Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) Sentiment Score Analysis of News using Chat GPT-4.0 from January 2018 to June 2024

The Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) can refine monetary statistics, fiscal policymaking, controls against illicit activities and promote financial inclusion. However, it could also raise concerns about data leakage and privacy. This paper analyzes the sentiment score of news towards CBDC using ChatGPT 4.0. The author extracted 11,679 news of LexisNexis database from 2018 to 2024, grouped in selected topics and create a new sentiment analysis index (CBDCSX). The results show i. Most of news related to CBDC were positive, wherein the events that drove to more positive news were related to the announcement of launches/pilot; and to more negative news were related to political speeches and legislation/consultation. ii. For the CBDC projects progress, the privacy concern should be overcome, since privacy is the main concern of citizens and professionals and that most appeared on the news, instead of “cyber”, “attacks”, “digital thefts”, and competition or association between cryptocurrencies versus CBDC. Therefore, the likelihood of a Central Bank issuing wholesale CBDC exceeds of issuing a retail CBDC, due to the privacy risk being reduced. And to CBDC become adopted by relevant economies, the regulatory and perception of the privacy concern should be solved, considering that USA and Europe government officials were the most mentioned on the news. This study enriches literature with the overall CBDC’s sentiment and their events that triggered positive and negative sentiment, and highlights that privacy may guide the future of CBDC projects; and differentiates from the literature with the analysis of different languages using ChatGPT-4.0.