The Federal Reserve just launched FedNow, a new instant payment platform, and a select few online are sounding the alarm. This video will explain what FedNow really is.

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This channel is for education purposes only and does not constitute financial advice - Richard is not responsible for investment actions taken by viewers. Please seek out a registered advisor if you require assistance (while Richard is a registered portfolio manager at WDS Investment Management, he does not provide advice through The Plain Bagel, which is not affiliated with his employer).

The Federal Reserve just launched its FedNow service, a new instant payment platform that promises to bring money transfers in the United States into the 21st century.

And yet there are some online calling FedNow the first step towards a dystopian future of government surveillance and control in the United States.

You see, while a lot of news about FedNow has been pretty unremarkable, you might not have even heard about it.

There are people online who worry that it will increase the government's ability to track transactions and even freeze bank accounts with some even suggesting that they might do so for something as minute as say liking a post that's critical of the government.

But there is a lot of misinformation and speculation being spread on TikTok, YouTube videos and online posts around what this service is, what it'll allow the government to do, and whether it's really just a ACBDC or central bank digital currency in disguise.

I think a lot of it really stems from a misunderstanding of how things currently operate.

Because if you have a better understanding of that, you'll see that FedNow isn't really a seismic shift in what the Federal Reserve will be doing.

So in this video, I'll provide those details to explain how things currently operate, what FedNow is and how that sits in the picture, why people keep bringing up Ripple, a cryptocurrency that skyrocketed this week leading up to the launch of FedNow, and why, while it's important to be diligent with a new service like this, why the most egregious claims are really wild speculations with not a whole lot of merit behind them.

Before I jump into that, first a word from our sponsor, the Federal Reserve.

Well, In short, it's a new platform that will allow financial institutions, namely banks and credit unions to transfer money between 1 another in mere seconds, almost instantly, tackling a problem that really shouldn't exist in the modern age, which is that it takes a heck of a long time to send money around.

As you might know, payments and transfers like your payroll, bill payments, and even transfers between friends can take days to settle.

Meaning that while you might see the amount leave your account right away, it can often have a lag of time before it actually enters the recipient's account and is usable by them.

Something that's made even worse by operating hours, weekends, and banking holidays.

Now there are some methods for sending money faster such as a wire transfer which is same day but that is often quite costly to customers.

Banks may offer alternative systems like Zelle which for my fellow Canadians is the equivalent to Interac that will allow faster money transfers between peers.

But those have limited use cases and typically cap the amount of money you can actually send in a day.

And there are alternatives outside of banking such as money transmitters like Venmo who offer digital wallets that let you again, transfer money between other digital wallets and even buy stuff using that money.

And if you want to send that money to your bank account, it will again, often take a few days charging a fee if you want an instant transfer.

It all makes for a pretty tedious and frustrating process.

With the worst part being that there are countries out there who don't have to deal with that.

India, for example, is a leader in real time payments and transfers.

And even countries like Nigeria have employed similar processes within their financial system, allowing people to send and receive money within seconds.

So America, which has always been a leader in financial markets, has actually been a laggard when it comes to real time payments and transfers.

But that all appears to be changing now with FedNow.

Let's say person A is looking to buy inventory for their business from business B.

So they go on their credit union or bank's app and initiate a transfer.

The Payment will be quickly screened by their respective institution and a payment message will be sent to the Federal Reserve's FedLine network, a current network that has more than 10, 000 participants on it that FedNow will be operating over.

The payment message will be instantly validated and passed along to the recipient's institution.

And upon confirmation, FedNow will debit and credit the master accounts of the respective institutions and notify them accordingly.

In other words, because the Federal Reserve is the bank of the banks, it'll be able to settle things at that master account level, at which point the banks themselves can then notify their clients and credit their accounts accordingly, making the funds more or less available immediately, with the entire process expected to take under 20 seconds from start to finish.

Best of all, compared to traditional methods, the service is available 24-7, 365, Meaning you can finally pay your share of mom's present that you forgot to pay your sibling on Christmas day.

Now outside of speed and availability, there are a number of other benefits to FedNow as well.

The system complies to ISO 20022, which is a global standard that codifies what details need to be included in the payment messaging, making it easier to digitally validate and process the transactions, allowing for that instant settlement.

The service also sounds like it's going to be more affordable than some alternatives.

Compared to things like automated clearinghouses, which is how things like payrolls and other EFTs are processed, which can cost upwards of a dollar, FedNow will cost 4.5 cents per transfer.

And it will include advanced fraud detection and prevention tools.

Now the first phase of the service is launching this month with additional features expected to be released later on.

But that doesn't mean that these instant transfers will be immediately available.

While there are currently 57 early adopters, which includes the likes of JP Morgan and Wells Fargo, the list does exclude some pretty big names like Bank of America and Citigroup.

On top of that, companies will actually need to build their own interfaces for FedNow services with FedNow itself actually just being a foundation for building money transfer services on top of the likes of bill payments and account to account transfers.

So some of those services might not be available immediately but people are expecting a pretty quick uptake of this.

The service does have a receive only option, meaning that a participant can, rather than doing the full sort of registration, sign up to just be able to receive funds on the platform.

Well, again, the service does require that master account.

It's intended to be flexible to allow smaller institutions to effectively partner with the larger companies so that they likewise gain access to the FedNow service.

There was, there's not really a whole lot exciting about it, but it does sound like good news at a very broad level.

Well, like I mentioned, some of these concerns are very valid.

For example, 1 of the big ones that's been highlighted is the risk of fraud.

Traditional transfers can be held up to avoid fraud.

And if there's any questions or concerns that come up along the way that somehow suggests that this transfer should not be happening, it can usually be reversed and the money sent back to the sender.

But you don't have that with an instant payment platform.

And because the money is available immediately, it can be withdrawn immediately by the recipient.

So if you're ever tricked or scammed into sending money to someone, there's not a whole lot that can be done if it's transferred over the FedNow network.

On top of that, people are concerned that institutions might not be able to handle instant transfers or payments in the case of say, a bank withdrawals.

If you recall with Silicon Valley Bank, it had $42 billion of withdrawals in a single day and had to scramble to raise those funds by loans or selling securities.

So you can imagine the problems if those withdrawals would have been instant and the bank had no time to try and raise that money.

Although there is currently a cap of $500, 000 per transfer And banks can set further limits on top of that.

But it just goes to highlight that there are other considerations here with instant transfers and payments.

But those aren't really the concerns that are circulating online.

The primary concern is about government abuse.

Some don't like the idea that the Federal Reserve, who is supposed to be the steward of the US dollar, that they will now be offering a service within the market that they're supposed to be a sort of watchdog over.

On top of that, there are people who have a number of privacy concerns with the Federal Reserve facilitating the bulk of these transactions that it will more or less have sole control over these instant payments and all the data that comes with that.

Some are also concerned that because of the close ties between the government and the Federal Reserve even though their operations are technically separate that the government might access this information.

Then there are the claims about the CBDC, the Central Bank Digital Currency.

CBDC is a digital currency that much like cryptocurrencies lives entirely online, can allow you to transact without using a financial institution per se.

But unlike cryptocurrency, which relies on a blockchain for that ledger, the currency is issued and managed by the central bank, with some fearing that the sort of structure gives the central bank and by extension the government too much data and control over people's finances, with some going so far as to believe that this truly is the first step towards the US becoming a surveillance state.

With that concern, not really being helped by the fact that China is really leading the charge here for CBDCs, launching its own digital yuan in 2022.

But these fears have led people to speculate that FedNow is a sort of Trojan horse that will lead to the eventual release of a US dollar CBDC, with the idea that it will first come to dominate the instant payment infrastructure by forcing institutions to adopt it, or just squeezing out all of the competition by offering a cheap and convenient method for transferring money, only to then use that position, that dominance, to force people to adopt the digital currency.

Which some going so far as to highlight a recent SEC lawsuit against Ripple in December of 2020, as evidence of the government trying to crack down against alternatives to the FedNow service.

So yeah, people have some pretty dire concerns about the FedNow implementation.

And again, I don't want to discourage people from raising questions and concerns about these sort of implementations.

Dare I say, the government has had a history of overreaching in the past, and it's important to consider that when you see a big change like this.

But when it comes to these master plans about a CBDC and concerns about Jerome Powell's scene, whether you watch the Bargain Movie or Oppenheimer First in theaters, A lot of it really is based on wild speculation with very little evidence to support it and again is really based on a misunderstanding about how things currently operate and how Fed now differs from it because 1 of the biggest points as to why some of these claims are really unjustified is that the Federal Reserve already processes a good chunk of transfers in the United States.

Most wire transfers in the US are done through Fedwire, the Federal Reserve's wire transfer service, which processed $1 quadrillion worth of transfers in 2022 alone.

Same goes for electronic funds transfers, which use that automated clearinghouse system with the primary provider being the Federal Reserve via its FedACH service, which processed $40 trillion worth of transfers in 2022.

And by many accounts, FedNow is really just an upgrade to FedACH.

And while that does come with more capabilities, it doesn't necessarily mean that the Fed will be processing more transactions as in a way it will cannibalize what it's already processing.

Secondly, there's really no evidence that institutions would be forced to use FedNow, or even that it will become the only provider of real-time transfers.

It is an opt-in program and doesn't punish people for not using it.

And while there could arguably be a day where the Fed has so much dominance that it's able to force people to use its own platform, that doesn't even really align with what we've seen in the past.

Fedwire and FedACH already face private competition from the likes of chips and electronic payments network.

With these networks likewise processing trillions of dollars of transfers a day.

There also haven't really been any moves to crack down on those alternatives.

You know, services like Zelle and by extension money transmitters like Venmo.

Even cryptocurrency, which has faced a lot of sort of pushback from regulators, has still retained a lot of its transaction freedom.

Ripple even won that mentioned lawsuit, which actually only really involved whether or not it was a security, with the cryptocurrency jumping in price after being relisted on a bunch of exchanges.

So it looks like for now, anyway, there will be a plethora of alternatives to the FedNow system.

In fact, it's worth highlighting here that the U S currently actually has a real time payment network, which is offered by the same company behind chips.

It's just that it hasn't seen widespread adoption in processes, less than $100 billion worth of transactions a year.

And the federal reserve has made a lot of comments about how there really is no intent of squeezing out competition.

And while there is always a chance that the U S does eventually pursue a CBDC.

And it's very clear that they are considering that.

The Federal Reserve has highlighted that Fed Now has nothing to do with the CBDC and that they haven't even really made up their mind around whether a CBDC would be worth it.

And regardless of their decision, it is something that would require congressional approval and is already facing a number of state bans.

Thirdly, as a quick aside on Ripple, some have really flipped the narrative there from a negative to a positive with the recent lawsuit victory, with some even claiming that RippleNet is going to be an integral part of the FedNow service, but that really is a baseless claim.

The only evidence people are sharing to prove this is that some of the early adopters of FedNow are partners of Ripple, which could be as minor of a role as signing up as deposit only institutions.

Finally, on a more depressing note, FedNow doesn't seem to give the government any further control over people's finances in terms of monitoring and control, in part because they already have a lot of control on that front.

The current system already lets the US government monitor a lot of transactions.

Banks are already required to report suspicious financial behavior and threats and will forfeit any information required for investigations.

There was a big discovery in 2010 that the government tracks credit card transactions and accounts can already be frozen without this sort of system.

And that's not to say that you should just give the government more power to do that better, but it's just to highlight that this isn't as significant of a shift when it comes to those concerns as a lot of people outside the industry are really painting it to be.

There's a reason that a lot of professionals and people who deal in the space haven't really been sounding the alarms about the FedNow adoption.

Not only does the Federal Reserve deny that the Fed and FedNow can access or control individuals bank accounts, which makes sense because the money is from their perspective controlled at that master account level, but we even had industry professionals and think tanks really playing down the risk here.

Only time will tell how the government ends up using this system and whether we do see that pursuit of a CBDC following the Fed Now adoption and there are important questions to be asked when that time comes.

But substantial claims require substantial evidence and we really just don't have that.

We really just have a lot of what if scenarios being kind of posited online.

And I really don't want to be dismissive here about the concerns with this, but given the alternatives and how FedNow sits relative to the current system, it just really goes to show how far-fetched a lot of these stories really are and how a lot of other stuff would have to happen for the US to enter a phase where it would be remotely similar to what some people are suggesting.

You know, the collapse of the rule of law and things like that.

So hopefully this video helps to clear up some of the noise and paint the whole picture about what this means for the US monetary system.

It's a lot more boring than people are making it up to be.

It's really just a country upgrading its transaction system.

I'm sure I'll get some unpleasant comments down below, but truly I'm trying to be constructive to the conversation because this is complicated stuff.

And I really do see it as this misinformation stemming from a misunderstanding of how the system works.

I sort of see it as being like with GameStop, when trading of the stock was frozen, many people blamed Robinhood, you know, for colluding with hedge funds.

When a report afterwards explained how the trading system actually works and why a tiny broker dealing with this unprecedented level of trading activity wasn't able to fulfill those transactions, the roadblocks that came up along the way.

You know, just a matter of those details that you wouldn't necessarily know from the outside.

That's not to say I know how things will play out, but I just looking to add extra details.

If you liked this video, please do make sure to like, subscribe, all that good stuff.

If you don't like this video, make sure to like, subscribe, all that good stuff.

And genuinely do let me know your thoughts down below.


Speaker 0: The Federal Reserve just launched its FedNow service, a new instant payment platform that promises to bring money transfers in the United States into the 21st century. And yet there are some online calling FedNow the first step towards a dystopian future of government surveillance and control in the United States. So quite the contrast. You see, while a lot of news about FedNow has been pretty unremarkable, you might not have even heard about it. There are people online who worry that it will increase the government's ability to track transactions and even freeze bank accounts with some even suggesting that they might do so for something as minute as say liking a post that's critical of the government.

But there is a lot of misinformation and speculation being spread on TikTok, YouTube videos and online posts around what this service is, what it'll allow the government to do, and whether it's really just a ACBDC or central bank digital currency in disguise. I think a lot of it really stems from a misunderstanding of how things currently operate. Because if you have a better understanding of that, you'll see that FedNow isn't really a seismic shift in what the Federal Reserve will be doing. So in this video, I'll provide those details to explain how things currently operate, what FedNow is and how that sits in the picture, why people keep bringing up Ripple, a cryptocurrency that skyrocketed this week leading up to the launch of FedNow, and why, while it's important to be diligent with a new service like this, why the most egregious claims are really wild speculations with not a whole lot of merit behind them. Before I jump into that, first a word from our sponsor, the Federal Reserve.

That's a joke, please wait. Let's start from the beginning. What exactly is FedNow? Well, In short, it's a new platform that will allow financial institutions, namely banks and credit unions to transfer money between 1 another in mere seconds, almost instantly, tackling a problem that really shouldn't exist in the modern age, which is that it takes a heck of a long time to send money around. As you might know, payments and transfers like your payroll, bill payments, and even transfers between friends can take days to settle.

Meaning that while you might see the amount leave your account right away, it can often have a lag of time before it actually enters the recipient's account and is usable by them. Something that's made even worse by operating hours, weekends, and banking holidays. Now there are some methods for sending money faster such as a wire transfer which is same day but that is often quite costly to customers. Banks may offer alternative systems like Zelle which for my fellow Canadians is the equivalent to Interac that will allow faster money transfers between peers. But those have limited use cases and typically cap the amount of money you can actually send in a day.

And there are alternatives outside of banking such as money transmitters like Venmo who offer digital wallets that let you again, transfer money between other digital wallets and even buy stuff using that money. But it faces similar restrictions. And if you want to send that money to your bank account, it will again, often take a few days charging a fee if you want an instant transfer. It all makes for a pretty tedious and frustrating process. With the worst part being that there are countries out there who don't have to deal with that.

India, for example, is a leader in real time payments and transfers. And even countries like Nigeria have employed similar processes within their financial system, allowing people to send and receive money within seconds. So America, which has always been a leader in financial markets, has actually been a laggard when it comes to real time payments and transfers. But that all appears to be changing now with FedNow. Here's how it works.

Let's say person A is looking to buy inventory for their business from business B. So they go on their credit union or bank's app and initiate a transfer. The Payment will be quickly screened by their respective institution and a payment message will be sent to the Federal Reserve's FedLine network, a current network that has more than 10, 000 participants on it that FedNow will be operating over. The payment message will be instantly validated and passed along to the recipient's institution. And upon confirmation, FedNow will debit and credit the master accounts of the respective institutions and notify them accordingly.

In other words, because the Federal Reserve is the bank of the banks, it'll be able to settle things at that master account level, at which point the banks themselves can then notify their clients and credit their accounts accordingly, making the funds more or less available immediately, with the entire process expected to take under 20 seconds from start to finish. Best of all, compared to traditional methods, the service is available 24-7, 365, Meaning you can finally pay your share of mom's present that you forgot to pay your sibling on Christmas day. Now outside of speed and availability, there are a number of other benefits to FedNow as well. The system complies to ISO 20022, which is a global standard that codifies what details need to be included in the payment messaging, making it easier to digitally validate and process the transactions, allowing for that instant settlement. The service also sounds like it's going to be more affordable than some alternatives.

Compared to things like automated clearinghouses, which is how things like payrolls and other EFTs are processed, which can cost upwards of a dollar, FedNow will cost 4.5 cents per transfer. So obviously pretty cheap. And it will include advanced fraud detection and prevention tools. So great. Now the first phase of the service is launching this month with additional features expected to be released later on.

But that doesn't mean that these instant transfers will be immediately available. While there are currently 57 early adopters, which includes the likes of JP Morgan and Wells Fargo, the list does exclude some pretty big names like Bank of America and Citigroup. On top of that, companies will actually need to build their own interfaces for FedNow services with FedNow itself actually just being a foundation for building money transfer services on top of the likes of bill payments and account to account transfers. So some of those services might not be available immediately but people are expecting a pretty quick uptake of this. The service does have a receive only option, meaning that a participant can, rather than doing the full sort of registration, sign up to just be able to receive funds on the platform.

Well, again, the service does require that master account. It's intended to be flexible to allow smaller institutions to effectively partner with the larger companies so that they likewise gain access to the FedNow service. And that's really it in a nutshell. It's a instant payment platform. There was, there's not really a whole lot exciting about it, but it does sound like good news at a very broad level.

So why are people so concerned about it? Well, like I mentioned, some of these concerns are very valid. For example, 1 of the big ones that's been highlighted is the risk of fraud. Traditional transfers can be held up to avoid fraud. And if there's any questions or concerns that come up along the way that somehow suggests that this transfer should not be happening, it can usually be reversed and the money sent back to the sender.

But you don't have that with an instant payment platform. The transfers are irrevocable. And because the money is available immediately, it can be withdrawn immediately by the recipient. So if you're ever tricked or scammed into sending money to someone, there's not a whole lot that can be done if it's transferred over the FedNow network. On top of that, people are concerned that institutions might not be able to handle instant transfers or payments in the case of say, a bank withdrawals.

If you recall with Silicon Valley Bank, it had $42 billion of withdrawals in a single day and had to scramble to raise those funds by loans or selling securities. So you can imagine the problems if those withdrawals would have been instant and the bank had no time to try and raise that money. Although there is currently a cap of $500, 000 per transfer And banks can set further limits on top of that. But it just goes to highlight that there are other considerations here with instant transfers and payments. But those aren't really the concerns that are circulating online.

The primary concern is about government abuse. Some don't like the idea that the Federal Reserve, who is supposed to be the steward of the US dollar, that they will now be offering a service within the market that they're supposed to be a sort of watchdog over. On top of that, there are people who have a number of privacy concerns with the Federal Reserve facilitating the bulk of these transactions that it will more or less have sole control over these instant payments and all the data that comes with that. Some are also concerned that because of the close ties between the government and the Federal Reserve even though their operations are technically separate that the government might access this information. Then there are the claims about the CBDC, the Central Bank Digital Currency.

CBDC is a digital currency that much like cryptocurrencies lives entirely online, can allow you to transact without using a financial institution per se. But unlike cryptocurrency, which relies on a blockchain for that ledger, the currency is issued and managed by the central bank, with some fearing that the sort of structure gives the central bank and by extension the government too much data and control over people's finances, with some going so far as to believe that this truly is the first step towards the US becoming a surveillance state. With that concern, not really being helped by the fact that China is really leading the charge here for CBDCs, launching its own digital yuan in 2022. But these fears have led people to speculate that FedNow is a sort of Trojan horse that will lead to the eventual release of a US dollar CBDC, with the idea that it will first come to dominate the instant payment infrastructure by forcing institutions to adopt it, or just squeezing out all of the competition by offering a cheap and convenient method for transferring money, only to then use that position, that dominance, to force people to adopt the digital currency.

Which some going so far as to highlight a recent SEC lawsuit against Ripple in December of 2020, as evidence of the government trying to crack down against alternatives to the FedNow service. So yeah, people have some pretty dire concerns about the FedNow implementation. And again, I don't want to discourage people from raising questions and concerns about these sort of implementations. Dare I say, the government has had a history of overreaching in the past, and it's important to consider that when you see a big change like this. But when it comes to these master plans about a CBDC and concerns about Jerome Powell's scene, whether you watch the Bargain Movie or Oppenheimer First in theaters, A lot of it really is based on wild speculation with very little evidence to support it and again is really based on a misunderstanding about how things currently operate and how Fed now differs from it because 1 of the biggest points as to why some of these claims are really unjustified is that the Federal Reserve already processes a good chunk of transfers in the United States.

Most wire transfers in the US are done through Fedwire, the Federal Reserve's wire transfer service, which processed $1 quadrillion worth of transfers in 2022 alone. Same goes for electronic funds transfers, which use that automated clearinghouse system with the primary provider being the Federal Reserve via its FedACH service, which processed $40 trillion worth of transfers in 2022. And by many accounts, FedNow is really just an upgrade to FedACH. And while that does come with more capabilities, it doesn't necessarily mean that the Fed will be processing more transactions as in a way it will cannibalize what it's already processing. Secondly, there's really no evidence that institutions would be forced to use FedNow, or even that it will become the only provider of real-time transfers.

It is an opt-in program and doesn't punish people for not using it. And while there could arguably be a day where the Fed has so much dominance that it's able to force people to use its own platform, that doesn't even really align with what we've seen in the past. Fedwire and FedACH already face private competition from the likes of chips and electronic payments network. With these networks likewise processing trillions of dollars of transfers a day. There also haven't really been any moves to crack down on those alternatives.

You know, services like Zelle and by extension money transmitters like Venmo. Even cryptocurrency, which has faced a lot of sort of pushback from regulators, has still retained a lot of its transaction freedom. Ripple even won that mentioned lawsuit, which actually only really involved whether or not it was a security, with the cryptocurrency jumping in price after being relisted on a bunch of exchanges. So it looks like for now, anyway, there will be a plethora of alternatives to the FedNow system. In fact, it's worth highlighting here that the U S currently actually has a real time payment network, which is offered by the same company behind chips.

It's just that it hasn't seen widespread adoption in processes, less than $100 billion worth of transactions a year. And the federal reserve has made a lot of comments about how there really is no intent of squeezing out competition. And while there is always a chance that the U S does eventually pursue a CBDC. And it's very clear that they are considering that. The Federal Reserve has highlighted that Fed Now has nothing to do with the CBDC and that they haven't even really made up their mind around whether a CBDC would be worth it.

And regardless of their decision, it is something that would require congressional approval and is already facing a number of state bans. Thirdly, as a quick aside on Ripple, some have really flipped the narrative there from a negative to a positive with the recent lawsuit victory, with some even claiming that RippleNet is going to be an integral part of the FedNow service, but that really is a baseless claim. The only evidence people are sharing to prove this is that some of the early adopters of FedNow are partners of Ripple, which could be as minor of a role as signing up as deposit only institutions. Finally, on a more depressing note, FedNow doesn't seem to give the government any further control over people's finances in terms of monitoring and control, in part because they already have a lot of control on that front. The current system already lets the US government monitor a lot of transactions.

Banks are already required to report suspicious financial behavior and threats and will forfeit any information required for investigations. There was a big discovery in 2010 that the government tracks credit card transactions and accounts can already be frozen without this sort of system. And that's not to say that you should just give the government more power to do that better, but it's just to highlight that this isn't as significant of a shift when it comes to those concerns as a lot of people outside the industry are really painting it to be. There's a reason that a lot of professionals and people who deal in the space haven't really been sounding the alarms about the FedNow adoption. Not only does the Federal Reserve deny that the Fed and FedNow can access or control individuals bank accounts, which makes sense because the money is from their perspective controlled at that master account level, but we even had industry professionals and think tanks really playing down the risk here.

Only time will tell how the government ends up using this system and whether we do see that pursuit of a CBDC following the Fed Now adoption and there are important questions to be asked when that time comes. But substantial claims require substantial evidence and we really just don't have that. We really just have a lot of what if scenarios being kind of posited online. And I really don't want to be dismissive here about the concerns with this, but given the alternatives and how FedNow sits relative to the current system, it just really goes to show how far-fetched a lot of these stories really are and how a lot of other stuff would have to happen for the US to enter a phase where it would be remotely similar to what some people are suggesting. You know, the collapse of the rule of law and things like that.

So hopefully this video helps to clear up some of the noise and paint the whole picture about what this means for the US monetary system. It really isn't that interesting. It's a lot more boring than people are making it up to be. It's really just a country upgrading its transaction system. That's mostly it.

Thanks for joining me. I'm sure I'll get some unpleasant comments down below, but truly I'm trying to be constructive to the conversation because this is complicated stuff. And I really do see it as this misinformation stemming from a misunderstanding of how the system works. I sort of see it as being like with GameStop, when trading of the stock was frozen, many people blamed Robinhood, you know, for colluding with hedge funds. When a report afterwards explained how the trading system actually works and why a tiny broker dealing with this unprecedented level of trading activity wasn't able to fulfill those transactions, the roadblocks that came up along the way.

You know, just a matter of those details that you wouldn't necessarily know from the outside. That's not to say I know how things will play out, but I just looking to add extra details. If you liked this video, please do make sure to like, subscribe, all that good stuff. It does help the channel tremendously. If you don't like this video, make sure to like, subscribe, all that good stuff.

It does help the channel tremendously. And genuinely do let me know your thoughts down below. Thanks again for watching. See you in the next 1.

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FedNow, and the Conspiracy Theories Around It, Explained