Are stablecoins the new Bretton Woods?

Cross-posted from FTAlphaville:

Ousmène Jacques Mandeng is director of advisory boutique Economics Advisory Ltd and a Visiting Fellow at the School of Public Policy of the LSE. He currently works on a number of leading central bank digital currency (CBDC) projects and other blockchain-related payments applications. Here he explains why calls for stable coins hark back to the era defined at the Bretton Woods conference.

Fifty years ago, an embattled Richard Nixon dropped a monetary bombshell: the dollar would no longer be pegged to gold. The currency markets were thrown into chaos as the mechanism that underpinned fixed exchange rates was killed off overnight. The Bretton Woods era had ended and a new monetary order took shape.

The full text of this article is available to MacroBusiness subscribers

$1 for your first month, then:

$24.99 / month

$249 / year

Cancel at any time through our billing provider, Stripe

Share

About the author

David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.