Let's get real for a minute: France and Germany do not want Facebook, of all businesses, to monitor most private monetary transactions. Yesterday a social network, then a press/media entity, now a "central" bank with no traditional jurisdiction but its own private virtuality? It's preposterous, particularly considering the track record of this company.
The statement you quoted is just typical gov/political PR, common rhetoric.
However, it's everything but a bizzare statement, fundamentally. Ask yourself: how does the USA treat the US Dollar, would they be willing to just let it wane or die, be "invaded" by a foreign and private currency, as if it were not "inherent to its sovereignty"? Would the Fed be OK to just vanish and let the BCE or some private Asian conglomerate run the monetary show from San Francisco to Berlin passing by tokyo in terms of monetary policy? You in fact support the opposite view, inflation has indeed become many a government's tool.
Come on. This comment was either disingenuous or wildly uneducated about macroeconomics and political theory, either way totally fails to account for/relate to the European political/philosophical framework. Your world view is absurdly narrow, hyper-centered on the peculiar American case: few countries have privatized their citizens' State hence sovereignty to such an unfettered extent.
> how does the USA treat the US Dollar, would they be willing to just let it wane or die, be "invaded" by a foreign and private currency
This can only happen one of two ways:
a. US government declares that currency legal tender. They won't do it ever.
b. all of US citizens voluntarily agree to accept this currency instead of dollars, only using dollars when they must (e.g. when paying taxes) but otherwise avoiding it like plague. This has been a common occurrence in places with unstable national currency - e.g. exUSSR countries in 90s-2000s, and many others. At that point, the US dollar would be effectively dead anyway as currency, and the only way to recover it would be stabilize it back and make it preferable means of trade.
The only way for other currency to push out US dollar is for US citizens and the whole world to become convinced this currency is better for them - safer, more stable, more convenient, more trustworthy - than the US dollar. If anybody can ever do that, it's not Facebook. So there's nothing to worry about.
> wildly uneducated about macroeconomics and political theory
What exactly in macroeconomics or political theory suggests that any private coin - of which literally thousands already exist - pose any threat whatsoever to the existence of national currencies?
They, of course, pose tax-avoidance, money-laundering, etc. risk - and if particular state's central bank goes completely bonkers and ruins their own currency with their monetary policies - as it happened in Zimbabwe, Venezuela and many countries before that - then the national currency can vane and die. But that happened many times before Facebook even existed and will undoubtedly happen again. Libra has zero to do with it, and nothing you just described comes even close to explaining bizarre and non-sensical action of European government. It's mostly looking as "this new thing is confusing to me so I ban it just in case". Funny thing it's not even new, it's just pure ignorance.
The statement you quoted is just typical gov/political PR, common rhetoric.
However, it's everything but a bizzare statement, fundamentally. Ask yourself: how does the USA treat the US Dollar, would they be willing to just let it wane or die, be "invaded" by a foreign and private currency, as if it were not "inherent to its sovereignty"? Would the Fed be OK to just vanish and let the BCE or some private Asian conglomerate run the monetary show from San Francisco to Berlin passing by tokyo in terms of monetary policy? You in fact support the opposite view, inflation has indeed become many a government's tool.
Come on. This comment was either disingenuous or wildly uneducated about macroeconomics and political theory, either way totally fails to account for/relate to the European political/philosophical framework. Your world view is absurdly narrow, hyper-centered on the peculiar American case: few countries have privatized their citizens' State hence sovereignty to such an unfettered extent.