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In thinking about these possible roles of generally available public money it is important to think beyond the status quo in which private money is issued only by tightly regulated commercial banks.

From Do We Need ‘Public Money’? – Speech By Jon Cunliffe, Bank Of England, Deputy Governor, Financial Stability, Given at the OMFIF Digital Money Institute, London:

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And so perhaps the most interesting part of the U.K.’s announcement of a CDBC taskforce was not the tantalizing glimmer of a Britcoin. It was the BOE’s creation of a new “omnibus” account to provide access to its real-time settlement system beyond its traditional customers. This will allow new providers of financial market infrastructure to leverage blockchain technology to deliver faster and cheaper wholesale payments and settle them using central bank money.

One consortium, comprised of 15 shareholders including UBS Group AG, Barclays Plc and Nasdaq Inc., has already applied for access with a goal to be up and running next year. Others are likely to follow.

Put another way, Britain may have the world’s first synthetic digital currency system for wholesale payments — backed by a central bank — as early as 2022. Such a development, over time, will have a profound impact on the role of banks in settlement. This is what to watch, not the Bahamas’ sand dollar.

From Bitcoin Won’t Leave Central Bankers in the Dust. Watch Britain and Singapore – Bloomberg:

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George Selgin, who is a thorough scholar of such things and an expert on the evolution of payment services, wrote an excellent piece for The Hill making precisely this point, calling on the Fed to follow the example the Bank of England set in 2017 by providing “master accounts” to non-banks. In the UK, for example, Wise (formerly Transferwise) has a settlement account at the Bank of England and therefore access to the same payment rails that banks do.

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Swift this week issued a paper with Accenture, which has a bank consulting practice, that argues central bank digital currencies should use existing payment rails

From Financial firms confront the threat of central bank digital currencies | American Banker.

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Facebook-backed cryptocurrency Diem is abandoning efforts to gain a payments licence from Swiss regulator Finma and instead switching its focus to the US

From Facebook Diem shifts operations from Switzerland to US.

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Nine million people are missing from the electoral roll, there are glaring loopholes in our lobbying laws and online political adverts still don’t have to say who paid for them.

From Voter ID: An Expensive Distraction – Electoral Reform Society:

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It’s not clear how non-photographic utility bills would tackling any of the alleged problems.

From Voter ID: An Expensive Distraction – Electoral Reform Society:

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Binance Halted Withdrawals of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin https://buff.ly/3bhUxQE. It’s an odd coincidence that scheduled maintenance often coincides with prices going down, but nothing more than a coincidence.

In another coincidence, Coinbase went down too.

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In a congressional hearing Thursday, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler called for more regulations for U.S. crypto exchanges. Bitstamp CEO Julian Sawyer explains why he would welcome such regulation and sees Gensler’s comments as positive for the industry. Sawyer also discusses plans for major expansion in the U.S., where one of the oldest crypto exchanges now seeks to triple its staff.

From Bitstamp CEO: Regulation is ‘Absolutely What the Industry Needs’ – CoinDesk.

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Now, as I have written and presented about numerous times, there are many and diverse reasons to implement digital currency as a form of electronic cash that runs in parallel with, not on top of, the legacy electronic money infrastructure of payment networks, interbank transfers and bank accounts (and, indeed, banks). It makes eminent sense to create a more robust and flexible payments infrastructure to the benefit of society as a whole by choosing to create a richer payment ecology.

Apart from the obvious need for the electronic cash for the online world that has been missing from day 1 of the internet, the fact is that the existing infrastructure cannot be made bulletproof. This is not hypothetical issue. Last year we saw the complete failure of all payment transactions within the European Target2 system for several hours on Friday, with backup systems and contingency modules also unable to function. 

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Swift this week issued a paper with Accenture, which has a bank consulting practice, that argues central bank digital currencies should use existing payment rails

From Financial firms confront the threat of central bank digital currencies | American Banker.

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The Bank Policy Institute (BPI) is a nonpartisan public policy, research and advocacy group, representing the nation’s leading banks. Our members include universal banks, regional banks and the major foreign banks doing business in the United States.

From About Us – Bank Policy Institute.

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The only major obstacles to such a system are government regulations on anti-money laundering, countering the financing of terrorism and sanctions enforcement.  They could be reformed tomorrow in a way that preserved their effectiveness but allowed money to flow faster.

From The Dollar, the Yuan, and CBDCs: What Talks, What Walks – Bank Policy Institute.

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