Mark Carney, Bank of England Governor has given a given a significant speech at the Jackson Hole symposium in which he outlines some potential steps to a new global currency. He argues that just as Sterling transitioned to the US Dollar in the 1930s’s, something similar could occur again. But rather than having a battle of competing reserve currencies, perhaps an alternative path is possible via a Synthetic Hegemonic Currency (SHC). This might be based on a network of central bank digital currencies, rather than something like Libra.
This folks is a big deal – when aligned with the reduction in cash, the migration to digital currencies, and globalisation. The potential implications are immense!
Technology has the potential to disrupt the network externalities that prevent the incumbent global reserve currency from being displaced.
Retail transactions are taking place increasingly online rather than on the high street, and through electronic payments over cash. And the relatively high costs of domestic and cross border electronic payments are encouraging innovation, with new entrants applying new technologies to offer lower cost, more convenient retail payment services.
The most high profile of these has been Libra – a new payments infrastructure based on an international stablecoin fully backed by reserve assets in a basket of currencies including the US dollar, the euro, and sterling. It could be exchanged between users on messaging platforms and with participating retailers.
There are a host of fundamental issues that Libra must address, ranging from privacy to AML/CFT and operational resilience. In addition, depending on its design, it could have substantial implications for both monetary and financial stability.
The Bank of England and other regulators have been clear that unlike in social media, for which standards and regulations are only now being developed after the technologies have been adopted by billions of users, the terms of engagement for any new systemic private payments system must be in force well in advance of any launch.
As a consequence, it is an open question whether such a new Synthetic Hegemonic Currency (SHC) would be best provided by the public sector, perhaps through a network of central bank digital currencies.
Even if the initial variants of the idea prove wanting, the concept is intriguing. It is worth considering how an SHC in the IMFS could support better global outcomes, given the scale of the challenges of the current IMFS and the risks in transition to a new hegemonic reserve currency like the Renminbi.
An SHC could dampen the domineering influence of the US dollar on global trade. If the share of trade invoiced in SHC were to rise, shocks in the US would have less potent spillovers through exchange rates, and trade would become less synchronised across countries.
By the same token, global trade would become more sensitive to changes in conditions in the countries of the other currencies in the basket backing the SHC.
The dollar’s influence on global financial conditions could similarly decline if a financial architecture developed around the new SHC and it displaced the dollar’s dominance in credit markets. By reducing the influence of the US on the global financial cycle, this would help reduce the volatility of capital flows to EMEs.
Widespread use of the SHC in international trade and finance would imply that the currencies that compose its basket could gradually be seen as reliable reserve assets, encouraging EMEs to diversify their holdings of safe assets away from the dollar. This would lessen the downward pressure on equilibrium interest rates and help alleviate the global liquidity trap.
