Project Syndicate | By: Andrew Sheng and Xiao Geng | August 30, 2017:
Financial markets today are thriving. The Dow Jones industrial average, the S&P 500, and the Nasdaq composite index have all reached record highs lately, with emerging-economy financial markets also performing strongly, as investors search for stability amid widespread uncertainty. But, because this performance is not based on market fundamentals, it is unsustainable – and very risky.
According to Mohamed El-Erian, the lost lesson of the 2007 financial crisis is that current economic-growth models are “overly reliant on liquidity and leverage – from private financial institutions, and then from central banks.” And, indeed, a key driver of financial markets’ performance today is the expectation of continued central-bank liquidity.
After the US Federal Reserved revealed its decision last month to leave interest rates unchanged, the Dow Jones industrial average set intraday and closing records; the Nasdaq, too, reached all-time highs. Now, financial markets are waiting for signals from this year’s meeting of the world’s major central bankers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
But there is another factor that could further destabilize an already-tenuous leverage- and liquidity-based system: digital currencies. And, on this front, policymakers and regulators have far less control.
The concept of private cryptocurrencies was born of mistrust of official money. In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto – the mysterious creator of bitcoin, the first decentralized digital currency – described it as a “purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash,” which “would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.”
A 2016 working paper by the International Monetary Fund distinguished digital currency (legal tender that could be digitized) from virtual currency (non-legal tender). Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, or a kind of virtual currency that uses cryptography and distributed ledgers (the blockchain) to keep transactions both public and fully anonymous.
However you slice it, the fact is that, nine years after Nakamoto introduced bitcoin, the concept of private electronic money is poised to transform the financial-market landscape.
To read full article – please click here.
