Ben Dyson (formerly Positive Money)
Prime Economics: “Academics and civil society clash on money”
27 July, 2016Geoff Tily has some interesting and balanced analysis on the academic debate around money reform, in particular the debate between Giuseppe Fontana and Malcolm Sawyer, and Positive Money, which is currently playing out in the Cambridge Journal of Economics. Tily expresses some concern that stopping banks creating money is 'throwing the baby out with the bathwater', but [...]
Bank of England: Digital Cash – the end of monetary policy as we know it?
25 July, 2016Last week the Bank of England released a key paper that analyses the 'macroeconomics of central bank issued digital currencies'. The paper essentially asks what would happen if people could hold money electronically at the central bank, instead of having to use bank deposits (created by commercial banks). We wrote about it briefly last week but we're [...]
Our response to critics in the Cambridge Journal of Economics
24 July, 2016The Cambridge Journal of Economics (probably the leading journal of Post-Keynesian economics) has published an entire special issue on "Cranks and brave heretics: Rethinking money and banking after the Great Financial Crisis", inviting a range of academics to comment on proposals to stop banks creating money (amongst other ideas for monetary reform). It is great [...]
Bank of England releases key paper on digital cash and blockchain
19 July, 2016The Bank of England has just released its most significant paper yet. Macroeconomics of central bank issued digital currencies, by John Barrdear and Michael Kumhof, discusses the consequences of the central bank making a digital form of cash available to the general public, so that they are no longer forced to use bank deposits to [...]
New Report: Why State-Issued Money is Not Debt
11 April, 2016Positive Money advocates a shift away from the current ‘debt-based’ monetary system, in which almost all money is created by commercial banks when they make loans, to a ‘sovereign money’ system in which only the central bank is able to issue new money. In the past, we’ve described sovereign money as ‘debt-free money’, because it [...]
Mervyn King’s “Pawnbroker for All Seasons” Explained
3 March, 2016Lord Mervyn King, who was Governor of the Bank of England from 2003-2013 and saw the financial crisis play out from the centre of the action, has just released his new book, The End of Alchemy. Our short review of the book is available here. This article explains his proposal for the Bank of England [...]
Mervyn King’s New Book: The End of Alchemy
3 March, 2016Lord Mervyn King, who was Governor of the Bank of England from 2003-2013 has just released his new book, The End of Alchemy. The book is not a memoir of his time at the Bank of England; he comments that historians will be able to give a less biased view of his performance in that time, [...]
Digital Cash & Your Privacy
18 February, 2016Since we released our paper Digital Cash, which proposes that members of the public should be able to hold an electronic version of notes and coins in accounts at the Bank of England, a number of people have raised concerns about the privacy implications. The more sensible concerns focus on the risk of one institution [...]
How would you be affected if the Bank of England started issuing digital cash?
1 February, 2016We've just published a new report arguing that the Bank of England should start issuing 'digital cash' - essentially an electronic version of the physical notes and coins we use every day. You can read the summary and download the report here. But how would you be affected if the Bank of England started issuing [...]