week pointed out that the increased use of CBDCs can “reduce dollarization” of the global economy—a situation where countries move away from relying on the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency. De-dollarization would push up borrowing costs in the United States, making loans expensive for businesses and individuals, thus affecting economic growth. Stock market values can also crash, reducing the savings and investments of Americans.
In addition to de-dollarization, a CBDC “could increase risks of flight to safety from retail bank deposits in periods of market stress.” During times of market volatility, customers withdraw their deposits and move it into safe assets to avoid losing money in scenarios like bank collapses.
If CBDCs were available, pulling out funds from a bank and putting them in such assets will come across as a safe option for many people, thus triggering a bank run.
The organization pointed out that CBDCs could offer “a safe store of value and efficient means of payment, which can increase competition for deposit funding, raise banks’ share of wholesale funding, and lower bank profits.”
The IMF handbook was published as the organization’s Director Kristalina Georgieva promoted the use of CBDCs during the Singapore FinTech Festival on Nov. 15, arguing that such digital currencies could bring an end to the cash-based economy.
“CBDCs can replace cash, which is costly to distribute in island economies,” she said during a speech. “CBDCs would offer a safe and low-cost alternative to cash. They would also offer a bridge to go between private monies and a yardstick to measure their value, just like cash today, which we can withdraw from our banks.”
Back in May, Ms. Georgieva said that the world was heading towards widespread CBDC adoption without considering the risks involved in such a transition.
“What we are careful about is the choice between wholesale and retail CBDCs. We think that wholesale CBDCs can be put in place with fairly little space for undesirable surprises. Whereas retail CBDCs, they completely transform the financial system in a way that we don’t quite know what consequences it could bring,” she said during a discussion.
Wholesale CBDCs are meant to be used in interbank settlements as well as transactions between institutions and other market participants, while retail CBDCs are for use by the general population and other institutions.
A potential risk of retail CBDCs is that funds get pulled out from traditional commercial banks and deposited as CBDCs in central banks. The depletion of deposits will affect the lending ability of commercial banks, possibly worsening any banking crisis.
US Government CBDC
While the IMF pushes ahead with the promotion of CBDCs, Republican lawmakers are taking steps to prevent the U.S. government from issuing such digital currencies. In September, Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) reintroduced the CBDC Anti-Surveillance State Act.
In a Sept. 12 press release, Mr. Emmer pointed out that unlike decentralized cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, CBDCs are designed and issued by a government “and [transact] on a digital ledger that is controlled by that government.” This could give the administration the power to “surveil Americans’ transactions and choke out politically unpopular activity.”
The bill imposes the following prohibitions:
- It prevents the U.S. Federal Reserve from issuing a CBDC directly to individuals, thus making sure that the Fed cannot mobilize itself as a retail bank and collect personal data of Americans.
- It prohibits the Fed from indirectly issuing a CBDC to individuals via an intermediary, thereby blocking the central bank from launching a retail digital currency through a two-tiered financial system.
- It bans the Fed from using any CBDC to implement its monetary policy. This ensures that the central bank is not able to use these currencies as a “tool to control the American economy.”
In March 2022, President Joe Biden signed an executive order asking the Fed to continue its ongoing research and experimentation of CBDCs and to evaluate the benefits and risks of a digital dollar.
Talking about the issue, Mr. Emmer said that “agency reports to that executive order have made it clear that the Biden Administration is not only itching to create a CBDC, but they are willing to trade American’s right to financial privacy for a surveillance-style central bank digital currency.”
“We’re not going to let this happen,” he said. The CBDC Anti-Surveillance State Act “ensures the United States digital currency policy is in the hands of the American people—not the Administrative State—so that it reflects our American values of privacy, individual sovereignty, and free market competitiveness.”
On Sept. 20, the House Financial Services Committee passed the bill.
Back in April, Federal Reserve Board member Michelle Bowman warned in a speech that a CBDC may pose “significant risks, challenges, and tradeoffs.”
There is a “risk that a CBDC would provide not only a window into, but potentially an impediment to, the freedom Americans enjoy in choosing how money and resources are used and invested.”
A CBDC could also lead to the politicization of the payments system, potentially undermining the independence of the Fed, Ms. Bowman said.
In May, Florida’s House of Representatives passed a bill banning the use of CBDCs in the state. The bill defined money to exclude CBDC. Weeks before the bill was passed, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had pointed to China as a potential example of how CBDCs could negatively affect people.
“Look no further than China, in seeing the impact of centralized digital currency,” he said. “The People’s Bank of China uses its central bank to monitor citizen behavior, allowing for the surveillance of spending habits and to cut off access to goods and services.”
Sound off about this on the Economic Collapse Substack.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
