"CBDCs are about ways of making payments; they are not a new currency."
"Whether a country needs a CBDC is really about the state of its current payments system," he pointed out in the House of Lords this month..
"What are the problems in our payments system to which a CBDC might be the answer? .... There are no problems to which a CBDC is the only, or even the most obvious, answer."
"Our payments system is more efficient than those in most other countries, certainly the United States."
"Most transactions are already digital, whether by tapping a card on a machine at the point of sale or making a digital payment on a computer for remote transactions."
"All of these are operated already by commercial banks and an increasing number of new payment vehicles."
"Competition has moved us from a system based on paper cheques to one driven largely by digital payments with virtually instantaneous clearing."
"It would be somewhat odd to try to increase competition in this area by creating a state monopoly of the payment system"
"Of course, there can always be improvements in our payment systems, but a CBDC is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for that.
"The major problem today concerns the cost and speed of cross-border payments, but much of this results from money laundering regulations."
"The enormous risk is that, in a financial crisis, households would abruptly shift their deposits from banks to [CBDC] accounts with the Bank of England, forcing the latter immediately to transfer the deposits back to the banks to avoid a collapse of the system."
"In 2008, when the Bank, with approval from the Government, lent a large amount of money to RBS and HBOS to prevent their collapse, the operations were covert and revealed only some months later to prevent a system-wide loss of confidence"
"That would be impossible if households could switch without limit instantaneously from all commercial banks to the Bank of England."
"So a retail CBDC has risks but no obvious benefits".
Lord King, from a position of immense experience, has completely demolished the case for a "Britcoin," British CBDC or "digital pound."
It thus remains quite puzzling why the Government and Bank of England are pressing ahead with such vigour? What are their real motives?
“A CBDC system could not support anonymous transactions....
This lack of anonymity is to prevent CBDCs facilitating large-scale criminal activity, and to ensure a CBDC system complies with national disclosure laws that apply to payments"….
“This means payments data on CBDC users would exist and would be accessible to some authority or institution.
There is concern about the potential for state surveillance.”
Of course the tax authorities, with their strong investigatory powers, would get hold of CBDC data.
Fun facts on the UK tax code, the longest in the world.
Its complexity is yet anther way in which tax is holding Britain back. A thread:
The UK tax code is over 21,000 pages long and contains over 10 million words.
That's about 12 times the length of the Complete Works of Shakespeare and 12.5 times the number of words in the Bible (800,000 words).
It's 8 times longer than Marcel Proust’s ‘À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu’ which at 1.26 million words has the Guinness World Record for the longest novel ever written.
Corporate tax should be zero, points out Stuart Kirk in an excellent article in the FT
Scrapping corporation tax would remove myriad distortions and inefficiencies 1/6
"Companies are generally seen as fair game when it comes to taxes. It looks much better on television to target the global headquarters of a faceless mega-firm than a hard-up family with bills to pay. And therein lies the problem," says @stuartkirk__.....2/6
"What politicians around the world fail to understand is that companies do not exist as such — they are nothing but a series of trade-offs between four groups of humans: staff, customers, suppliers and investors. Companies do not generate tax. Only people can do that". 3/6
A shocking new study of official UK Gov data from @Civitas_UK has revealed that a record 54.2% of individuals now live in households which receive more in benefits than they pay in direct and indirect taxes. A thread:
Moreover 83% of all Income Tax is paid by just 40% of British adults
And more than half – 53% – is paid by the top 10% of earners, three times as much income tax as the bottom 60% – despite this group being six times larger.
The top 20% of individuals pay two thirds – 66% – of all Income Tax, handing over, on average, £35,000 more in taxes than they receive in public spending or universal benefits (like a bus pass they probably don't use).
Another leading British businessman has lambasted the Government's tax polices.
Sir Rocco Forte says "the Government is paralysing the economy with taxes."
"Individuals who are relatively low earners are being subjected to draconian levels of taxation. No one on £50k can be considered rich – indeed many families on this level of income are still in receipt of benefits – but that is the point at which the 40% tax rate kicks in."
"Incentives to work are constantly being eroded. Big earners are being driven overseas and big spenders are being discouraged from coming here in the first place," Sir Rocco laments.