Tag Archives: CBDC

Share this article An attempt at an analysis from the perspective of a free Swiss individual What you’re about to read is the abridged and condensed English translation of a speech I gave in Munich in November 2023. You can find the full speech, in German with English subtitles, here. It tackles the very difficult, but also very crucial, subject of individual freedom, or what is left of it these days, and it seeks to offer a constructive analysis from a Swiss perspective.  It is...

In mid-November, while the whole world was focused on the Ukraine crisis, the US midterms or whatever other “big story” the media decided was more important, a truly momentous shift took place in the global financial system. It might seem like a small step on the surface, but it has the potential to bring about a real and possibly irreversible sea change in the way we use money; or better said, the way it uses us.  As Reuters reported on the 15th of November, “Global banking...

I have long thought about and written about the incredible opportunities that decentralized digital technologies have brought forward, especially when it comes to solving financial and monetary problems. The more these technologies and their applications develop and mature, the more I believe they hold many of the answers to some our most complex challenges. Chief among them is the future of money itself: the idea of a decentralized, robust and independent system of freely competing...

On Alphaville, Claire Jones and Izabella Kaminska discuss privacy issues related to CBDC. In the background, Kocherlakota’s “Money is Memory” is lurking.

In the NZZ, Matthias Müller reports how China’s CBDC plans progress: In China beginnen nun im Viertel Xiangcheng, das zu der unweit von Schanghai gelegenen Millionenstadt Suzhou gehört, in einem geschlossenen System erste Tests. … Die PBoC dürfte ein zweistufiges System entwickelt haben. Auf der ersten Ebene wird die digitale Währung an die Geschäftsbanken ausgegeben. Auf der zweiten Ebene können dann die Haushalte und Unternehmen den digitalen Yuan abheben und verwenden. … In Suzhou...

A common argument against retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) is that CBDC would undermine financial stability by allowing the general public to swiftly move funds from banks to a government account. But in several countries such swift transfers are possible already today—in the US through Treasury Direct. (The argument also has conceptual flaws, see the paper On the Equivalence of Public and Private Money with Markus Brunnermeier.)

There is widespread international interest in CBDC, Libra, and the like. E.g., my VoxEU column on Libra and CBDC is discussed on the Czech news platform patria.cz. And my JME paper with Markus Brunnermeier is discussed on the Turkish site digitalage.com.tr.