Comment by kelnos
3 years ago
Ignoring the fact that FedNow doesn't change much in this regard...
I'm torn on this. Visa, MasterCard, Venmo (aka PayPal), etc. all know about large subsets of my transactions, and they go and sell my personal data to other companies in sleazy ways to cover their costs.
Is that better or worse than the government knowing all this stuff? Sure, the government can also legally use force against me and deprive me of my freedom and possessions, and might pervert my transaction history into justifying doing bad things to me. But that's a risk, not a certainty. Private companies selling my data and using it in nefarious ways is a certainty.
We can stop private companies from selling that data if we wanted to. Once the federal government has direct control of our financial transactions, how do we limit what they can do with that power?
The point of keeping the government out of the banking business would be to keep the door cracked for the chance to improve it later. That door slams shut once the federal government has the insights into every transaction, and more importantly the ability to deny ones they don't want us to do. We also Wil have much less control over the creation of a social credit score, theoretically the government would have everything it needs to make that happen with control over our transactions.
Can’t the government just buy this data from them, anyway?
They can and do. The government doesn't need a warrant to buy data from a databroker selling your information wholesale.
don't forget SARs to FinCEN and other AML requirements
the government already knows.
It's not about KNOWING, it's about CONTROLLING. The concern is they can shut off your ability to make transactions if you don't cooperate with whatever their agenda is at any given moment, like what the truckers in Canada protesting vax mandates experienced.
in effect the requirement to file these activity reports leads to banks simply requesting a lot of data from clients (contracts, trading data, invoices), and if you can't convince them, they'll eventually close your account. so you go to a different bank. their compliance department eventually also starts asking questions, and so on.
the freezing of accounts related to the "Freedom Convoy" is quite different, as it was an exercise of emergency powers. the Trudeau admin could have ordered gas stations to not sell fuel to them, or Visa/MasterCard to not process certain cards, or anything similarly extraordinary.