The Federal Reserve will never adopt a central bank digital currency (CBDC), the U.S. central bank’s chairman, Jerome Powell, confirmed on Tuesday to lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Powell’s pledge follows President Donald Trump’s recent executive order barring federal agencies from developing a digital dollar and comes amid a broader slowdown in CBDC adoption by central banks worldwide.
Testifying before the Senate Banking Committee on Feb. 11, Powell faced pointed questions from Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), who raised concerns about a potential CBDC in the United States that mirrors China’s financial surveillance practices. China’s digital yuan—the largest CBDC project in the world—allows authorities to see people’s financial transactions, empowering the regime to use the financial system as a tool for surveillance and targeting of dissidents.
