Today Agustín Carstens, the head of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), spoke at the Bank of Korea (BOK) and had a conversation with the BOK Governor, Chang Yong Rhee. Carstens gave a rousing speech on tokenization and central bank digital currency (CBDC), urging central banks and banks to make a “quantum leap”. Governor Rhee discussed the sense of urgency and the concern that Visa or Mastercard might launch a stablecoin.
The Carstens speech is well worth reading. “Exploiting these technological advances would allow us to build a financial system centred on the individual. This would enable a far-reaching democratisation of finance where each person has access to a digital representation of any asset for financial purposes, regardless of its value. And they would be able to send or receive such assets in any unit or amount, to anyone, anywhere, anytime, using any device,” he said.
Afterward, Governor Rhee asked him about his reference to a quantum leap. Mr. Carstens spoke about his time as Governor of the Bank of Mexico, which uses planes to distribute cash around the country. The planes were regularly upgraded, but at 40 years old they were inefficient and unreliable aircraft and needed replacing, which he did.
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