Macau Adds More Casino Hotels For Use As COVID Medical Facilities

While the government has not imposed the type of citywide lockdown seen in mainland Chinese cities, Macau is effectively closed with most facilities shut. Residents have been asked to stay home and restaurants are only providing takeaway. Residents thronged to food markets and grocery stores on Thursday, spooked that the city would be fully locked down. The government denied the rumours and urged the public not to panic and hoard food, according to local broadcaster TDM.

Privacy concerns over CBDCs The primary concern over a government-issued digital dollar centers on privacy, particularly when it comes to the issuance of Federal Reserve accounts. The US government could track all citizens' purchases through an e-wallet, giving the Fed an account of everything we do and eliminating space for unsurveilled monetary exchange, according to Peebles. 

HONG KONG, July 9 (Reuters) - Macau will shut almost all commercial and industrial businesses including its casinos for one week from Monday, as authorities race to curb a surge of COVID-19 infections in the world's biggest gambling hub.

Risk-off sentiment, further stoked by Macao's first casino shutdown in over two years to curb the spread of COVID-19, When you have just about any concerns with regards to where and also the way to work with read this blog post from Www.Google.lk, it is possible to e mail us on the webpage. also sent the Nasdaq into negative territory, with market leading tech- and tech-adjacent megacap stocks weighing heaviest.

"There´s nervousness about earnings season and the CPI report, but I think the market has a sense as to what CPI is going to bring this week," said Robert Pavlik, senior portfolio manager at Dakota Wealth in Fairfield, Connecticut.

If the US government monitors everything you buy -- from milk at your local store to poker chips during your next casino trip -- there's potential for abuse. "All sorts of profiling could emerge out of that, and hackers might deem that database to be quite valuable, too," Peebles said. "So you could picture predatory marketing to the elderly, for example, if the data got out."

HONG KONG, July 8 (Reuters) - Macau authorities have added two hotels in popular casino resorts to be used as COVID-19 medical facilities from Friday as they try to ramp up capacity to handle a surge of infections in the world's biggest gambling hub.

Alliance for Gambling Reform coordinator Anna Bardsley has led calls for a reduction in venue trading hours, spin rates and maximum bets after a shocking new report revealed Victorians alone had lost an estimated $66 billion to pokies in the last 30 years.

China, which outlawed cryptocurrency last year, is leading the "in-development" pack with the digital yuan, having trialed over $5 billion worth of transactions since June 2021. China has conducted various real-world pilot runs to test the "reliability of economic theories, the stability of systems and the controllability of risks," according to a recent report by the People's Bank of China. These pilot runs included giving digital yuan to a random pool of applicants to be spent at designated offline locations or on the site of China's largest online retailer, JD.com. 

Still, the logistics haven't yet been hammered out. One option is for the Federal Reserve to issue digital wallets to Americans, making money accessible through a smartphone app or debit card, according to Peebles. El Salvador did this in the fall by giving Salvadorans access to a crypto wallet app called Chivo when it adopted bitcoin as legal tender in the country.

The market currently expects that the central bank will raise the Fed funds futures rate by 75 basis points in its latest salvo against red-hot inflation, a tactic which some fear could tip an already cooling economy into recession.

How would a digital dollar work in practice? Americans are using and carrying less cash nowadays, turning to card and electronic payments instead, with 40% of individuals reporting that they didn't use cash for in-person payments in April, according to a survey by the Federal Reserve System's Cash Product Office. Mobile payment services like Venmo, Zelle and PayPal are increasingly popular, with 64% of survey respondents saying they regularly use a digital payment platform, according to a 2020 survey by the Travis Credit Union. 

But CBDCs are complex. They offer some potential benefits (providing financial resources to underbanked populations, for example) and potential drawbacks (including significant privacy concerns). For now, here's an introduction to some of the basics, as well as an overview of which countries are working on CBDCs and some clues about how a central bank digital currency might work in practice. 

Which countries are exploring CBDCs? About 110 countries are at some stage of CBDC development, according to the IMF. The Bahamas, Nigeria and several countries in the eastern Caribbean through the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (including Grenada, Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Lucia and St. Kitts and Nevis) have already issued CBDCs. The names of their e-currencies are the Sand Dollar, eNaira and DCash, respectively.