De nombreuses monnaies parallèles circulent depuis toujours à côté de la monnaie officielle. Aujourd’hui, une nouvelle génération de monnaie est en train de naître des nouvelles technologies : les crypto-monnaies, dont l’exemple le plus connu est le bitcoin. Ces monnaies n’existent que sous forme de code informatique, sans équivalent papier ou métallique. Bien qu’elles constituent une avancée technologique remarquable, elles soulèvent de nombreux défis tant éthiques qu’économiques, que ce numéro de Regards économiques essaie d’éclairer
Earlier research on the links between economic growth and credit market development has abstracted from interactions between labour and financial markets. Moreover, most studies have analysed macro‐finance linkages at the aggregate level, ignoring the decentralized nature of search and matching in labour and credit markets. This paper fills this void and thus allows for a more disaggregate analysis of policy effects. We show that the credit market exacerbates and accentuates the labour market effects, having amplifying effects on output, consumption, employment and welfare. Depending on the strength of the debt‐dynamics, several growth dynamics emerge from this interaction between labour and credit markets with two distinct steady states: a stable growth regime and another one that is vulnerable and unstable. To test the empirical implications of the theoretical model, a multi‐regime VAR (MRVAR) model is fitted to the US output and credit market data. The MRVAR estimation indicates that shocks to credit conditions during a high‐growth period have markedly different effects than during a low growth and recessionary period. Also, there are substantial state‐dependent asymmetries with respect to the sign of shocks to credit conditions, confirming the theoretical predictions.
Central banking in an age of digital currencies is a fast-developing topic in monetary economics. Algorithmic digital currencies such as bitcoin appear to be viable competitors to central bank fiat currency, and their presence in the marketplace may pressure central banks to pursue tighter monetary policy. More interestingly, the blockchain technology behind digital currencies has the potential to improve central banks' payment and clearing operations, and possibly to serve as a platform from which central banks might launch their own digital currencies. A sovereign digital currency could have profound implications for the banking system, narrowing the relationship between citizens and central banks and removing the need for the public to keep deposits in fractional reserve commercial banks. Debates over the wisdom of these policies have led to a revival of interest in classical monetary economics.
In most countries, the central bank is required to hold reserve assets as a means of providing credibility for the value of the fiat currency. These assets can be in the form of gold, foreign exchange or some other internationally recognised reserve asset and are held to permit the country to engage in international transactions. Within recent years, cryptocurrencies have been increasingly utilised for international transactions, and it is possible that the use of these cryptocurrencies might expand in the future. This paper therefore examines the potential role of digital currency balances as part of the portfolio of external assets held by a central bank. Using the case of Barbados, the paper also provides a simulation of the effect holding some proportion of their asset-base would have had on the stability of the foreign reserves as well as the return on the portfolio of assets.
El auge de las monedas digitales, como el bitcoin, provoca la codicia de Wall Street. Esta tecnologia deja que los grandes financieros entrevean nuevas fronteras de beneficio. Sin embargo, estas monedas electronicas fueron concebidas para cortocircuitar los bancos. Al entrecruzarse con las aspiraciones de los que se oponen al poder de las finanzas, habrian podido proporcionar una nueva juventud a las utopias del siglo XIX.
A revolução tecnológica na área da computação e da Internet trouxe modificações importantes nos mais variados setores da sociedade. Atualmente, a maioria das transações financeiras ocorre virtualmente, nesse contexto surgiu a moeda digital Bitcoin. O conceito desta moeda foi introduzido em 2008 e pode ser descrito como a primeira criptomoeda descentralizada do mundo. As transações em Bitcoin ocorrem sem a necessidade de um intermediário e não dependem da confiança em nenhum emissor centralizado ou instituição financeira. Ao longo deste trabalho serão expostas as características, o funcionamento, as vantagens e desvantagens desta nova moeda, contrastando-a à moeda tradicional de cunho forçado. O objetivo principal é observar se essa nova tecnologia pode ser uma alternativa concorrente aos meios tradicionais, até o ponto de substituir por completo as moedas usadas nos dias de hoje, centralizadas em bancos centrais, ou se a criptomoeda será uma aliada cooperativa à moeda tradicional. Conclui-se que o Bitcoin é no curto e médio prazo uma moeda paralela, ou seja, que coopera e é aliada aos meios tradicionais.
The objective of this article is to analyze the tie between the financings of the Decentralized Financial System (DFS) and the agricultural growth in Senegal. We use a linear equation model. The survey covers the active period of 1999 to 2013. Results show that the Decentralized Financial System has a positive and significant impact on the agricultural GDP in Senegal.
Although indispensable and in daily use, money and more specifically money creation in our two-layered fractional reserve banking system is still poorly recognized by social science at large. Its main features are outlined in order to identify (a) money’s double nature to be private and public at once and (b) inflation and speculative excess as two of its inherent dangers. Bitcoin and sovereign money are discussed as prominent examples of, on the one hand, private or libertarian and, on the other hand state-oriented or social-democratic monetary reforms, each intended to solve one of the two systemic problems our currency order. The new money’s respective advantages notwithstanding, it is shown that neither Bitcoin nor sovereign money can overcome money’s double nature or realize the dream of an eventually neutral money.
Recent years have witnessed the advances of e-money systems such as Bitcoin, PayPal and various forms of stored-value cards. This paper adopts a mechanism design approach to identify some essential features of different payment systems that implement and improve the constrained optimal resource allocation in Germany. Bitcoin is a digital, decentralized, partially anonymous currency, not backed by German or any government or other legal entity, and not redeemable for gold or other commodities. Bitcoin relies on peer-to-peer networking and cryptography to maintain its integrity. Compared to most currencies or online payment services, such as PayPal, bitcoins are highly liquid, have low transaction costs, and can be used to make micropayments in Germany. Although the Bitcoin economy is flourishing, Bitcoin users are anxious about Bitcoin’s legal status. This paper examines a few relevant legal issues. The research question is to investigate how supplementary digital terminating currency Bitcoin can provide a superior fallback position as e-gold standard in Germany and worldwide. Digital self-liquidating e-Gold ounce could be distributed immediately to voters by using swipe cards used by some governments for transit facilities. Bitcoins as e-Gold ounce do not provide a viable medium of exchange because of the cost of their purchase, creation and/or exchange.
Can competition among privately issued fiat currencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum work? Only sometimes. To show this, we build a model of competition among privately issued fiat currencies. We modify the current workhorse of monetary economics, the Lagos-Wright environment, by including entrepreneurs who can issue their own fiat currencies in order to maximize their utility. Otherwise, the model is standard. We show that there exists an equilibrium in which price stability is consistent with competing private monies, but also that there exists a continuum of equilibrium trajectories with the property that the value of private currencies monotonically converges to zero. These latter equilibria disappear, however, when we introduce productive capital. We also investigate the properties of hybrid monetary arrangements with private and government monies, of automata issuing money, and the role of network effects.
La tecnología trajo conceptos que, fundidos con el campo económico, permitieron soluciones a problemas que la sociedad enfrentó varias veces a lo largo de su historia, como: inflación, ciclos económicos, instituciones financieras no confiables y la falta de universalización de servicios financieros a toda población. Este artículo pretende elucidar tanto la parte conceptual de Bitcoin abordando los aspectos históricos, económicos y jurídicos, así como los posibles beneficios sociales que la moneda puede traer como una primera alternativa, basada en tecnología, al dinero tradicional controlado por el Estado. El método utilizado para ello es el deductivo y la técnica de investigación es la bibliográfica, partiendo de ejemplos de la utilización del dinero a lo largo de la historia y del ascenso de Bitcoin como moneda.
Bitcoin has become notorious as the first cryptocurrency to gain widespread media attention, however, despite its many benefits over the existing financial system it remains a volatile fringe currency. This thesis examines the validity of bitcoin as a currency and whether it can play a role in circumventing extractive economic and political institutions in developing countries. The analysis compares bitcoin usage to the level of financial openness, the inflation rate, and the percentage of the population with a bank account in 21 different countries. The correlation is found to be both statistically and economically significant for all of these variables, which suggests that bitcoin is being used in countries with underdeveloped financial systems and detrimental monetary policies. A regression run on these variables indicates that a one-percentage-point increase in inflation leads to a 44.48% increase in bitcoin usage, a one-percentage-point increase in the percentage of people in a country that have a bank account leads to an 8.65% decrease in bitcoin usage and a one unit increase in financial openness leads to a 216% decrease in bitcoin usage. Throughout this analysis the positive and negative implications of widespread bitcoin adoption are discussed with respect to economies in the developing world.
Dong He, Karl Habermeier, Ross Leckow, Vikram Haksar · 11 authors
New technologies are driving transformational changes in the global financial system. Virtual currencies (VCs) and the underlying distributed ledger systems are among these. VCs offer many potential benefits, but also considerable risks. VCs could raise efficiency and in the long run strengthen financial inclusion. At the same time, VCs could be potential vehicles for money laundering, terrorist financing, tax evasion and fraud. While risks to the conduct of monetary policy seem less likely to arise at this stage given the very small scale of VCs, risks to financial stability may eventually emerge as the new technologies become more widely used. National authorities have begun to address these challenges and will need to calibrate regulation in a manner that appropriately addresses the risks without stifling innovation. As experience is gained, international standards and best practices could be considered to provide guidance on the most appropriate regulatory responses in different fields, thereby promoting harmonization and cooperation across jurisdictions.
Abstract This paper studies the risk of Bitcoin being used for the purpose of capital flight. We propose a new indicator, the bitcoin‐implied exchange rate discount, to identify empirically capital flight via Bitcoin. Using data from the two largest bitcoin exchanges in the world during our sample period, BTC China and Bitstamp, we find strong evidence of capital flight from the Chinese Renminbi to the US Dollar via Bitcoin before the People's Bank of China, China's central bank, announced its regulatory policy on December 5, 2013, while the evidence displays no trace of capital flight after the announcement. The People's Bank of China's Bitcoin restriction policy successfully halts the illicit capital outflow via Bitcoin, thereby providing valuable policy implications for government regulation on Bitcoin, as well as on other virtual currencies.
Nesta obra, o autor desenvolve um estudo econômico e histórico da origem do Bitcoin e de seu valor enquanto moeda. Em sua argumentação, o autor explora a relação entre a moeda digital Bitcoin e a Economia Austríaca, discutindo, em particular, o Teorema da Regressão de Ludwig von Mises e sua conexão com a evolução do mercado monetário, bem como a abordagem evolutiva seminal de Carl Menger.
Digital currencies are a fairly new phenomenon brought about by the spectacular rise of the internet. While Bitcoin is the most famous, there are numerous other digital currenciesâfrom Amazon Coin to Zetacoin. Beyond Bitcoin explores the economic forces underlying the design of their features and their potential. Halaburda and Sarvary argue that digital currencies are best understood by considering the economic incentives driving their creators and users. The authors present a framework that will allow systemic analysis of this dynamic environment and support further discussion of the design of digital currencies' features and the competition in the market.
Abstract What does being money consist in? We argue that something is money if, and only if, it is typically acquired in order to realise the reduction in transaction costs that accrues in virtue of agents coordinating on acquiring the same thing when deciding what thing to acquire in order to exchange. What kinds of things can be money? We argue against the common view that a variety of things (notes, coins, gold, cigarettes, etc.) can be money. All monetary systems are best interpreted as implementing the same basic protocol. Money, i.e. the thing that we coordinate on acquiring in order to lower our transaction costs, is, in all cases, a set of positions on an abstract mathematical object, namely a relative ratio scale. The things that we ordinarily call ‘money’ are merely records of positions on such a scale.
Bitcoin is the first technology for the final transfer of digital goods online, facilitating instant global payments without intermediation. Bitcoin’s operation is based on a distributed, decentralized, and transparent asset ledger that acts as an ongoing chain record of all transactions. The system issues coins to reward those who contribute processing power to the network’s operation. The possibilities created by this innovation are significant for the world’s poor, who could skip traditional political and financial institutions and move to digital currencies in the same way they have gone straight to using mobile phones and skipped landline telephones.
The exchange of ideas between Jodi Dean and Stephen Healy at the 2013 Rethinking Marxism International Conference, taken together, presents a seemingly either/or choice between a communist politics of anticapitalist militancy subsumed under the unity of the party and a politics that eschews critique and antagonism in favor of emergent postcapitalist alternatives. Such a dichotomy eclipses myriad possibilities for autonomous, organized forms of opposition and creation. This commentary appreciatively challenges postcapitalist scholar-activists to engage more robustly with a critique of capital and with forms of decentralized militant organization in order to constitute a politics in which anticapitalism and postcapitalism can become mutually reinforcing dynamics in struggles to build new modes of collective life.