Tag Archives: European Central Bank

Katrin Assenmacher (ECB), Peter Bofinger (U of Wurzburg), Rod Garratt (UCSB, BIS), Alexandre Stervinou (Banque de France). Chair: Dirk Niepelt. One of the opening events at CEPR’s Paris Symposium 2023. Organizer: Tessa Ogden, Dirk Niepelt.

Conference jointly organized by CEPR’s RPN FinTech & Digital Currencies and the European Central Bank. Welcome speech by Piero Cippolone, keynote by Fabio Panetta. Organizers: Toni Ahnert, Katrin Assenmacher, Massimo Ferrari Minesso, Peter Hoffmann, Arnaud Mehl, Dirk Niepelt. CEPR’s conference website. ECB’s website with videos. Website with pictures.

In Christos V. Gortsos and Rolf Sethe, editors: Central Bank Digital Currencies, EIZ Publishing, ch. 3, Zurich, October 2023. PDF.

With Cyril Monnet. VoxEU, August 10, 2023. HTML. … promoting the digital euro requires an aggressive marketing strategy because private incentives for adoption are limited. However, the pursuit of such an aggressive approach is unlikely as this runs counter to the ECB’s fourth, implicit objective of protecting banks’ existing business model. This is problematic and could turn the project into a significant missed opportunity, for the potential social benefits of the digital euro...

Neue Zürcher Zeitung, July 5, 2023. PDF. HTML. Ein digitaler Euro könnte den Wettbewerb fördern, mehr Transparenz schaffen und das Too-big-to-fail-Problem entschärfen. Mit ihrer Minimalvariante aber priorisiert die EZB das Ziel der Bewahrung des Status quo im Bankensystem.

SUERF Policy Brief 612, June 2023. HTML, PDF. Executive summary: The ECB’s first two progress reports on the digital euro clarify the project teams’ considerations. Some motivations for a digital euro remain vague, some fundamental tradeoffs receive limited attention. Most importantly, the reports lack an analysis of why digital euro holdings as stores of value are not desirable and whether strategies to limit such holdings cause collateral damage. Against that backdrop some of the design...

European Parliament, April 2023. PDF. Executive summary: The two progress reports provide an insightful overview over some of the thinking underlying the digital euro project. The reports remain vague in some respects, which is not surprising given the early stage of the project and the division of tasks between the ECB and the Commission. The first report suggests that the digital euro can help preserve public money as the anchor of the payment system, but it does not explain how the...

In an NBER working paper John Cochrane concludes that … we have been guilty of playing with too-complex models when we don’t really understand basics, such as stability, determinacy, and the frictionless limit. … Given the state of actual agreed-on knowledge, central banks’ proclamations of detailed technocratic ability to manipulate delicate frictions is laughable. Figure 10 shows in chart form the Rube-Goldberg list of mechanisms the ECB thinks it understands and can manipulate....

In a speech, the ECB’s Fabio Panetta argues that a digital Euro is necessary because [i]n the digital age … banknotes could lose their role as a reference value in payments, undermining the integrity of the monetary system. Central banks must therefore consider how to ensure that their money can remain a payments anchor in a digital world. He argues that outsourcing the provision of central bank money [to stable coin providers] … would endanger monetary sovereignty [as would the absence...

CEPR and SUERF webinar moderated by me. Markus Brunnermeier and Jean-Pierre Landau present their report for the European Parliament. Youtube.