Whether Venezuela follows through on this or not, I would expect other countries to do so in the not-too-distant future. The US-based payment systems are no longer reliable.
The central bank of Venezuela will develop an independent national payment system to get rid of international giants Visa and Mastercard in response to US sanctions, according to local media citing the regulator.
The document, which also separately mentions multi-national debit card service Maestro owned by Mastercard, orders a suspension of debit card operations starting November 2019 and payments via credit cards from January 2020.
The joint order was reportedly issued on May 16 by the central bank and Superintendency of the Institutions of the Banking Sector of Venezuela (SUDEBAN), responsible for ensuring the country’s banks comply with local regulations. It instructs the banks to create a “sovereign” system to process financial operations that will use clients’ biometric data.
The attempts to exert control over who can, and who cannot, utilize the monetary system is transforming the Internet economy into something resembling a South American economy, with all the uncertainty and chaos that one would expect.
And the current system is falling apart anyhow. When Deutsche Bank is laying off 18,000 people around the world, that’s a pretty strong indication that change is coming.
When traditionally stable institutions like Deutsche Bank find themselves in trouble, it’s a signal that the world’s financial system will face big problems down the road, legendary investor Jim Rogers has told RT.
On Monday, the German multinational investment bank –and the world’s 15th largest bank by total assets– started cutting thousands of jobs as part of an $8.3 billion overhaul announced one day earlier. The bank’s workforce is set to be reduced by 18,000 to around 74,000 employees by 2022, as Deutsche Bank scraps its global equities and trading operations. The move has already impacted the bank’s shares, which started to fall after initial 4 percent gains on Monday.
“The financial system is in trouble and this is just one sign of what is going on. This has happened in previous financial problems in the 1930s or the 1960s or the 1990s,” Rogers said in a phone interview with RT. He explained that central banks around the globe drove interest rates “to crazy levels,” and now we have to pay the price for that.