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Your Mortgage Was Priced in Basel

Somewhere in America today a couple is signing a mortgage. Thirty years, a fixed rate, a kitchen table, a pen that suddenly weighs more than it should. They believe the number on the page came from their bank, or from the Federal Reserve, or from the mysterious weather system called the market. All three answers hold a piece of the truth, and all three leave out the room where a slice of that number was set: a round tower beside the railway tracks in Basel, Switzerland, owned by the central banks of the world, run by a staff most Americans will never hear named, and answerable to no voter on Earth.

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The Invisible Ledger: How Digital Currency Threatens the Last Private Thing You Own

There is something seductive about the promise of digital money. It arrives dressed in the language of progress, efficiency, inclusion, and modernization, as though the ability to hold a coin in your hand were a primitive embarrassment that civilization ought to outgrow. Cryptocurrency evangelists speak of decentralization and freedom from institutional control. Central bankers speak of reduced transaction costs and expanded access to financial services. What neither camp mentions with sufficient urgency is that the digitization of money is, at its operational core, the digitization of permission. And once your ability to buy bread requires permission, you no longer live in a free society. You live in an administered one.

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