Cross the Fabian Society’s In Tandem, ‘Positive Money’, and the BIS Innovation Hub’s Project Rosalind and what do you get?
You get a blueprint for a command economy using 21st-century digital infrastructure — a technical and institutional architecture for comprehensive control over money, spending, and economic activity.
We previously discussed two reports — neither of which were particularly palatable. The first, ‘In Tandem’ by the Fabian Society1, subversively suggests the effective, undemocratic transfer of fiscal policy control to the Bank of England through an Economic Policy Coordination Committee which would meet before every budget, with the BoE governor empowered to write letters influencing when and how the Treasury should borrow and spend.
Should you refuse, hey, read up on what happened to Liz Truss.
The second, the ‘Positive Money’ proposal2, advocates introducing a secondary transactional currency with full central bank reserve backing — alarmingly creating a pathway to the fifth plank of the Communist Manifesto: a single central bank in control of all credit.
In Tandem
… goes further than merely proposing institutional coordination — it explicitly calls for highly targeted fiscal policy customised to individual circumstances and transactions. The report argues that:
… targeted tax increases on higher income households offer a much more precise means of constraining demand than the distributionally blunt instrument of interest rate rises…
… and proposes that:
… fiscal policy can be used to manage the distributional effects of inflation.
Concretely, when taken to its logical conclusion (as scope creep is so hot these days) this means applying different VAT rates, surcharges, and rebates to different people at the point of purchase based on their income bracket, what they’re buying, and where they’re spending. A wealthy household buying restaurant meals would face real-time surcharges; a low-income household buying groceries would receive instant rebates — all applied automatically at checkout, with the differential flowing to or from the Treasury without any legislative debate or budget line item.
To operationalise this vision, ‘In Tandem’ proposes creating an Economic Policy Coordination Committee comprising the Treasury, Bank of England, Climate Change Committee, Office for Budget Responsibility, and various ‘stakeholder’ organisations — meeting before every fiscal event on a statutory basis that ‘could not be bypassed by the government of the day without new legislation’.
The BoE governor would gain the power to write letters to the Chancellor whenever monetary policy proves insufficient, effectively dictating when and how the Treasury must intervene fiscally. These letters — amplified through compliant media as demonstrated during the Truss affair — would function as political weapons forcing elected governments to comply with technocratic directives. The result is an effective transfer of fiscal policy powers from the Treasury to an unelected committee structure where the Bank of England — whose governor, Andrew Bailey, is himself a Fabian Society member — holds the commanding position. Democracy remains in form; in substance, economic policy passes to those who control the authorisation engines and write the rules that your wallet enforces.
Positive Money
… proposes splitting the monetary system into two distinct rails: fully-backed transaction accounts and fractional-reserve investment accounts. Transaction accounts would function like allocated gold certificates — each unit of digital currency backed 1:1 by central bank reserves, perfectly liquid and perfectly safe, used for everyday spending like groceries, bills, and wages. Investment accounts would continue operating under fractional reserve banking as today, enabling commercial banks to create credit through lending while bearing the associated risks. Consumers could choose between safety (transaction accounts) and yield (investment accounts), with bridges between the two rails governed by the central bank.
However, a critical implication lies in what happens as money shifts from the credit rail to the transaction rail. Currently, zero percent of the money supply exists as public-held central bank liabilities — nearly everything is commercial bank deposits. If 10% shifts to allocated accounts requiring 100% reserve backing, the central bank must expand reserves significantly, backed by whatever collateral schedule it accepts — government securities, corporate bonds, securitised assets, real estate instruments.
This isn’t a bug, it’s the feature. It achieves the fifth plank of the Communist Manifesto — centralisation of credit in the hands of the state via a national bank — functionally if not formally. The question isn’t whether this mechanism enables centralisation, but how quickly crisis conditions will be used to justify expanding the allocated share, and what assets central banks will acquire to back that expansion.
The Missing Piece: Project Rosalind
Yet this identifies a missing piece of the puzzle. We have the social credit system in all but name through ‘In Tandem’ seeking to customise fiscal policy at the individual transaction level. We have the proposed transfer of fiscal policy control to the Bank of England ‘during emergencies’ — emergencies that the Bank of England’s own monetary policy failures created in the first place. We have a mechanism enabling a two-tier currency system through Positive Money that can facilitate both the Communist Manifesto’s fifth plank3 and Technocracy Inc’s energy certificates4 — just eliminate the second tier currency’s ability to circulate. Yet, nothing appears to tie these together. No technical substrate appears to exist to execute per-transaction fiscal policy, enforce Positive Money’s two-rail split, and coordinate it all through an unelected committee structure.
Project Rosalind5 is that substrate. It’s a retail CBDC API developed by the BIS Innovation Hub’s London Centre in collaboration with the Bank of England, presented as a neutral technical standard exploring the feasibility of a two-tier model: the central bank provides the settlement layer while private payment service providers manage customer-facing wallets and transactions. Just ‘infrastructure’. Merely ‘exploring what’s possible’.
But Rosalind defines a set of instructions for programmable wallets and CBDCs that make both ‘In Tandem’ and ‘Positive Money’ operationally trivial. In practice, if you pass the conditional requirements coded into the system, your transaction proceeds. If you fall short, the transaction is stopped, modified, or surcharged — regardless of whether you have sufficient funds in your account.
The system exposes four critical technical capabilities:
Conditional authorisation: The API can approve, deny, or modify a payment at checkout. Not after settlement, not at month-end reconciliation, but at the point of authorisation. This means applying a levy, withholding a surcharge, or granting a rebate before the transaction completes.
Targeting surfaces: The system can condition payments based on multiple dimensions.
Who (income band, employment status, age via selective disclosure credentials),
What (merchant category codes, product classifications),
Where (geofencing by location or jurisdiction),
When (time windows, seasonal restrictions), and
How fast (velocity limits, cumulative spending caps by category).
Two-tier structure: Rosalind implements the separation between the central bank settlement layer (Tier 1) and payment service provider customer-facing layer (Tier 2) — precisely the structure ‘Positive Money’ requires. Every payment service provider must implement the same API, and every wallet must respect the same conditional logic. The central bank doesn’t onboard customers directly, but it controls the chokepoints where every transaction is evaluated and can be modified or blocked.
Offline envelopes: Preset spending limits stored in secure elements within devices, allowing transactions without network connectivity. The critical question: are these limits truly user-controlled or remotely mutable by central authorities?
None of this forces fiscal targeting or conditional money. But it makes both operationally trivial to implement once a rule engine (such as the BIS Innovation Hub’s Project Mandala6) and legal authority are pointed at these controls.
From Theory to Transaction
A user attempts to purchase a restaurant meal. Their wallet communicates with their payment service provider, which calls the Rosalind API to request authorisation. Before approval, the request passes through a policy engine evaluating conditional parameters.
The wallet presents selective-disclosure credentials proving the payer is in the top income decile. The merchant category code indicates discretionary spending. The location is a fashionable London restaurant. The current date falls within a policy bundle, pushed to the system three days prior by the Economic Policy Coordination Committee.
The engine evaluates: income band (top 10%) × merchant category (discretionary) × geofence (London) × active policy bundle → apply surcharge of 2.5%.
The transaction proceeds. The user pays 2.5% more than the menu price. The merchant receives the standard amount, and the difference flows to the Treasury. No legislation was passed. No budget debate occurred. A committee met, compiled a rule, and pushed it to the engine.
The same mechanism operates in reverse. A low-income household purchasing groceries presents benefit eligibility credentials. The merchant category code indicates essential goods. The policy engine applies a 5% VAT rebate at authorisation. The customer pays less. The rebate is invisible to the merchant. The Treasury sees aggregate impact across millions of micro-adjustments, but individual transactions are silent, automatic, non-negotiable.
This is where ‘In Tandem’ logically leads as operational mechanism. The report proposes that ‘fiscal policy can be used to manage the distributional effects of inflation’ through ‘targeted tax increases’ and ‘simultaneous VAT reductions’ applied with precision that interest rates cannot provide. To work as described, those levers require attribute-aware surcharges and rebates deployed quickly and propagated uniformly. That means per-transaction enforcement at authorisation on a retail payments rail. The Fabian Society report doesn’t mention Rosalind by name, nor even CBDCs — it describes the desired outcome and leaves implementation to the technicians.
The Positive Money Connection
Rosalind’s two-tier structure maps directly onto Positive Money’s allocated versus unallocated split:
The Allocated/Transaction Rail: Fully-backed, non-interest retail balances representing direct central bank liabilities. Used for everyday spending — groceries, bills, wages, routine purchases. Perfectly liquid, perfectly safe, held 1:1 against central bank reserves. This is the retail CBDC exposed via Rosalind-class APIs.
The Unallocated/Savings-Credit Rail: Commercial bank deposits and credit instruments operating under fractional reserve. Used for savings bearing interest, credit creation through lending, investment instruments. Lives on traditional bank cores or wholesale tokenised settlement platforms.
The genius — or the danger — is in how the two rails interact. Bridges between them are necessary: users must convert CBDC to bank deposits and vice versa. But those bridges are governed by the same Rosalind-style API that enables conditional payments:
Conversion caps: Daily or monthly limits on CBDC-to-deposit exchanges, preventing rapid flight that could trigger bank runs.
Cooling-off periods: Large conversion requests face mandatory delays, giving authorities time to detect systemic stress before it cascades.
Attribute-based restrictions: High-income individuals face lower CBDC holding limits, forcing wealth into the monitored, taxable credit rail. Low-income households receive priority allocation of transaction balances.
Dynamic fees and spreads: The cost of conversion adjusts in real time to discourage arbitrage or manage aggregate flows between rails.
When every spend and every conversion hits the same programmable authorisation path, these controls become trivial to enforce. The policy engine evaluates. The API executes. Rosalind becomes the actuator that enforces Positive Money’s two-rail split and governs the bridges between them.
Implementation and Control
Rosalind is a reference API developed by the BIS Innovation Hub’s London Centre in collaboration with the Bank of England. The Bank’s deep involvement matters because the current Governor, Andrew Bailey, is a member of the Fabian Society7 — the same organisation that published ‘In Tandem’. The report that proposes expanding the Bank of England’s authority was authored by Fabian Society researchers. The Governor who would benefit from that expanded authority is a Fabian Society member. The technical infrastructure that makes the proposal operationally feasible is being co-developed by the Bank of England through the BIS Innovation Hub.
The ideology, the governance proposal, and the technical substrate converging through overlapping networks of people and organisations who share a common vision of how economic policy should be administered.
Did anyone say ‘conflict of interest’?
Marx, Technocracy, and the Administered Economy
The intellectual lineage is worth making explicit. Marx’s concept of labour certificated and socially necessary labour time proposed steering consumption toward planned output — essentials prioritised, luxuries constrained. Technocracy Inc’s energy certificates went further: non-transferable, non-saveable tokens functioning as administered allowances rather than money. Programmable payments provide the mechanism to emulate these visions at checkout. Expiry dates, velocity caps, and category fences turn money into access rights. Not immediately, not completely — but the knobs exist to move incrementally in that direction, especially under crisis conditions where ‘temporary’ measures become normalised.
The transaction rail provides administered flow for necessary consumption. The credit rail remains for capital formation and savings, but under centralised collateral and liquidity rules. The fifth plank of the Communist Manifesto calls for ‘centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly’. A two-tier system where the central bank controls both the retail transaction rail (via Rosalind-class APIs) and the wholesale credit rail (via collateral rules, reserve requirements, and access conditions) achieves this centralisation functionally.
As the retail CBDC share grows through Positive Money’s mechanism, the central bank’s balance sheet expands proportionally, and with it, its leverage over asset prices, credit allocation, and economic structure. This centralises money creation in the hands of the technocrats who control the central bank’s collateral policy and the Economic Policy Coordination Committee that sets the parameters on the transaction rail.
Who Gains?
If ‘In Tandem’ lands — if the Economic Policy Coordination Committee is established, if the BoE governor’s letters gain statutory force, if fiscal rules are amended to permit targeted, dynamic taxation — then the operational discretion of the central bank increases dramatically. Even if formal fiscal authority remains with the Treasury, the practical power to modify prices, restrict transactions, and steer consumption shifts to the institutions that control the policy engine and the API. The Treasury retains the title. The Bank of England and its delegates gain the throttle.
And if Positive Money’s two-rail structure is implemented alongside this governance shift, the concentration becomes even more acute. The central bank controls the transaction rail directly through Rosalind-class APIs. It controls the credit rail indirectly through collateral schedules, reserve requirements, and access to wholesale settlement platforms. It influences fiscal policy through the Economic Policy Coordination Committee. And it enforces all of it at the millisecond timescale of transaction authorisation — faster than Parliament can debate, faster than the public can mobilise, faster than anyone can ask for a receipt.
What This Means
Project Rosalind is the missing piece. It’s the technical substrate that makes ‘In Tandem’s’ real-time fiscal coordination operationally feasible. It’s the actuator that enforces Positive Money’s two-rail split and governs the bridges between them. It’s the API where Marx’s labour certificates and Technocracy Inc’s administered energy credits stop being remnants of history and become hypothetical possibilities.
None of this is inevitable, but the capability exists. The governance proposal is published, and the institutions are aligning. Deployment requires legal authorisation — but here’s the critical danger: this infrastructure doesn’t need to launch fully operational. It can be integrated dormant into payment systems and legal frameworks, sitting inactive in the background, presented as merely ‘modernising payment infrastructure’ or ‘ensuring financial resilience’.
And then it waits.
The next crisis (or ‘emergency’) — pandemic, inflation spike, bank failure, climate emergency, geopolitical shock — provides the justification. Temporary controls to prevent hoarding, restrictions to direct spending toward essentials, expiry dates to encourage circulation. Each measure arrives with reassurances of limited scope. Each measure is presented as the minimum necessary response to extraordinary circumstances.
But the transfer of power happens in that moment of activation. In the blink of an eye, fiscal policy shifts from Parliament to the Economic Policy Coordination Committee. From elected government to the Bank of England and its technocratic delegates. From public debate to policy bundles compiled in private and pushed to BIS authorisation engines that your wallet enforces automatically. The infrastructure was already there — dormant, tested, certified, waiting. The crisis simply provided the political cover to flip the switch.
And who benefits? Not the Treasury, whose formal authority remains intact while practical control evaporates. Not Parliament, which discovers that budget debates have become theatrical performances while real fiscal policy executes at the API layer. Not the public, who find their spending modified, surcharged, or restricted based on credentials and categories they never voted on.
The Bank of England benefits. The institution that failed to prevent the 2008 crisis. That monetised pandemic deficits and called the resulting inflation ‘transitory’. That engineered the conditions forcing Liz Truss from office when she dared conduct policy without clearing it first. That same institution gains operational control over both monetary policy (which it already holds) and fiscal policy (which it obtains through the EPCC structure), enforced through programmable money that executes its directives before you finish scanning your card.
The time to demand safeguards is now, while the specifications are being written and the test cases defined. After the infrastructure locks in, after the corridors require conformance, after the Economic Policy Coordination Committee starts issuing policy bundles that your wallet enforces automatically, it will be too late to ask whether this was a good idea.
Your card declines. The screen shows a reason code. Nothing changed in Parliament today... but the API spec did.
And that, in the end, will be the only vote that matters.
Vielen Dank für die umfangreichen Ausarbeitungen. Jetzt fehlt noch ein wichtiger Baustein, die Anwendung kybernetischer Prinzipien im RGW Wirtschaftsblock. Die Arbeiten kybernetischer Institute sowohl in Berlin (Ost) und Moskau zu Zeiten des kalten Krieges. Was resultiert daraus? Im Prinzip ein Experimentierfeld. Die Planwirtschaft des Ostblocks inklusive der gelieferten Ideologie (trotz Mangel vorwärts ;-)). Die Dinge fügen sich nun zusammen.
The name Rosalind means 'gentle horse' as in Trojan