> No government is going to let FB and any coalition do an end run around their national currency and their banking institutions.

That's the point of confusion. This is not an end around. This is about extracting tolls - slivers - from economic activity. They will all comply with the status quo, they will say what needs to be said, they will bow as they need to bow, they merely want to get their little cut on a billion transactions. It's nothing more than an attempt to layer another transaction processing fee-based system into/onto the global economy. There is no other point, it's why Facebook has partners like Visa interested.

These guys could not care less about replacing national currencies or doing an end run around of political control. In fact it's the exact opposite: they would want the regulators to make sure Libra is the standard that they can properly exploit, and raise the walls to other competition. That is how these companies always behave, it's rather obnoxiously predictable. They will be thrilled to work with regulators to keep things exactly as they are, with a little exception for their new baby parasite that gets 0.3% of everything (and please regulators, while you're at it, make it really hard to compete, make the regulations impossible for everybody else to comply with).

They do not want the political power, responsibility and conflicts that come with national currencies. They want the money, the fat juicy profits, that come with extracting high margin tolls. It's ideal to leave the national fiat currencies intact, so they can extract additional fees everytime people want to change their money. Libra is a rider, national currencies come and go.