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SHCs are sick, as the kids say

Now, of course, when techno-determinist mirrorshaded hypester commentators (eg, me) say that the future of money might be somewhat different to the Bretton Woods II structure and that perhaps the decentralising nature of computer, communications and cryptographic (CCC) together mean that there might be currency issuers other than central banks (as, for example, I did in Wired magazine two decades ago), this might be dismissed by scenario planners and strategists as cypherpunk-addled babble.

It seems to me, however, that the reflections of sensible, knowledgable and powerful players is tending int the same direction. Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, recently gave a speech at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in which he said that [Central Banking] a form of global digital currency could be "the answer to the destabilising dominance of the US dollar in today’s global monetary system”.

Wow.

Mr. Carney went on to talk about the idea of “synthetic hegemonic currency” (abbreviated to SHC by everyone else but abbreviated to SyHC by me so that I can pronounce it “sick”). An obvious example of such a currency would be an electronic version of the IMF’s Special Drawing Right (SDR). In fact the former boss of SDRs has already put forward such a proposal, asking for the IMF to "develop a procedure for issuing and using market SDRs following currency board rules and backed 100% by official SDRs or by an appropriate mix of sovereign debt of the five basket currencies”. This, of course, sounds a little like Facebucks (or “Libra” as they are more properly designated).

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