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Showing posts with label Currencies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Currencies. Show all posts

Monday 26 July 2021

Govcoins and crypto to coexist

 



GOVERNMENT-backed coins and private cryptocurrencies will coexist for a while, despite rising regulatory walls set by the government to counter virtual coins, experts at a global webinar session said Thursday.

Noting that cryptocurrencies and digital currencies by governments are “two different animals,” they will coexist for now partly because current cryptocurrencies are not actually solving payment problems.

“How many of them (cryptocurrencies) are solving actual payment problem? Most of them are speculative and used as a means of storage,” said Nelson Chow, chief fintech officer of the Fintech Facilitation Office at the Hong Kong Monetary Authority.

Chow said that some central bank digital currency, or CBDC, projects such as Multiple CBDC Bridge have the potential to solve decades-old problems for cross-border transactions. Multiple CBDC Bridge is a wholesale CBDC co-creation project between the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, Bank of Thailand, the People‘s Bank of China and the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates.

Under the current regulatory environment, John Kiffmeiste, a former senior financial sector expert at the International Monetary Fund, said that it is unlikely that the emergence of CBDC projects, now numbering nearly 60 according to Kiffmeiste’s data, would make crypto assets obsolete.

“CBDC has to operate within confines of tax regulations, anti-money laundering, KYC (know-your-customer) and so many other regulations whereas cryptocurrencies don’t operate in that environment,” the economist added.

Speakers at the webinar co-hosted by The Investor, a tech media outlet run by The Korea Herald, Malaysia’s The Star and the Asia News Network.Speakers at the webinar co-hosted by The Investor, a tech media outlet run by The Korea Herald, Malaysia’s The Star and the Asia News Network.

But, Kiffmeiste pointed out that as the regulatory and legislative walls are closing in on crypto assets, they will come under the same rules that other types of conventional currencies operate under. “In that case, that levels the playing field. Perhaps in that new world, CBDCs and cryptocurrencies coexist, but crypto assets become redundant as at least payment medium.”

Andrew Sheng, one of Asia’s top economists, stressed that authorities should understand the complex contextual backgrounds that have brought about the rising interest in CBDCs and cryptocurrencies.

Noting that the value of the cryptocurrency market has reached US$1.2tril – half the value of the official gold reserves – Sheng said cryptocurrencies had grown outside of the purview of public control. “This was the big lesson of the Covid-19, private cyber currencies will be with us whether you like it or not,” Sheng said.

The tug-of-war between regulators and cryptocurrencies is most apparent in the US in the area of stablecoins like USD Coin, a digital equivalent of the US dollar.

The US-proposed Stable Act will bring USD stablecoin issuers into conventional regulatory perimeters.

Kevin Werbach, a professor of legal studies and business ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, said that the cryptocurrency industry does not have to be allergic to regulations.

“There is always a notion that we have to choose either innovation or regulation. And I think it’s a false dichotomy. For new technological markets to mature and develop, they need to be trusted. They need to get to the point where ordinary people around the world are willing to participate in these activities at scale, and regulations are an important part of that,” Werbach said.

As to the increasing public controls on crypto assets, speakers called for regulations compatible with the emerging cryptocurrency industry. They shared a similar view that cryptocurrency companies and regulators must work together on bringing the industry into the system.

“Since innovation is always ahead of regulation, it is inevitable for regulators to rely on us when drafting policies. It is crucial to reshape their ‘legacy mindset’ and make them understand the nature and dynamics of cryptocurrency,” said Marcus Lim, CEO and co-founder of Zipmex.

They were speaking at a webinar co-hosted by The Investor, a tech media outlet run by The Korea Herald, Malaysia’s The Star and the Asia News Network entitled “The rise of Govcoins & What’s next for crypto”. Speakers at the July 22 virtual seminar included a group of experts in the US, Europe and Asia who are navigating the current situation surrounding the development of central bank digital currencies and challenges posed by and to cryptocurrencies.

Experts said that central bank digital currencies have a huge potential to solve many issues, ranging from decades-old problems involving cross-border transactions to digital transformation.

Kiffmeiste noted that almost 60 jurisdictions are currently exploring retail CBDCs, with countries like the Bahamas and China at the forefront, but they are divided in their motivations for issuing the CBDCs. For instance, emerging economies consider CBDCs as a way to spur financial digitalisation, while advanced economics mull digital currency as part of financial stability and to improve monetary policies. — The Korea Herald/Asia News Network

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Tuesday 20 July 2021

The seismic shift in global finance

 

Why the global financial landscape is undergoing a seismic shift

  • Regulators are struggling to keep up with fintech’s rapid growth and the impact of big data, even as intense geopolitical rivalries mean accidents could easily escalate into crises

 
AUGUST 15, 2021 marks the 50th anniversary of United States President Richard Nixon delinking the US dollar from gold. Instead of a crisis, the ensuing half century marked the pre-eminence of the US financial system to global dominance.

In 2017, US Treasury Secretary Mnuchin commissioned four major studies on the US financial system that reviewed its efficiency, resilience, innovation and regulation. These surveys highlighted the US dominance in all four areas of banking, capital markets, asset management and financial technology.

To quote the reports proclaimed : “The US banking system is the strongest in the world”... “The US capital markets are the largest, deepest, and most vibrant in the world..(that) include the US$29 trillion (RM119 trillion) equity market, the US$14 trillion (RM57.5 trillion) market for US Treasury securities, the US$8.5 trillion (RM35 trillion) corporate bond market, and US$200 trillion (notional amount or RM820 trillion) derivatives market.”

According to the reports,“Nine of the top 10 largest global asset managers are headquartered in the United States.” In the area of financial technology, “US firms accounted for nearly half of the US$117bil (RM480bil) in cumulative global investments from 2010 to 2017.”

Under-pinning the US financial system’s success is of course the US dollar’s dominant currency pricing role. The dollar accounted for 88% in paired foreign exchange currency trading in 2019 and 59% of official foreign exchange holdings in 2020. It is widely used in trade invoicing in manufacturing but less so in services trade. As a major International Monetary Fund study has shown, this pricing role impacts on emerging market economy (EME) exchange rate policies, as their devaluation would have only limited positive impact on their exports, but amplifies their import contraction.

Furthermore, because EME debt is largely denominated in dollars, any dollar appreciation would have an overall contractionary impact on EME liquidity and growth. This is why US interest rate increases are feared not just by the US Treasury, but also almost all EME economies.

Several factors combined to create the recent seismic shift in the global financial landscape. 

First, financial technology has eroded the dominant share of the banking system. The Financial Stability Board (FSB) 2020 report on non-bank financial institutions (NBFI) revealed that as of end-2019, they accounted for 49.5% of global financial assets of $404 trillion, compared with 38.5% for the banks. Indeed, total NBFI lending now exceed bank lending, partly because of tighter bank regulations and higher bank capital and liquidity costs.

` Second, financial technology has enabled new arrivals in the financial sector comprising not new fintech startups, but also Big Tech platforms that are using Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, apps and their dominance of cloud computing to provide more convenient, speedy and customer-oriented finance for individuals and businesses. This month, a major BIS study on the implications of fintech and digitisation on financial market structure showed how Big Tech has muscled into traditional banking services, especially in payment services, lending and even asset management.

Taking the growth of NBFIs and Big Tech together, the traditional bank regulators and supervisors find that they regulate less and less of the financial system, but central banks are responsible for overall financial stability. Regulating the complex financial eco-system is like trying to tie down a huge elephant by a bunch of specialists each trapped in their own silos. And politically, no one wants to give a super-regulator power to rule them all.

Third, the financial landscape entered new minefields because of intense geopolitical rivalry. If global supply chains are going to be decoupled by different standards, and we arrive at a Splinternet of different technology standards, how should finance respond? As the US applies pressure on Chinese companies and individuals through new sanctions and legislation, financial institutions and companies struggle to deal with shifting goal posts and game changes. 

 

A woman and a child walk past the People’s Bank of China building in Beijing on March 4. China’s central bank, like others around the world, is grappling with how to regulate the fintech industry. Photo: Bloomberg

The Ant Finance and Didi events are more a reflection of regulatory concerns whether large domestic Big Data platforms should be subject to foreign legislation with national security implications. Will India, for example, continue to allow foreign Big Tech to own all their client data?

Fourth, the regulatory trend towards “open financial data” in which banks would open up their client databases to allow new players to access customer accounts and data will provide new products and services. But this means also severe concerns on client privacy and data security. No country has yet figured out how to manage competition fairly in the fintech world when five firms (Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM, Oracle) dominate 70% of cloud-related infrastructure services.

Fifth, blockchain technology, cyber-currencies and central bank digital currencies are now increasingly coming on-stream, making possible payments and transactions that rely less on official currencies and also outside the purview of regulation. In short, the official regulators are responsible for system stability, but may not have access to what is really going on in blockchain space. That is an accident waiting to happen.


 
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All these suggest that the global financial system has grown faster, more complex and entangled than any single nation to manage on its own. If the largest financial systems are caught in increasingly acrimonious geopolitical rivalry, what are the risks of financial accidents that can easily escalate to financial crises? In the 2008 global financial crisis, the G20 stood together to execute a whole range of responses. This time round, there is no unity as the US continues to apply financial sanctions against her enemies and rivals, amounting to 4,283 cases as of January 2021, of which 246 and eight respectively were against Chinese and Hong Kong entities.

The bubble in fintech valuation that has fueled rising stock markets and investments in technology is fundamentally driven by central bank loose monetary policy. Central bank assets have grown faster on an average of 8.4% per annum between 2013-2018, than banks (3.8%) or NBFIs (5.9%) to reach 7.5% of global financial assets. Does this mean that financial markets can assume that central banks will continue to underwrite their prosperity?

As inflation rears its head, central banks will have to reverse their loose monetary stance, thus putting the global financial system under stress. The global financial system has structural and regulatory cracks, but they can only be fixed by having some political understanding amongst the big players. Without this, expect a messy outcome.

Andrew Sheng comments on global affairs from an Asian perspective. The views expressed here are his own.

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Saturday 6 March 2021

The future of money is digital, but is it bitcoin?

 

Don’t be surprised if by the end of the current decade, the e-wallet on your smartphone resembles a multicurrency account. But instead of dealing with commercial banks, you may be a customer of central banks. Several of them, in fact

 

THE idea that much of today’s cash use will shift to digital tokens is neither faddish nor outlandish, as long as you don’t start equating the future of money with bitcoin.

Sure, governments will borrow some elements of the distributed ledger technology behind private cryptocurrencies, but they will very much want to retain control of what circulates as money in their economies. Some will succeed.

Don’t be surprised if by the end of the current decade, the e-wallet on your smartphone resembles a multicurrency account. But instead of dealing with commercial banks, you may be a customer of central banks. Several of them, in fact.

Sound far-fetched? Apart from the Bahamian Sand Dollar, there’s no official online currency in mass circulation yet.

Still, digital yuan pilots are gathering pace as Beijing aims for a possible rollout coinciding with the 2022 Winter Olympics.

Sweden may be the next major nation to follow suit. The Bank of Japan has no immediate plans, but it acknowledges the possibility “of a surge in public demand” for official digital cash going forward.

Even in the US, which is only toying with the concept, digital payment vehicles that don’t rely on traditional bank accounts can increase financial inclusion among cash users, according to a September 2020 paper by Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta president Raphael Bostic and others. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says a digital dollar is “absolutely worth looking at”.

Once China and the US are both in the fray, virtual money is bound to become a tool for wielding global influence by carving up the world into new currency blocs. That’s because any token will have dual uses outsidethe issuing nation’s borders.

The dollar or yuan that pops up in a phone wallet in Indonesia or India – backed by a solemn promise of taxpayers in the US or China – could be used for buying goods, services or assets internationally.

Just as easily, this new money can end up replacing domestic currency in people’s daily lives. Although this is no different from traditional dollarisation that occurs in countries plagued by inflation and exchange rate volatility, the convenience and accessibility of central bank-issued digital cash could enable “substitution at a faster pace and larger scale,” according to Tao Zhang, a deputy managing director at the International Monetary Fund (IMF). To stay in control of monetary policy, authorities in smaller economies will need their tokens to be attractive in domestic situations.

The goal for bigger nations may be different: China and the US may want to offer add-ons that make the E-CNY or the Fedcoin the preferred choice for foreigners in settling international claims.

An efficient future will be one in which all central banks’ digital currencies are interoperable. In other words, they’ll interact with one another – and with private-sector alternatives including bitcoin, says Sky Guo, the chief executive of Cypherium.

The US enterprise blockchain startup is a member of the Fed’s Faster Payments Council and of the digital monetary institute of the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum, or OMFIF, a central banking think tank.

Guo is working on the challenges that will arise when sovereign money gets digitised:

How to process high volumes of transactions quickly, cheaply, and with a strong consensus among registries updated automatically across a network? How to give people a sense of privacy in everyday payments, even after the anonymity of cash is lost?

Central banks will have to make choices. Not all smartphones can run advanced virtual machines, effortlessly executing the software code for automated contracts.

Choose the wrong technology, and the unbanked population might once again get excluded. Ditto for overseas remittances, a US$124 trillion-a-year opportunity for tokens to replace an expensive network of correspondent banks moving money by exchanging SWIFT messages.

But it won’t work for small transfers if the computing power to verify transactions in a decentralised network costs too much. The ideal technology doesn’t necessarily have to be a blockchain, but it should be something “lightweight, flexible and capable of working with legacy systems,” Guo says. Above all, the distributed ledger must be transparent.

There will be other obstacles. “A driving force for lobbying against central bank digital currencies has been established among payment processing giants like Paypal, Venmo and Stripe,” Guo tells me. “Fedcoin won’t need these intermediaries to send funds.

As these companies fall victim to innovation, it’ll be interesting to see how they try to protect themselves from disruption.”

Paypal Holdings Inc, which owns the person-to-person service Venmo, contests Guo’s assertion as false. Supporting and distributing central bank digital currencies is part of Paypal’s vision of an inclusive future, CEO Dan Schulman told investors last month.

Former Bank of England governor Mike Carney, who has proposed an alternative to the dollar through a network of central bank digital currencies, recently joined the board of Stripe Inc.

One way to resolve the tension may be to co-opt the private sector. As IMF economists Tobias Adrian and Tommaso ManciniGriffoli have argued, an official virtual currency could be like Apple’s IOS operating system, with commercial banks and e-money providers running apps on top of it.

The Apple Health app may be fine for a lay user; an athlete will want something more sophisticated. Money could go the same way.

Countries will also have to cooperate with one another. Take M-CBDC Bridge. The project for 24/7 cross-border remittances using central bank digital currencies was begun by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and the Bank of Thailand, but has now been joined by the central bank of the United Arab Emirates and the People’s Bank of China. ─ Bloomberg

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China's central bank speeds up digital currency drive

 Private-sector players likely to participate in project

Photo: VCG

With internet technologies advancing and cryptocurrencies flourishing amid a broad digital transformation, individual countries are starting to issue legal tender in digital form, and the People's Bank of China (PBC), the country's central bank, is also accelerating its pace in this area.

As of Sunday, the PBC had applied for 74 patents involved with digital currencies to the National Intellectual Property Administration, according to a report by the Economic Information Daily on Monday.

The PBC said it will speed up the development of legal digital currency on Friday.

Wang Xin, director of the PBC Research Bureau, said in July that the authority is organizing market-oriented institutions to jointly research and develop a central bank digital currency and the program has been approved by the State Council, China's Cabinet.

"China is beefing up efforts in digital currency innovation, a trend driven by emerging technologies that is spreading worldwide," said Huang Zhen, a professor at the Central University of Finance and Economics.

Rather than letting cryptocurrencies challenge the position of sovereign currencies, it is wiser for countries to roll out their own digital currencies, Huang told the Global Times on Monday.

Chinese authorities ordered a ban on initial coin offerings in 2017 and stopped direct bitcoin-yuan trading as the rapidly expanding market spawned concerns over financial risks.

The PBC, one of the earliest central banks in the world to start the process of digital currency innovation, launched its program in 2014 during the tenure of former governor Zhou Xiaochuan. In 2017, the PBC established a research institution for the digital currency.

"China is among the leading countries in terms of its research into a government-backed currency," said Huang.

Favorable conditions

The basic conditions favorable for China's implementation of a digital currency include comprehensive and fast networks, broad digitalization in the financial sector, and advanced financial technologies - particularly blockchain, a digital, public ledger that records online transactions, according to Huang.

In recent years, Chinese internet companies have made huge achievements in the mobile payment and e-commerce sectors, helping create a digital economy of more than 30 trillion yuan ($4.36 trillion), according to media reports.

In June, US social media giant Facebook released an official white paper for its cryptocurrency project Libra, a blockchain-powered stablecoin expected to arrive in 2020.

The move stepped up the global race for digital currencies, with China's central bank paying close attention.

The central bank is closely working with market participants on creating a central bank digital currency, PBC official Wang said.

"China's private market players have accumulated some experience in the digital currency sector. Their participation in the government's work will effectively help promote the project," Cao Yin, an expert in the blockchain sector, told the Global Times on Monday.

It is likely that the sovereign digital currency will be issued within two or three years at the soonest, although the authority tends to take a prudent attitude, Cao said.

Once it is broadly implemented, the new currency will have a big impact on Alibaba's Alipay and Tencent's WeChat Pay, the two dominant mobile digital payment tools in China, as the PBC's digital currency is featured by decentralization, unlike the former two.

Challenges ahead

There are still some bumps on the road to promoting the digital currency.

"For this new kind of currency, its nature actually poses challenges to existing policies in such aspects as foreign exchange control, so it takes time to balance benefits with potential risks," said Cao.

A flexible and open mechanism is needed by the PBC to attract more talent, he added.

Digital currencies can help strengthen regulation as transaction data can be tracked and analyzed, including illegal money laundering, according to Huang. But laws and rules should be formulated in a timely fashion to protect individual information. "Safety is the biggest issue," he added.

"Use of the digital currency to better serve the real economy also requires policy guidance," said Huang. Newspaper headline: PBC accelerates digital currency drive.

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Tuesday 4 July 2017

The Asian financial crisis - 20 years later


https://youtu.be/eocI_JZK5_g

East Asian Economies Remain Diverse

It is useful to reflect on whether lessons have been learnt and if the countries are vulnerable to new crises.


IT’S been 20 years since the Asian financial crisis struck in July 1997. Since then, there has been an even bigger global financial crisis, starting in 2008. Will there be another crisis?

The Asian crisis began when speculators brought down the Thai baht. Within months, the currencies of Indonesia, South Korea and Malaysia were also affected. The East Asian Miracle turned into an Asian Financial Nightmare.

Despite the affected countries receiving only praise before the crisis, weaknesses had built up, including current account deficits, low foreign reserves and high external debt.

In particular, the countries had recently liberalised their financial system in line with international advice. This enabled local private companies to freely borrow from abroad, mainly in US dollars. Companies and banks in Korea, Indonesia and Thailand had in each country rapidly accumulated over a hundred billion dollars of external loans. This was the Achilles heel that led their countries to crisis.

These weaknesses made the countries ripe for speculators to bet against their currencies. When the governments used up their reserves in a vain attempt to stem the currency fall, three of the countries ran out of foreign exchange.

They went to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for bailout loans that carried draconian conditions that worsened their economic situation.

Malaysia was fortunate. It did not seek IMF loans. The foreign reserves had become dangerously low but were just about adequate. If the ringgit had fallen a bit further, the danger line would have been breached.

After a year of self-imposed austerity measures, Malaysia dramatically switched course and introduced a set of unorthodox policies.

These included pegging the ringgit to the dollar, selective capital controls to prevent short-term funds from exiting, lowering interest rates, increasing government spending and rescuing failing companies and banks. This was the opposite of orthodoxy and the IMF policies. The global establishment predicted the sure collapse of the Malaysian economy.

But surprisingly, the economy recovered even faster and with fewer losses than the other countries. Today, the Malaysian measures are often cited as a successful anti-crisis strategy.

The IMF itself has changed a little. It now includes some capital controls as part of legitimate policy measures.

The Asian countries, vowing never to go to the IMF again, built up strong current account surpluses and foreign reserves to protect against bad years and keep off speculators. The economies recovered, but never back to the spectacular 7% to 10% pre-crisis growth rates.

Then in 2008, the global financial crisis erupted with the United States as its epicentre. The tip of the iceberg was the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the massive loans given out to non-credit-worthy house-buyers.

The underlying cause was the deregulation of US finance and the freedom with which financial institutions could devise all kinds of manipulative schemes and “financial products” to draw in unsuspecting customers. They made billions of dollars but the house of cards came tumbling down.

To fight the crisis, the US, under President Barack Obama, embarked first on expanding government spending and then on financial policies of near-zero interest rates and “quantitative easing”, with the Federal Reserve pumping trillions of dollars into the US banks.

It was hoped the cheap credit would get consumers and businesses to spend and lift the economy. But instead, a significant portion of the trillions went via investors into speculative activities, including abroad to emerging economies.

Europe, on the verge of recession, followed the US with near zero interest rates and large quantitative easing, with limited results. The US-Europe financial crisis affected Asian countries in a limited way through declines in export growth and commodity prices. The large foreign reserves built up after the Asian crisis, plus the current account surplus situation, acted as buffers against external debt problems and kept speculators at bay.

Just as important, hundreds of billions of funds from the US and Europe poured into Asia yearly in search of higher yields. These massive capital inflows helped to boost Asian countries’ growth, but could cause their own problems.

First, they led to asset bubbles or rapid price increases of houses and the stock markets, and the bubbles may burst when they are over-ripe.

Second, many of the portfolio investors are short-term funds looking for quick profit, and they can be expected to leave when conditions change.

Third, the countries receiving capital inflows become vulnerable to financial volatility and economic instability.

If and when investors pull some or a lot of their money out, there may be price declines, inadequate replenishment of bonds, and a fall in the levels of currency and foreign reserves.

A few countries may face a new financial crisis.

A new vulnerability in many emerging economies is the rapid build-up of external debt in the form of bonds denominated in the local currency.

The Asian crisis two decades ago taught that over-borrowing in foreign currency can create difficulties in debt repayment should the local currency level fall.

To avoid this, many countries sold bonds denominated in the local currency to foreign investors.

However, if the bonds held by foreigners are large in value, the country will still be vulnerable to the effects of a withdrawal.

As an example, almost half of Malaysian government securities, denominated in ringgit, are held by foreigners.

Though the country does not face the risk of having to pay more in ringgit if there is a fall in the local currency, it may have other difficulties if foreigners withdraw their bonds.

What is the state of the world economy, what are the chances of a new financial crisis, and how would the Asian countries like Malaysia fare?

These are big and relevant questions to ponder 20 years after the start of the Asian crisis and nine years after the global crisis.

But we will have to consider them in another article.


By Martin Khor Global Trend

Martin Khor (director@southcentre.org) is executive director of the South Centre. The views expressed here are entirely his own.


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