In July 2023, the Federal Reserve Bank (FRB) announced FedNow as their foray into the US dollar central bank digital currency (CBDC) payment service. The service is offered to insure immediate CBDC payments are made to a registered individual and/or business buying and selling products and/or services. The FRB offers CBDC as a quick payment convenience to Americans when many see it as a subtle expansion of FRB monetary management power and control.
Many dollar payments today are made through an electronic funds transfer system managed by the National Automated Clearinghouse Association known as Automated Clearing House (ACH). Sent and received payments are completed in one to two business days. ACH was officially established in 1974.
US scrap metal recycling businesses receive, process, recycle and sell varieties of iron and steel, many grades of aluminum, various types of copper and other metals by the ton nationwide on a daily basis. Many family or corporate-owned businesses pay for received and sold recycling metals in cash (US dollars).
One future outcome from the forced federal phase out of cash in our daily private and public business transactions is mandating the use of CBDC for each transaction. A CBDC allows the FRB to monitor all buying and selling of each type of metal by individuals and businesses in the metal recycling business. CBDC monitoring can open a federal inquiry into how an individual or business acquires pounds of this type of metal, where it is bought and sold, where it is stored, etc. The FRB can see how much CBDC you receive from buying and selling recycled metals. They would require you to report this received CBDC as income on your yearly federal income tax return.
Our modern industrial society functions using steel, aluminum, and copper for the flow of electricity, pipelines to transport crude oil, gasoline and natural gas, structure for cars, trucks, cargo and passenger planes, streetlights and traffic lights, rebar for concrete buildings, roads and bridges, etc. Approximately 70 percent of US steel is sourced from end-of-life steel supplied from scrap metal recycling businesses sent to steel mills.
Some people receive money by selling collected end of life aluminum, copper, steel, etc. These people are sometimes called the “underbelly” of society. “Underbelly,” defined as a noun from dictionary.com is, “a vulnerable area; weak point, a dark, seamy, often hidden area or side.” These underbelly people help in providing some metal, sold to a metal recycler, and they would be subject to a future CBDC. Take time to visit a scrap metal recycling business to see the immense variety of aluminum, copper, and steel received from our modern functioning society.
Applying the FRB CBDC to every metal recycling transaction would require every buyer and seller to have digital currency access (like a card or smartphone app). The loss of transaction privacy is irreversible to everyone in the metal recycling process. Federal oversight of each recycled metal transaction would be an intrusion into the daily life of the individual and business on an unseen scale. The new federal metal recycling reporting requirements would be reprehensible. These are a few more reasons to oppose the FRB CBDC push to replace cash as an option to conduct business transactions where it is not attractive to the metal recycling world.
