Progressives were calling for mass student-debt cancellation before the pandemic, arguing the debt is simply too great a burden. President Biden, in contrast, is citing the pandemic to justify the debt-cancellation order he issued in August. But a new analysis by the Department of Education refutes his justification, and a new lawsuit by the Cato Institute seeks to reverse Biden’s unwise and unconstitutional cancellation plan.
Josh Hendrickson writes about central-bank digital currencies and who will use them:
One might therefore wonder whether the safety and faster payments offered by the CBDC would cause people to abandon their accounts at commercial banks in favor of the CBDC. After all, if the CBDC is safer and faster than a commercial bank account, why would anyone continue to use a commercial bank account? Furthermore, even if people continue to hold balances at the commercial bank, wouldn’t the safety of a CBDC create a new risk? For example, the safety of the CBDC account might cause people to run on commercial banks during bad times in an attempt to move their money to safety. This sort of disintermediation could have significant costs.
No worries. Advocates of a CBDC have a solution to this problem. By setting the interest rate on CBDC balances sufficiently low, the central bank can discourage people from abandoning their commercial bank accounts for the CBDC. But therein lies the contradiction. The CBDC supposedly offers users superior features, but the central bank will make sure the CBDC is not widely used.