Why Now For A Digital Treasury Dollar? Because Coronavirus

• Why Now For A Digital Treasury Dollar? Because Coronavirus
  by Robert Hockett, https://www.forbes.com/, 29 March 2020
  The Coronavirus pandemic has brought back to the front burner something we’d almost begun to forget about after last summer – the urgent need of a Democratic Digital Dollar and Public Payments Platform.
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  When Facebook announced its proposed Libra project last summer, monetary authorities worldwide redoubled their efforts to develop central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). These efforts were well underway even before Libra, and for very good reasons. Facebook’s announcement accordingly simply sped up developments that were going to happen in any event. Now, after a lull, the need appears all the more urgent – so urgent that a digital dollar almost made its way into the March 27 relief bill, and is all but certain to make its way into the next.
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  The social distancing and “shelter in place” measures necessitated by the current pandemic are antithetical to productive activity – and to people’s earnings. Economies worldwide are accordingly confronted by simultaneous supply-side and demand-side shocks. In order to mitigate, minimize, and reverse these shocks, action must be taken immediately to make payments and disburse moneys. What ever we’re able to do to optimize and speed up the operation of our payments architecture should be done.
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  Digital currencies are advanced means to such optimization. The reasons are not hard to see. A currency is simply “that which pays” in a payments system. To design a digital currency is accordingly to design a digital payment platform; it is to design a literal speed-of-light mechanism of value transfer and storage.
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  The sooner the United States can adopt such an architecture, the better – for reasons not only of long-term commercial and financial inclusion and efficient transacting, but also, in this time of crisis response, of immediate need. In a commercial society and exchange economy such as our own, a commercial architecture must be accounted an essential public utility – freely available, without fees or conditions, to all citizens and businesses.
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  In any economy whose size and growth are measured by gross domestic product (GDP) as ours is, moreover, to streamline the payments system is to fuel growth. For faster transacting means more transacting, which in turn means more growth as measured by GDP. A publicly provided digital payment platform is accordingly a justice gain and a growth gain alike.
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  It is also a crisis-mitigation gain. Congress has debated multiple mechanisms over these past two weeks by which to get badly needed relief money to individuals and businesses across the country. These debates have highlighted the Byzantine complexities of our sprawling national payments system.
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  There are multiple ways to optimize and rationalize our payments system. One especially easy way to do it would simply add two functionalities to the Treasury’s already existing network of “Treasury Direct” accounts. (A draft bill prescribing just that is here.) Any citizen or legal resident of the U.S. with a bank account and a Social Security or Taxpayer I.D. number can now open a digital account with the Treasury through which to transact with the Treasury any time, night or day in Treasury securities. It takes literally no more than ten minutes to open an account and begin transacting.
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  All that Treasury would have to add to this already existing platform to convert it into a universal digital payment platform is two things: (1) add “horizontal” peer-to-peer (P2P) connected Treasury Direct Account digital wallets; and (2) either ensure that existing bank accounts have that same connectivity to these wallets, or issue a new, unredeemable zero-coupon Treasury Bill – call it a “Treasury Dollar Bill” (“Treasury Dollar” for short) – valued at one Federal Reserve Note (i.e., one current “dollar bill”) per Treasury Dollar Bill, and make it legal tender on the very same terms. The U.S. Digital Service, an executive agency housed within the Executive Office of the President of the United States, is more than able to do the designing.  
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