Typography

Central bank digital currency, or CBDC, is a form of highly-liquid digital debt that most governments have, till now, held back from issuing. But there is a growing push to change this. Free market economists are generally not big fans of CBDC. They see it as government encroachment on the banking sector. In this post I'm going to push back on the free market consensus. (This post was inspired after reading posts by Tyler Cowen and Scott Sumner ). Look, we're always going to have a government. Right? And that government is going to have to raise funds somehow in order to keep the lights on. The question is, how? Should it issue 30-day Treasury bills? Fifty-year bonds? Perpetual debt? Paper currency? Why not issue currency-ish debt instruments in digital form? Let's start with a parable. Imagine a world in which the government has only ever issued 30-year bonds. But next month it wants to shift some of its borrowing from the 30-year bond range to the 10-year range. Governm...

Freigeld , or stamp scrip, is designed to pay negative interest, but it can be re-purposed to pay positive interest. Remember when global interest rates were plunging to zero and all everyone wanted to talk about was how to set a negative interest rate on cash? Now that interest rates around the world are rising again, here's that same idea in reverse: what about finally paying positive interest rates on cash? I'm going to explore three ways of doing this. As for why we'd want to pay interest on cash, I'll leave that question till the end. ------- The first way to pay interest on cash is to use stamping. Each Friday, the owner of a bill—say a $50 note—can bring it in to a bank to be officially stamped. The stamp represents an interest payment due to the owner. When the owner is ready to collect his interest, he deposits the note at the bank. For example, say that 52 weeks have passed and 52 stamps are present on the $50 note. If the interest rate on cash is 5%, then th...

Cross section of a banknote with a cotton paper core surrounded by two layers of polymer [ Source ]   Central bankers are at their most comfortable when engaging in technical debates over the finer points of monetary policy. But over the next few years they may be forced out of their comfort zone into a thorny philosophical debate over anonymity and financial censorship. They are poorly equipped for such a debate. When central bankers monopolized the issuance of banknotes in the 1800s and early 1900s, little did they know that a hundred years later anonymity would become an important public good . And because banknotes are the only generally-accepted way for law-abiding citizens to make uncensored anonymous payments, central bankers effectively became—by accident rather than design—the sole purveyors of these vital services.* Banknotes are anonymous because it is very difficult to link banknotes to identities, say by monitoring usage of notes via a note's serial number. As for ...

by Paul Conrad When we talk about bitcoin, one thing we need to ask ourselves is this: can worthless things circulate and be accepted in trade? If so, how? And can this state of affairs continue indefinitely? An intrinsically useless, unbacked, and costless fiat object might be accepted in trade, but only if it already has a positive price. A history of positive prices will generate sufficient expectations among potential acceptors that they will be able to trade that object on tomorrow. But how might our fiat object earn a positive price to begin with? If we reply that early adopters expected it to be widely accepted by others in trade, how did these early adopters ever form these expectations if that object didn't already have a positive price? We're dealing with a problem of circularity. There is no way to "break into" a dynamic that might generate a positive value for a fiat object. So logically, worthless things cannot trade in the market at a positive value. How...

Florentine florin Last year Scott Sumner introduced the econ blogosphere to what he likes to call the medium-of-account function of money, or MOA, defined as the sign in which an economy's sticker prices and debts are expressed. Here and here are recent posts of his on the subject. I think Scott's posts on this subject have added a lot of depth to the interblog monetary debates. However, I've never been a big fan of Scott's terminology. As I've pointed out before , what Scott calls MOA, most modern economists would call the unit-of-account function of money. Older economists like Jevons and Keynes[1] referred to the unit-of-account as the money-of-account, and modern economic historians also prefer money-of-account. Terminological differences aside, in today's post I want to focus on what I'll call from here on in the unit-of-account function of money. Scott's UOA posts often emphasize the idea of separating the unit-of-account function from the me...

Tyler Cowen and Scott Sumner discuss the idea of abolishing central bank-issued cash. The existence of cash can create problems for monetary policy. Say a central bank wants to reduce the rate it pays on central bank deposits to below zero. If it did so, everyone would immediately convert deposits into cash, since owning 0% yielding paper notes is better than owning an instrument that pays a penalty rate. There appears to be a zero-lower bound to the interest rate on deposits. Ban cash and you might remove that bound. Tyler points out that the alternative to an outright ban is to put a Silvio Gesell-style tax on cash that brings a bank note's yield to something below 0%. This way, no one will prefer cash to negative yielding deposits. But as he points out, this is slightly "goofy" since it requires serial numbers and scans on all paper notes. There is a simple alternative that doesn't require a ban, nor does it require that all cash carry sensors, serial numbers, or...

Tyler Cowen posts on Is there an easy way out of the eurozone? He notes it would be harder than Robert Barro thinks. I agree. My comment: Barro’s is the Euro-as-glove argument. You can slip it on, and slip it off just as easily. I like the Euro-as-Chinese-finger-trap argument. Once you’re in, you aren’t going to get out of it.* *Germany can’t leave it easily, because it is owed some E500b by the ECB via the Target2 settlement system. Leave it and lose it. The PIIGS can’t leave, because as Tyler points out, a bank run will immediately result. And if they dodge the run, they surely won’t be able to dodge euroization: citizens will spontaneously disengorge any newly-created liras/drachmas/etc in favour of the already-circulating and vastly superior Euro.

Tyler Cowen posts again on the theory that banks are using the ECB's new and broader facilities for arbitrage by buying risky sovereign debt, thereby driving interest rates down. There is another explanation for the fall in rates, see my comment below: The new ECB collateral rules dramatically increase the quantity of assets that banks can submit to the ECB in order to get ECB clearing balances. Bank loans are now allowed, so are lower quality ABS. This means that it is less likely that the national governments will have to guarantee local bank debt. This was a real problem in Greece and Ireland, for instance, for the local banks had run out of assets to submit to the ECB. Instead, banks were creating debts amongst each other and having the government guarantee these debts, before submitting them to the ECB as collateral. Since private non-marketable debt can now be submitted to the ECB, governments will no longer be required to covertly bail out their banks by guaranteeing intra-...

Have commented on a few blogs that bring up the meme of collateral shortages. Commodity money: It's back! (and it sucks) at Macromania Is the Fed our savior in financial regulation? at Marginal Revolution Why the Global Shortage of Safe Assets Matters at Macro and Other Market Musings The idea of a scarcity of shortage of safe assets is nonsensical to me. I just don't think this can be a real issue. If the quantity of "safe assets" somehow collapses, then the prices of remaining "safe assets" will rise to meet the market's demand for safe collateral and stores of value. You can't have shortages in financial markets. Do you think you can? and The idea that there can be a shortage of good collateralizable financial assets sounds fishy to me. Prices for those assets will simply rise until their price is sufficient to meet the demand for good collateral. The same with an excess demand for money - prices will simply fall to meet that demand.

Tyler Cowen has another post on the ECB financing sovereign governments via loans... It is finally being recognized that the eurozone made a major policy breakthrough : My thoughts: I don’t think the key here is arbitrage and government monetary financing. It’s about a slow bank run that has been enveloping Southern Europe for a few years now. The mechanism which governs intra-Euro payments requires Greek/Italian etc banks to “solve” for the bank run by submitting collateral to their national central bank in return for settlement balances. Much of this is done overnight or on a weekly basis. By establishing 3 year operations, the ECB is telling the banks and the rest of the world that they will continue to meet the demands of anyone running on the Southern European banks for the next 3 years. That sort of commitment to the system might be large enough to stop the bank run. It’s similiar to how, in the old days, banks suffering bank runs would often bring out all their cash and gold fro...

Interesting post on Marginal Revolution, What is the difference between LOLR to banks and LOLR to governments? Cowen: “Is this transfer of the subsidy to the sovereign a bug or a feature of the plan? Perhaps this is how the EU/ECB, viewed for a moment as a consolidated entity, will circumvent EU law to finance troubled governments. Is it possible that by changing collateral requirements they can alter the flow of funds to governments in a discretionary, ever-changing, and relatively non-politicized fashion? Does this satisfy the “too complicated for people to complain about” provision?” Reply: Good post. It is probably a feature, not a bug, and it is surely “too complicated for people to complain about,” at least for now. This isn’t a new thing, though. The ECB has been lightening up collateral requirements for a few years now, presumably in part to finance weak governments through the back door. Remember when the ECB broke its rules and began accepting BBBminus-rated collateral? Relev...