We can all see the short-term impacts of the coronavirus pandemic: fear, lockdowns, falls in output, restrictions on travel, frictions in supply chains, growing social tension and unprecedented government intervention. […]
Most of us are so used to the concept that saved money grows by earning a positive rate of interest that the idea of negative interest rates comes as a […]
It’s time to reverse the major trend seen since the 2008 financial crisis—centralisation. That’s the opinion of Alex Lipton, an academic and former Wall Street quant who now works at […]
Entrepreneurs are competing in an intensifying race to design the future standards for the transmission of money. Gauge war The western English town of Gloucester was once the frontline of […]
The leading cryptocurrency’s design features cause it to behave weirdly: the more speculators buy bitcoin, the greater the short-term downward pressure on its price. “There are two features of bitcoin […]
In the last decade, everyone has been able to join networks like Airbnb and Uber to rent out their property or labour. The sharing economy now extends to electricity, where […]
If money is ‘the most successful story ever invented by humans’, as Israeli historian Yuval Harari tells us, then the narrative is about to take a fantastical turn. That’s my […]
Digital identity systems promise a way out of the coronavirus slump. But as they have major implications for money systems, politics and democracy, getting them wrong could have disastrous repercussions. […]
For the last four decades we’ve been living through a period of globalisation, with economies becoming ever more specialised. That specialisation has also meant we are all more reliant on […]
Hard economic times can spur the adoption of local currencies. Could digital payments give a boost to the trend? In an economic slump, no one has much cash. And if […]
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