Senators Want to Ban China's Digital Currency From US Apps and App Stores
Freeman writes:
Three Republican senators are proposing a law to prohibit app stores from carrying apps that accept payments using China's digital currency. The "Defending Americans from Authoritarian Digital Currencies Act" would prohibit app stores in the US from carrying or supporting any app "that supports or enables transactions in e-CNY," also known as the digital yuan or digital renminbi.
The app stores would also be prohibited from supporting or enabling digital yuan transactions. The bill defines an app store broadly as "a publicly available website, software application, or other electronic service that distributes applications from third-party developers to users of a computer, a mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device."
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The digital yuan is in the early stages of rollout. Akram Keram, an expert on China at the National Endowment for Democracy, wrote last year that the digital currency would give the Chinese Communist Party "direct control over and access to the financial lives of individuals, without the need to strong-arm intermediary financial entities. In a digital-yuan-consumed society, the government easily could suspend the digital wallets of dissidents and human rights activists, for example."
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The US could eventually issue a digital dollar. In March, President Joe Biden issued an executive order that said his administration "places the highest urgency on research and development efforts into the potential design and deployment options of a United States CBDC [Central Bank Digital Currency]."While Americans have long used the dollar in digital form, a digital dollar would differ in fundamental ways. The Federal Reserve explains that a Central Bank Digital Currency "is generally defined as a digital liability of a central bank that is widely available to the general public." By contrast, the current types of central bank money in the US are "physical currency issued by the Federal Reserve and digital balances held by commercial banks at the Federal Reserve."
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