“But there are risks,” Brainard said, in a partial reprisal of her own and other global central bankers’ worries about the rise of private digital payment systems and currencies, including Facebook’s Libra digital currency project. But the Fed is also, she said, “conducting research and experimentation related to distributed ledger technologies and their potential use case for digital currencies, including the potential for a CBDC (central bank digital currency).”Dozens of central banks globally are also doing such work, a recent international study showed, with China moving ahead on plans to issue a digital coin. But that was before the scope of Facebook’s digital currency ambitions were widely known. At Wednesday’s conference, Brainard said the Facebook Libra project “imparted urgency” to the conversation around digital currencies. “We are collaborating with other central banks as we advance our understanding of central bank digital currencies,” she said.

Source: The Express Tribune February 06, 2020 05:15 UTC