Eswar Prasad, a Cornell University professor, has warned that central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) – with their expiry dates and restrictions on “less desirable” purchases – could lead economies to a much dark path. Prasad issued the warning during the 14th Annual Meeting of the New Champions hosted by the World Economic Forum (WEF).
During one of the 30-minute panel discussions at the WEF event, also known as Summer Davos, Prasad said programmable CBDCs and other new forms of money could take the international economic landscape toward financial collapse.
He noted that one of the “huge potential gains” for digitizing money is the programmability of CBDC units.
“You could have a potentially better – or some people might say a darker world – where the government decides that units of central bank money can be used to purchase some things, but not other things that it deems less desirable like ammunition, or drugs, or pornography or something of the sort,” Prasad explained. “And that is very powerful in terms of the use of a CBDC, and I think also extremely dangerous to central banks.”
A digital currency has unique characteristics that can serve as the conduit for economic policies in a very targeted way, or more broadly for social policies that could affect the integrity of central bank money and the integrity and independence of central banks. “So, there are wonderful notions of things that can be done with digital money, but again I fear the technology also has the potential to take us to a pretty dark place,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Epoch Times reported that putting expiry dates on CBDCs is currently being discussed across the globe, with the Bank of Canada (BoC) doing a piece on its pros and cons. The institution insisted that an expiry date would “automate personal loss recovery.”
“With this feature enabled, digital cash could not be spent after its expiry date. Consumers whose digital cash expired would automatically receive the funds back into their online account without having to file a claim,” BoC wrote. “We show that offering the option of personal loss recovery could substantially increase consumer demand for digital cash. However, the length of time to expiry plays a key role. An expiry date that is too soon is inconvenient, but a date too far in the future slows down the reimbursement of lost digital cash.”
China has also considered integrating the best-before dates on the digital yuan, creating a policy that would invalidate the money after the specified timeframe.
“Expiring money would increase both the velocity of money and overall economic activity, similar to applying a negative rate to digital cash,” the World Bank wrote. “In practice, a carrying fee on money would encourage people to spend it and thus prevent it from being hoarded.”
Survey: Only 16% of Americans open to using CBDCs
What experts are worried about echo in the nation’s pulse. The Cato Institute’s 2023 CBDC National Survey finds that only 16 percent of Americans support the CBDC adoption despite their regular use of digital dollars via credit cards, debit cards and other digital platforms. (Related: Only 16% of Americans would support adoption of CBDC, survey finds.)
According to the study, 34 percent of Americans oppose the Federal Reserve offering a central bank digital currency and only 16 percent favor it. Nevertheless, the plurality of Americans (49 percent) has not formed an opinion, allegedly because of the fact that only 28 percent of Americans are familiar with CBDCs and 72 percent are clueless. Based on political affiliations, only 11 percent of Republicans favor using digital money, exactly half of the 22 percent of Democrats who support it.
Although CBDCs are advertised as enhancing financial inclusion in the economy, lower-income groups do not support a CBDC more than higher-income groups. Among those earning less than $20,000 a year, 19 percent support it; among those earning more than $100,000 a year, 21 percent support one form of digital currency.
The survey also found that 68 percent of Americans would oppose it if the government could monitor their purchases. While both Democrats (71 percent) and Republicans (82 percent) would oppose a CBDC if the government could control what people spend their money on and when. Also, 76 percent of people are more concerned about CBDCs’ potential risks than their promised benefits.
Visit CurrencyCrash.news for more news related to the phasing out of physical money amid the proliferation of digital currencies. Watch this video that talks about the Bank for International Settlements releasing the new plan for a global CBDC.
This video is from the Pool Pharmacy channel on Brighteon.com.
More related stories:
IMF workingking crisis to usher in central bank digital currency, experts warn.
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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.