Money in Crisis: The Return of Instability and the Myth of Digital Cash

This book is a deeply scholarly, policy-relevant history of money, from the advent of coinage, paper currency, and bank money in ancient, medieval, and early modern times to the stablecoins and central bank digital currencies of today and tomorrow. The authors show how the use of money has responded to changing economic, political, and technological circumstances. They emphasize the intrinsic fragility of monetary systems, which rest on collective confidence and require careful management. The authors are therefore skeptical that digital currencies will transform the global monetary landscape. Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are too volatile to serve as money, stablecoins pegged to the U.S. dollar are dangerously fragile, and central bank digital currencies have few advantages over prevailing monetary instruments. The authors conclude that governments should invest in improving existing payment mechanisms and clearly demarcating the responsibilities of private payment providers, regulators, and central banks rather than pursuing new digital products.