The Coming Monetary Apartheid

Mark Jeftovic, Grey Swan Investment Fraternity

Looking at the big picture, central bank digital currencies or CBDCs, offer a lifeline to fiat currency.

Remember, central bankers are trapped. They can’t go up, they can’t go down. These currencies are completely debased. Changing interest rates does very little to fix fundamental problems with a currency, it can only juice up or slow down an economy.

Enter the CBDC. This programmable money can act as a way to try to extend that runway another few decades.

And what I have always said about them is they will either launch as or morph into social credit systems.

Remember when the “stimmy checks” came out during Covid and the pandemic? It was not used in ways central banks intended.

People used it to buy stocks on Robinhood, rather than pay their rent or continue to spend on other items. That was a clear, unintended effect.

Well, what if you could have permanent stimlus, permanent Universal Basic Income (UBI), you’re going to want to control how and where that money is spent.

CBDC’s: Tracking Your Social Credit, Carbon Footprint, and Programming Accordingly

Meanwhile, there’s the whole World Economic Forum (WEF) mindset that you’ll own nothing, and be happy.

A CBCD will be part of that trend, and, in fact, the key tool. You’ll have money that may come with a use-it-or-lose-it expiration date. And you’ll have an increasing number of monthly subscriptions to spend things on, not just streaming services, but things like food and clothes.

That means a CBDC can also be used not just for a social credit score like in China, but personal carbon footprint trackers.

Yes, all of this is doable with CBDCs. There’s an incredible clip from the World Economic Forum about a Canadian who’s the president in the Valley Baba, this one unit of Baba talk, and we’re going to be able to know what you’re eating, where you’re traveling, all of this stuff.

You can track your own carbon footprint, but really the sort of punchline there is they can control your carbon footprint.

In a way, CBDCs are kind of like an embracing of sound hard money in a way. It’s not. CBDCs come from the same realization as gold, and bitcoin is that fiat money is backed by nothing, and it’s worthless, and it’s kind of a ruse, and we’re running out of runway for it.

So CBDC or so gold says, well, we’ve got this gold, and we’re going to back money. And it’s worked for thousands of years that way.

Bitcoin is saying we’ve got this energy-backed fixed supply currency that’s capped at 21 million, and that’s never going to get bigger. And so that’s going to be a currency.

Well, what the CBDCs are doing is saying, we all live on one planet and carbon is killing us, and we’re going to back your money with a carbon footprint. That’s going to be what backs your “money.”

And I put air quotes around money at that point because it brings us to the big difference between CBDC and crypto.

Bitcoin: The Anti-CBDC and Protection in the Digital Age

Some people look at bitcoin and say, oh, this is just a prototype for CBDCs. It’s actually they’ve got it backwards.

Bitcoin is the anti-BDC. And the reason why is because bitcoin gives you private custody, private keys, personal sovereignty over your keys, whereas CBDC will have no self custody.

Bitcoin’s program runs as-is, and without 51% of network control, it can’t be changed. That’s in contrast to a CBDC, which could be changed on the programmer’s whim.

Alternatively, a CBDC will be a ledger in a central bank. It will not be hard-capped, and it will be more like a social credit score than it will be money, but it will happen.

The only thing that can stop CBDC from happening in my mind is if the global financial system falls apart before they can roll them out.

Currently, the United States is one of the laggards in CBDC development. So I don’t see a CBDC coming out at a federal level in the U.S. for a long time, and Canada’s a little further ahead, but nobody is anywhere close to launching this thing in Western countries.

So, because the global financial system is coming unglued faster than the powers that be hoped, they’re going to have to go with something that already exists to sort of come out with a hybrid quasi-CBDC. That gives investors an opportunity, and a chance to avoid the dangers of a CBDC.

Right now, there are some crypto projects who want to be base layers for CBDCs. One of them is Ethereum, another one is Ripple. They want to be the coding underpinning a CBDC. That’s why the developers of those projects go to World Economic Forum conferences and give presentations on how great it would be to use Ethereum as a base layer for a CBDC. So that may be how we see it deploy on top of some crypto.

It’s not going to happen on bitcoin because nobody can control bitcoin. So that’s why I firmly view bitcoin as the anti-CBDC, and we’re heading into a world where there’s going to be UBI because there’s going to be no jobs thanks to automation and AI.

Future forms of UBI will be delivered via CBDC, and the CBDC will be like carbon footprint trackers and social credit systems. In time, this programmable money will come with strings attached.

Tools For Escaping the CBDC Trap

And so the number one rule is going to be don’t be dependent on the state for any aspect of your economic underpinning.

It goes back to 1998 advice from Agora, right? Own your own businesses, multiple streams of income, hard assets, real estate out of the country, all of second passports, all of that thing, and hold Bitcoin and precious metals outside of the legacy financial system.

Because if you have no self-sustaining economic basis, you’re going to be getting your “stimmy” every month on this CBDC thing. And it’s also going to tell you how many hamburgers you can eat and how many plane trips you can take, and that’s going to be your life.

It’s monetary apartheid, and it’s coming in digital form.

It’s going to be awful. I don’t think it can last,, either. I don’t think it can be sustainable, but there’s going to be this rough period to get through.

The Coming Monetary Apartheid

Mark Jeftovic, Grey Swan Investment Fraternity

Looking at the big picture, central bank digital currencies or CBDCs, offer a lifeline to fiat currency.

Enter the CBDC. This programmable money can act as a way to try to extend that runway another few decades.

And what I have always said about them is they will either launch as or morph into social credit systems.

Remember when the “stimmy checks” came out during Covid and the pandemic? It was not used in ways central banks intended.

People used it to buy stocks on Robinhood, rather than pay their rent or continue to spend on other items. That was a clear, unintended effect.

Well, what if you could have permanent stimlus, permanent Universal Basic Income (UBI), you’re going to want to control how and where that money is spent.

CBDC’s: Tracking Your Social Credit, Carbon Footprint, and Programming Accordingly

Meanwhile, there’s the whole World Economic Forum (WEF) mindset that you’ll own nothing, and be happy.

That means a CBDC can also be used not just for a social credit score like in China, but personal carbon footprint trackers.

You can track your own carbon footprint, but really the sort of punchline there is they can control your carbon footprint.

So CBDC or so gold says, well, we’ve got this gold, and we’re going to back money. And it’s worked for thousands of years that way.

Bitcoin is saying we’ve got this energy-backed fixed supply currency that’s capped at 21 million, and that’s never going to get bigger. And so that’s going to be a currency.

And I put air quotes around money at that point because it brings us to the big difference between CBDC and crypto.

Bitcoin: The Anti-CBDC and Protection in the Digital Age

Some people look at bitcoin and say, oh, this is just a prototype for CBDCs. It’s actually they’ve got it backwards.

Bitcoin is the anti-BDC. And the reason why is because bitcoin gives you private custody, private keys, personal sovereignty over your keys, whereas CBDC will have no self custody.

Bitcoin’s program runs as-is, and without 51% of network control, it can’t be changed. That’s in contrast to a CBDC, which could be changed on the programmer’s whim.

Alternatively, a CBDC will be a ledger in a central bank. It will not be hard-capped, and it will be more like a social credit score than it will be money, but it will happen.

The only thing that can stop CBDC from happening in my mind is if the global financial system falls apart before they can roll them out.

Future forms of UBI will be delivered via CBDC, and the CBDC will be like carbon footprint trackers and social credit systems. In time, this programmable money will come with strings attached.

Tools For Escaping the CBDC Trap

And so the number one rule is going to be don’t be dependent on the state for any aspect of your economic underpinning.

It’s monetary apartheid, and it’s coming in digital form.

It’s going to be awful. I don’t think it can last,, either. I don’t think it can be sustainable, but there’s going to be this rough period to get through.

Bitcoin isn’t a trade and trying to time it with chart patterns generally does not work.

I’ve never really felt like technical analysis carried much real predictive edge in general and when it comes to BTC, I’ve seen too many failed “death crosses” to change my opinion.

The one that just triggered in mid-November as bitcoin flirted with $90,000 is just the latest.

What really matters? It’s a monetary regime change – if market participants are trading anything it’s getting rid of a currency (“it’s the denominator, stupid”) for a store of value – and we’re seeing it in spades with Bitcoin and gold.

White-collar hiring is, in fact, slowing. Engel’s Pause is taking hold of the jobs picture.

In the meantime, everyday Americans are rediscovering an ancient truth: there is wisdom in wearing steel-toed boots.

Jobs that struggle to attract bodies in boom times are now seeing stampedes of applicants.

– Georgia’s Department of Corrections: applications up 40%.

– The U.S. military: reached 2025 recruiting goals early.

– Waste management staffing: applications up 50%.

For now, economists call this “labor market tightness.” Anyone who has ever scrubbed a grease trap knows it by another name: fear.

Bitcoin has historically weathered 30%+ corrections while still in a bull market.

Global liquidity fears and lower odds of a Fed rate cut in December are driving bitcoin and other cryptos lower at present.

As Andrew Zatlin described on Thursday’s Live! we can expect a series of stimulus efforts next year, ahead of the midterms, driving new liquidity. The $2,000 “tariff rebate” checks President Trump has been touting are but one example.

When higher liquidity hits the market – in whatever form it takes – today’s bitcoin buyers will be waiting.

Make like the whales, and use market selloffs and stimulus to your advantage.

The market seems to know something about private credit that we don’t. And in a big enough liquidity event for private credit, investors will have to sell off more liquid assets if they want capital.

That’s the danger private credit poses today, exactly at a time when rules are being eased to make it easier for retail investors like us to buy into this asset class.

I’m in the camp that this smells like a way to keep the party going by providing another source of liquidity – the passive investment flows from your regular 401(k) contributions. The smell takes on a sour note as this sector starts to falter.

Perhaps today’s selloff is simply a reaction to declining interest rates, the growth of private credit, and a few inevitable deals that have gone sour recently.