 Thanks so much for joining us. Looks like we've got over 180 participants so far and that's going up. And we're also broadcasting on Facebook live too. And obviously we are living in unprecedented times. That's why we're doing this webinar rather than an in-person meeting. Things are changing really fast and things that we thought impossible at the beginning of 2020 have happened. In terms of the economy, things like monetary financing or the state covering 80% of workers' salaries, we would never have thought would have happened and we're only in April and things have changed dramatically. The pandemic is causing an enormous amount of tragedy and grief through the lives we're seeing lost. But at the same time, it's exposing some of the really deep-rooted problems with our dysfunctional economic system. And one area that isn't working that well is money payments and banking. For those of you who don't know positive money's work, we're a kind of non-profit organisation and our mission is to reform money and banking to enable a more fair, democratic and sustainable economy. We see that the flaws that were exposed over 10 years ago in the global financial crisis have not largely been resolved and obviously with the potential for financial stability, instability looming, then the prospect of alternative systems again seems relevant if not urgent to think about. So today we're gonna explore one possible solution which is central bank digital currencies or digital cash. And we're really pleased to have a fantastic panel of people who've talked about this. So we have Isabella Kaminska, who is editor of the Financial Times Alphaville blog and before that she worked as a producer at CNBC. We have Rohan Gray, who's the founder and president of the Modern Money Network. He's also a doctoral fellow at the Cornell Law School and a special thanks to Rohan for getting up so early for joining us from the US. It's just about 7 a.m. with him. We also have Frances Coppola, who is an author of the Coppola Comment Financial Economics blog and a contributor to Forbes and the Financial Times. And we have Zach Livingstone, who's a researcher at Positive Money and has co-authored our publication, our report, which we're releasing today, which is called Money We Trust. Just to let you know, in addition to these fantastic speakers, we did approach people from the Bank of England, the Treasury and politicians from all parties, but understandably considering the times we're in, we weren't able to secure anyone for today's debate, but we did get some very positive comments back that we were having this debate. So we're keen to include now over 220 participants. We have online and more on Facebook. But first of all, we want to obviously hear from all the panelists. So we're gonna kind of have two rounds. So firstly, we want to hear about what panelists think about the idea of a CBDC or digital cash. And then afterwards, we want to kind of think separately about their thoughts on whether they think plans for one should be accelerated in the current economic fallout of the pandemic. So then we're gonna move on to a Q and A. And so, ideally, don't put kind of questions in until we've gone through the panelists. But I think I can be picking them up as we go along. So those of you on Facebook Live, you can add questions in the comments box, and they'll find their way to us, so we can ask them. We're also keen to know who's in the audience. So if you can, let us know your name and maybe your organization or your geographical location, it would be good to know where people are tuning in from across the UK, potentially outside the UK to hear about this debate. So we're gonna kick off with Zach. So I'll hand over to you to give us your thoughts about the paper and then we'll move to the other speakers. Thanks, Zach. Okay, thank you very much, Fran. So with this new paper, Positive Money Explores How Launching CBDC Could Make Our Money in Banking Systems Safer and Farah. Under the current system, banks are heavily subsidized by the government. They get deposit insurance. They get central bank settlement systems and they've had huge government bailouts. But they're failing to provide us with basic services. They're closing bank branches, they're closing cash machines and they're not being held accountable for their actions. So how could CBDC help? Well, we think it could help with two key problems. Firstly, the rapid decline of cash and secondly, a lack of competition in payment services. I'll talk about cash first and then move on to the payments market. So cash is the main anchor of trust for the monetary system. Everyone can use it. It's simple, it's anonymous and it's inclusive. It's a way of making payments to the bank of England provides as a public service. But cash use is rapidly declining and access to cash, our only public means of payment is also declining rapidly. Well, we've got plenty of data showing this trend but I'll give you just one statistic. Between January 2018 and September 2019, the number of free to use cash machines in the UK went down from around 54,000 to around 47,000. So that's a drop of 13%, 7,000 free machines gone in a couple of years. So with less access to cash and digital payment methods taking over the market, many people are being forced into using private payment methods. Positive money is very concerned about this because it means our money and banking system is increasingly being run as a for-profit business rather than as a public service. Small number of players already dominate the payment market in the UK and without cash the whole system would be driven by the profit motive which would leave out many people who currently rely on cash. That's about 2 million people. On top of that, big tech companies like Facebook are working with private banks to set up stable coins to compete in the payments market. Stable coins are private digital currencies backed by a range of assets. So if you can imagine it as another layer on top of private money, on top of the existing kinds of money which takes us even further away from using public money. Central banks and regulators have worried about this because it would make monetary policy much harder to operate and would introduce all sorts of new risks into the system. And it raises huge privacy concerns as well. So how should the bank of England respond to these risks? First and foremost, it must protect access to cash because the money has campaigned on this before and it continues to be something that we care very strongly about. This would also secure... Secondly, we need digital counterpart to cash, central bank digital currency. That would give us a way to make digital payments with public money. This would also secure a new means of transmission for monetary policy that will remain effective as private payment systems become more complex. Smart contracts, programmable money and integration with online social platforms are just some of the innovations we're seeing on the horizon and the bank of England needs to be ready to face that jumping complexity. And finally, Christine Lagarde, the President of the European Central Bank has highlighted financial inclusion as a key benefit of CBDC. She points out that private banks are not exactly rushing to serve poor and rural populations. And if the majority of people adopt digital forms of money, the infrastructure for cash would degrade, leaving those in the periphery behind. So there have been concerns raised about CBDC as well. The main one is central banks have is bank runs could happen faster. And another risk is if enough people move their money into CBDC and out of bank accounts that could make banks less profitable. And if this happened on a large scale, it could cause financial instability. The technical term for that risk is private bank disintermediation and a bit of a mouthful. So the CBDC design we've afforded in this paper is one way to deal with these risks. So that we can launch CBDC safely. It's designed to work well alongside the Bank of England's other operations. So it would actually improve financial stability rather than undermine it. I'll quickly go over some of the details now. Positive money's vision for CBDC is to act as a digital counterpart to cash. So everyone would be able to open a CBDC account and use that money to make payments. You'd also be able to store some of your money risk-free with the Bank of England. And for this to work, CBDC must be versatile. It must be adaptable and it must be highly controllable. It also needs to safeguard financial stability. In our paper, we explore combination design features that could achieve this. So one, this form of CBDC would be account-based. So you'd open an account on the system before you could use it. Two, CBDC should be broadly available to the general public so anyone can open an account. Three, the central bank would apply a variable interest rate to CBDC held in your account. And for the interest rate could be higher or lower the different tiers of CBDC. So the average monthly household expenditure in UK is about 2,400 pounds. And so if you've got about 2,400 in your CBDC account then that money could earn a small amount of interest. That would be the first tier about 2,400. Money above that threshold could have a lower rate of interest or it could be zero interest. These tiers and interest rates would be set by the Bank of England and could be fine-tuned over time. This would allow them to respond quickly if there's any financial instability. So an example scenario would be if CBDC threatened to cause a financial crisis the interest rate on very large amounts of CBDC could potentially be made negative. And this would make it less desirable to hold large amounts of CBDC and more desirable to hold large amounts in private bank accounts. Taken together, these measures would ensure that CBDC acts as a digital counterpart to cash but does not become a way to store large amounts of money and would not be a competitive way to save. CBDC accounts would be a very secure means of payment as they would be shielded from instability in the financial sector by being held on the Bank of England's balance sheet. And by adopting these tiers of interest our CBDC designed such a competition floor for digital payment services above which private sector firms must compete. But it doesn't compete as a way of providing a large financial return or storing value above the monthly average income. So how does this compare to the CBDC outlined in the Bank of England's discussion paper which they released in March 2020? And that paper outlined a public core system with private sector firms providing front-end services to the user like managing your account. In this model the CBDC would be a public platform for private sector innovation. And we agree with this approach but we also want to explore the public policy options CBDC can enable. And specifically we think unconventional monetary policy tools like helicopter money should definitely be on the table. And we want to ensure every system has access to a CBDC account. The Bank of England paper is also it's pretty focused on the benefits CBDC could provide to the private sector which are important to take into account but they should not be the priority. And we want CBDC to be run as a public service for the benefit of everyone and not just as a platform for the private sector to make more money. There is an important downside of making the CBDC account-based which is that you can't make fully anonymous payments with it. The form of CBDC we're proposing could provide a level of payments privacy we think most people would accept. It would be about the same as a regular bank account. The Bank of England's paper actually notes a lack of a mandate for them to provide any anonymous means of payment and they suggest CBDC supporting anonymous transactions should be the decision made by the Treasury and discussed in Parliament. Positive Money thinks this reveals the need for a broader public debate about payments privacy and anonymity. And this is actually another reason why it's so important to protect access to cash alongside launching CBDC because there's a natural anonymity that comes with making payments in cash which has the in-built accountability of requiring you to be physically there to make the transaction. So it strikes a nice balance. It's unlikely CBDC would ever be able to match the anonymity cash provides but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try and we shouldn't rule out payments privacy measures for CBDC. So to sum up, Positive Money would like the Treasury to direct the Bank of England to issue CBDC and we think it should take the form of digital cash with the right design features. We can minimize the risks and maximize the advantages of launching CBDC and finally must protect access to cash because it provides an anonymous public needs of payment as well as a backup system in times of crisis. In the coming years we may be forced to choose between some disintermediation of private banks and a fully privatized payment system. Financial instability is already a serious threat in the current system and the risks will continue to rise as we move towards a fully private payment system. So to prevent that happening we can launch CBDC and establish a new digital anchor of trust for the whole monetary system alongside cash and ensure the Bank of England is able to fulfill its mandate in the future. Great, thank you so much, Zach, for kicking us off. Can we move to Rohan for your thoughts on whether we should introduce a CBDC or digital cash? Yeah, sure, thanks for having me and thank you to Positive Money for this initiative. I think it's really great to see an organization that's so dedicated to public education kind of getting ahead on this issue and I applaud the sort of a lot of depth that has gone into this report. In the spirit of sort of friendly kind of debate and to sort of provide my own suggestions, I've got a few topics that I would like to sort of offer a gentle nudge or to sort of only in the places where I don't already agree with everything that's been already said. The first I would start with is I think that there is a false dichotomy between the idea that this has to be account or token based. My view is that it should be both and the reason for that is that I think that they provide complementary functions and that it is important to consider digital currency in the widest conception that we can to begin with. The old line, you know, Henry Ford used to say if I asked the public what they wanted, when I was designing a car, they would have said I want a faster horse and if we think about the internet, when it first came out, people said, well, this could, you know, improve fax machines, this could improve telephones. And the answer really is that it created something that is all of those things, but so much more and the more that we limit what we think that digital currency can do, the more I think we limit the sort of the vision of the design as well as the policy. So the way that I would describe that is that we can have a system where if you design it to include tokens or a digital cash like instrument, even if there are policy concerns to begin with, you can always create accounts out of tokens. And I use the example of using sort of physical cash in a safety deposit box. You can still have an intermediary kind of run your safety deposit box for you. But if you design a system where it's accounts only forever, it is very hard to unwind that in the future. If we decide as a matter of public policy, we actually do want more anonymous cash and things like that. It's very hard to go backwards in time once we make those design decisions. So my view would be to make it as ecumenical and as multi-layered as possible at the architectural level and then leave the question and policy to trial and error at the very least. A second question, the second point I would say is to take privacy as seriously as we can. I applaud the commitment that positive money has been doing with its combating the war on cash. And I applaud the sort of concern for anonymity, but I would say that we actually should be leaning into the idea that cash should be replicated as much as possible. The war on cash, as I know that positive money is talked about, is real. And if that requires a larger conversation with the treasury to be involved as well, I think that is something that's very powerful. If you look around the world, there is a very successful, I would say, propaganda effort to discuss digital currency in the context only of central bank digital currency, rather than to consider it as something that could incorporate functions performed by the treasury in terms of fiscal policy all the way through to functions performed by other government agencies, things like issuing mortgage related assets or a whole range of financial regulatory functions could be sort of refracted through a digital currency system in the same way as we consider, for example, phone services and other services being currently provided through an internet infrastructure. I've used the term in some of my writing of an idea of super convertibility, the idea that this digital currency asset could have a whole range of features depending on how we wanted to design it, kind of like a Mr. Potato Head. If you wanted it to function like a security, it could. If you wanted to have duration, it could. If you wanted to pay interest, it could. But to sort of conceive of the underlying packet, the underlying infrastructure as a meta layer for all those various different functions. More broadly, I think central banks like to talk about their own independence. They like to talk about their own narrow mandate. And when we look at the issues that are implied by a digital currency, things like privacy, even in the context of accounts, have such deep political implications. I think we should take central bankers at their word and not assume that people perhaps who spent five years getting a PhD in macroeconomics or statistical modeling are the right people to make these complicated questions about privacy and civil liberties and sort of balance between public and private infrastructure. And in that sense, I think, not to say that the central bank shouldn't have a role, but it really should be centered at treasury as a sort of primary place. The last point I would say about disintermediation. I think we should be actually willing to lean into this. Positive Money's done some great work talking about banks as a sort of agent of government and creators of a public monetary instrument sort of by proxy. It is possible to disintermediate the deposit system while still giving banks the ability to serve that intermediary function. It just requires changing the way that we talk about that function and to have a more explicit relationship between the central bank and banks in terms of the credit that they issue. So if you say a bank can advance money on behalf of the central bank, and the limits on that are its profitability, the kinds of assets it's allowed to lean into, we can do that kind of thing. It just requires making more explicit the fact that these private banks are sort of front-ending public money. And I don't think that's something that Positive Money has shied away from in the past. So I'll stop there, but those are some initial thoughts. Fantastic. Thank you so much for your contribution, Rohan. Now we're gonna move to Isabella for her thoughts on the CBDC digital cash. I always forget to unmute. So my concern has for a while been that it's all very well and good getting the government to come in and transform physical cash of CBDC and it has all these beneficial functions. But there are sort of market concentration monopoly issues. The central bank is a monopoly for sure, right? But we keep it in check with this sort of, I guess, multifaceted system. It's more of a kind of hybrid system where you have the private sector working with the central bank. The banks are kind of agents of the central bank, but they keep the system honest, supposedly. I know they've failed in the past. But there is a function, there is a really important function that they provide. And if you, the risk of disintermediation is a really big one because we've been here before. Central banks that manage the totality of the money supply are very common in totalitarian states. We had it in the USSR, we had the sort of goss banking system there. And the real problem then becomes not so much the liabilities and their ability to issue the money. It's the assets on the other side of the central bank balance sheet that become the problem because the central bank is then charged with sort of backing all those liabilities. And it becomes a sort of state bank for everything, which is all fine during the COVID crisis because obviously the private sector has been massively disrupted and we do need that scale of sort of government intervention. But it's not so good in more normal times because the central bank is not necessarily the best central bank strip government isn't necessarily the best place to make decisions about small and medium sized loans or which sectors should be supported or which ones shouldn't be. I mean, we are now in exceptional times. So perhaps there is a justification but whether justification can be followed through into normal times, I think is harder to justify. And the other issue is one of privacy. So it's already been flagged as an issue with respect to sort of Libra. I mean, there's been a whole lot of criticism. A lot of the criticism focused on Libra and the Facebook project was around privacy concerns. But the same would apply to any central bank issuing digital money. And it's paradoxical. So there's a lot of peoples of technical specialists saying, well, we can manage this situation. We can have a system of private money. The central bank won't know everything. But there is definitely a paradox because unless we abandon regulatory standards on AML and KYC, the central bank itself would have an obligation to police the flows that occur under its digital banking framework. I mean, certainly that is the criticism that has been applied to Facebook and Libra. So it would be pretty hypocritical for the central bank to not apply the same AML, KYC, sort of scrutiny of the people holding accounts and it's in its name. And yet if it was to do that, then the money wouldn't be private and it would lose a lot of the sort of functionality and liquidity associated with sort of commonality of a conventional cash anonymous instrument. So I think that's gonna be very hard to overcome. It's not necessarily a problem in a place like China, but it is, I think, in democratic states. So unless we plan to somehow undermine the democratic function of our political systems, it's just not gonna be easily done. So I'll wrap my thoughts up. Now, I think the key issue is that we shouldn't get, you know, these launching a CBDC is very appealing right now because of the unique circumstances we are in. But I fear that if we rush into it, we may create a bit of a Frankenstein which we will regret later. So a lot of scrutiny has to be applied to any model that we come up with. Thanks for your thoughts, Isabella. I'm gonna hand over to Francis now for whether you think we should be thinking about a CBDC and in what form. Hi everyone. Great work, positive money. I know you've been thinking about this for a while and although it might seem that it's something who's an idea whose time has come along with other ideas like helicopter money and universal basic income that I am also rather in favour of, as many of you know. I actually want to echo what Isabella said about rushing into things. That whatever we create, whatever we design needs serious thought and actually all of these things need to be sort of together rather than cherry picking one particular thing saying, right, let's have a CBDC or let's have a UBI or let's get the central bank to do helicopter money or let's think about wealth taxes. All of these things are in the melting pot of a pretty radical redesign, I would say, in progress, kind of feeling our way towards some kind of different architecture for our social and monetary system. So I'm a little bit, just want to say, issue a note of caution about considering a CBDC in isolation from these other things. These whole questions of what our democracy needs to look like, the question of privacy, which both Rowan and Isabella have mentioned, which is an issue for any form of public, totally public money in order for anybody to have totally public money, unless it is in the form of some kind of bear bond like physical cash, you end up giving in some of your privacy, but we're having those discussions around other things as well. So here we are in this time, discussing invasive compulsory testing and mask wearing. I mean, that's a massive invasion of privacy as well, isn't it? No, so the question will be to what extent will we give up our right to freedom, to privacy, to live our own lives without interference from the government in order to have access to a public money system? And that, I think, is a question that needs careful thought and design. I know you've covered it to some extent. I think it probably needs more thought going forward. So that's kind of the negative side of what I wanted to say. The positive side is this, that actually I think it is a huge opportunity that using the CBDC rather than, I slightly disagree with Rowan here, rather than going for accounts, I think is an opportunity to resolve some of the fears that people have around privacy. And I wrote about this recently on Coindesk about the way in which you could design a CBDC that simply did make UBI payments anonymous to anonymous wallets. There are questions there about the limits of who we consider a residence and who should have this money. But it is, in theory, possible. And so this is more a democratic debate than a technical monetary one. The other thing that slightly puzzles me, and maybe we need to go on a trip into time to remember what the world used to be like, is this kind of idea from the central banks that having a CBDC, which would mean everybody would have, most people would potentially use central bank digital money for their everyday transactions with somehow disintermediate banks, make monetary policy impossible. Because if I go back to my childhood, so I'm quite old, in the 1960s, most people used physical cash. Now, that's money that is produced by the central bank. Most people never went near a bank. They were paid in cash on Fridays. They gave their money to their wives who spent it during the week on the groceries and the shopping. And they lived their lives in cash. And yet, we didn't have persistent bank runs. And we didn't have, it wasn't impossible for central banks to manage monetary policy. Because actually, the influences on banks and monetary policy tend to come from those who have large amounts of money to move around, not thousands, millions of people who are making small transactions all the time. And I think we can distinguish between small transactions and very large ones. And so actually, CBDC is perfectly OK for every ordinary people's everyday transactions. But that we still need to be cautious about how we conduct larger scale things so that we don't end up with market concentration and volatility. And a central bank that simply can't lose its control. I think I'll leave it there, some things to think about. Yeah, thank you, Frances, really, really good contributions. That's already been loads of different things we've thought about. And there's already questions coming in. We've got people from Canada, Switzerland, Edinburgh, North Wales, and Brighton. So we are going to come to your questions very shortly. And so keep those coming in now. But I just quickly want to go back to the panelists. Isabella and Frances touched on it in terms of, should we think about accelerating now? Because of COVID and obviously the potential financial instability, both cautiously, maybe Isabella more strongly, no. But it would be good to hear further thoughts from Rowan and then Zach. And then if there's anything else you want to come in on, Isabella and Frances. And then we'll open up for Q&A. So Rowan, can I go to you first of all? And also, feel free to pick up on any other points that the panelists made. Yeah, sure. So first of all, I think the crisis shows the importance of having a universal sort of mechanism for getting cash to every entity in the economy. And I certainly agree with Frances that there are ways that if you design this right, could be provided funds to people. I think that it is possible to look at, for example, numbered accounts as an example of kind of privacy respecting account systems. But as a matter of kind of longer term design, one of the reasons why I at least emphasize the importance of tokens as well is because anonymity, in my opinion, also comes in terms of transactional freedom. So as long as you have accounts, you have an entity that can turn off transactions. And that's very different from something where transactions can be made by two actors within a network without requiring a third party consent. And I think that's something that needs to be considered at a design level even before we decide how much we want to allow that as a matter of policy. When it comes to thinking about providing credit directly to firms, I probably disagree with Daisy on this and we've had this chat in other contexts. I think one of the things that you see in these crisis moments is that all of these assets ultimately get back stocked by the state. And so the idea that these are sort of times of exception rather than sort of exceptions that prove the rule, I think is maybe not how I would see it. The other thing on that is that if you look at the way that the regulatory structure of the banking system is set up right now, we already do have asset restrictions. We already say that you're not allowed to lend to certain kinds of actors for certain kinds of reasons. And we have a pretty strict collateral schedule but the central bank will accept in providing liquidity. So I think it's possible to design a system like that that still provides a wide amount of flexibility for private actors to have that sort of innovation and decentralized decision-making. And I'm certainly not advocating for a Gos Bank but what we see is to the extent that those standards matter at all and Izzy's comment is well taken that they are going out the window right now but that only proves the point that governments are not engaging in a sort of aggressive Gos Bank-style regulation. What they're doing is providing credit against almost any kind of collateral. So you could imagine a system where the same thing is happening on a daily basis. It's just more explicit to the public and there's more accountability for what that means to delegate responsibility for sort of credit money creation to private actors in the name of public purpose. I think the other thing that the COVID shows is that there's some limits to the current thinking around CBDC. One of my colleagues, Raul Correa, works with consumer finance grassroots activists on a daily basis and about 20% of the United States is unbanked but a significant number of them are unbanked by choice. If you ask them, they say that they don't trust the banking system. And when you look at bank regulations it's one thing to say, well, this should be available to everybody but there are limits to what undocumented people people who are engaged in sort of gray economy areas are able to do with official bank accounts. So if you really wanna be an effective sort of payment system you need, in my opinion, to silo off those kinds of public policy issues from the infrastructure. We proposed a bill in America with Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib and now others called the ABC Act, the Automatic Booster Communities Act where we were providing direct cash relief to every person in the country using a system of prepaid debit cards which was the closest we had to a digital cash system there. But the way that we distributed that was in addition to mailing them to people to propose stepping up distribution centers and actually having an emergency responder call that went to people's homes or people who are homeless or physically disabled to put the card directly in their hands. And part of that was a recognition that if you really wanna get cash to people you can't assume everybody can use a mobile phone. You have to actually meet people where they are and that requires thinking about everything from fees and fines that could be automatically garnished from these accounts the minute that anybody has access to them versus something where you can get the cash out and put in your pocket. Lastly, there is a kind of concern that disaster capitalism is always sort of faster than the state in these crisis moments. There are sort of fintech companies waiting in the wings to say, hey, we can provide these services better than the government. Hey, these problems show that you should let us kind of into the banking system. And we are seeing a concern for surveillance state expansion right now as Francis said, that in my mind is reminiscent of the Patriot Act, the kind of post 9-11 massive expansion of surveillance powers. And whether it's sort of becoming useful idiots for the kind of war on cash, well, saying things like, well, cash is dirty. We should get rid of it. This is another example of how cash is bad not really seeing how that fits into the larger narrative around the war on cash and the people who care about that. So the way that I would describe it, and I completely agree with Francis and Izzy's broader concern, we need to be thinking about these design questions not in the heat of the crisis, not sort of motivated by the short-term emotions that are being brought up by the crisis, but thinking about this as the infrastructure that we'll be governing digital finance for the next 50 hundred years. And to make these decisions with that kind of vision and foresight and to cover every base and to think about risks that may seem small today but could be extremely large over time. Great, thank you, Rowan. Did you want to come in now, Isabella? And then I'll go to Zach. I can see your hands up. Oh, you're still muted. Sorry, I always forget to do that. Yeah, just quickly, because that is the heart of my point. I did a column sort of arguing, comparing it to our search for a vaccine. We've got this crisis and we want a vaccine, but actually, I think there is consensus that we shouldn't rush a vaccine out because it might be worse in the long run if we don't do the right testing and you don't want the cure to be worse than the disease. And I think that same analogy applies to digital money. We might be tempted, we want to roll it out immediately and not go through all the proper sort of testing and thinking that we should be doing. And then we end up with a system that is actually potentially more fragile than improved. Great, thank you, very good contribution. Zach, should I move to you for thoughts on COVID response and acceleration? Yeah. So, I think the economic fallout from the virus is likely to cause a financial crisis further down the line. In a worst case scenario, we could see people struggling to access cash at the exact same time bank deposits are put at risk and digital payment methods are disrupted. And so I think there's a serious risk at the moment and it's a structural problem. We've ended up with a fragile money and bank system and we don't have a good backup system in place. So if we are hit with a financial crisis during a lockdown, what changes? And there are concerns that using cash could spread the virus, but I think those have been overstated. There's a recent paper from the Bank of International settlements that pushes back on that. And the evidence I've looked at suggests if you're making payments in person, the risks are similar for cash and card. So I don't think it's something we should focus on. Instead, we need to realize we're shopping a lot more online. There's many shops and businesses on high streets are shut and we're trying to keep up with social distancing. We have cash machines and bank branches, less of those in service, even more so because some are shut down due to COVID-19. So it's going to be very hard and lots of people need to get hold of cash quickly and bank accounts aren't working properly. When you start thinking about how a financial crisis and other kinds of crisis like this pandemic could hit at the same time, it starts making a lot of sense to have a digital payment service that's shielded from the private banking sector. And it would be a great backup system to have. So some of the benefits, I think, like obviously there are risks too and we shouldn't rush into it. I think that's a very good point. But I will list some benefits. I think it would provide a new and secure way for the public to hold digital money that is protected from financial sector instability. I think further down the line, it could support new monetary policy options like Alicor to Money, that would stimulate demand after lockdowns. And as has been discussed, CBDC might be a really good platform for launching a universal-based income and that kind of large-scale operation would probably require the Treasury and the Bank of England to coordinate so that price stability and financial stability are taken into account. And a new public payments platform could be instrumental in making that happen. But obviously we don't wanna get ahead of ourselves and jump into a whole new monetary paradigm without planning a safe course. So I definitely don't think we should rush. But we do need to, we are on the clock a bit because we've got cash disappearing and we've only got more crises around the corner, you know? The COVID-19 isn't gonna be the last crisis we face. That's from me, I think. Thanks, Zach, very useful comments. Francis, would you like to make any further comments on whether we should think about an acceleration of a CBDC design and rollout due to COVID? Well, I think my general point, my general view, I should probably gather and probably be no. I rather found myself opposing things that I have strongly supported in the past because of attempts to accelerate and beyond what I thought was sensible. So I sort of publicly opposed an emergency UBI and opposed helicopter money. And right now I'm publicly opposing an acceleration of CBDC. Not because I don't think it's a good thing. I think that we don't want to rush this. We need to get it right. Right, but there's another point I wanted to make as well, which is about resilience. That when you're trying to get money to people fast, you actually need to use whatever pathways you have available. If you are relying totally on one particular pathway and that pathway fails, you're in big trouble. And also people are diverse. People will choose whatever pathways they want. I mean, Ryan's already pointed out that some of the people who don't have bank accounts don't have them because they don't want them. There are still people who prefer to work entirely in cash when you look at Japan or Germany. You need to use multiple pathways and that may mean using private sector pathways. And at the moment, I actually think that you can have central bank money, but you might distribute it through lots of different routes. And perhaps that might be a model to look at going forward as well, rather than saying, no, no, we don't want to have private sector routes for payments. So, well, actually, you need a mixture. But what you're delivering through it is always the state money, always. And that's true even really in our present system to a greater or lesser extent, where we run into trouble is where we forget that and people start creating private monies claiming that they're state money and then they turn out not to be. We've seen that happen before and it could happen again. But I think that having multiple payments pathways that could be private, could be public, it introduces resilience into the system and makes it less likely that the whole thing just collapse. Really useful point there, Francis. Thank you. So we're going to start taking questions, which already had lots coming in. So there's been two, one from Julie and one from Mika, questioning why some panellists were so focusing on the importance of anonymity as part of our monetary system. So I'd like maybe to put that one to Rowan first. Julie says, isn't that just tax avoidance? Why are we worrying about anonymity? So much and Mika says, it is caused havoc on Twitter and other social media having anonymity. So if you could kind of maybe do the defensive of this first Rowan and then I'll take any other comments from the panellists. Yeah, sure. I mean, I think one thing to think about with this is that to sort of build on what Francis was just saying, I'm actually quite sort of bullish on doing things fast, but I would say that that doesn't mean cutting corners. That means sort of accelerating the right process and sort of accepting the urgency of this moment. And one way of doing that is to look at the people who have been thinking about this for quite a while, and not the sort of people who just turned their attention to it a one minute ago and want to sort of start developing that and to think about the different stakeholders. And in that respect, one of the key stakeholders are kind of groups that have thought about the implications of privacy and civil liberties. If you go back to the earliest sort of internet futurists of the 1980s, the cypherpunks and things who are helping develop the first round of kind of into infrastructure. One of the areas that they focused on was digital catch. And the reason was because if you imagine a world where every transaction can be surveilled, every transaction can be censored and shut down by a central authority and every bit of the information in the transaction system is going into a database that is learning about itself and learning about everybody in it. Then you have the worst of Facebook and Google combined with the worst of the Stasi and the KGB and the secret police. And that combination of kind of the capitalist data mining on one hand to try and predict your behavior to sell you products, combined with state prediction to get compliance and punished dissidents is the worst of both sort of state totalitarianism and sort of capitalist totalitarianism. And if you think about the way that money has worked through history, there has always been an uneasy balance between cash and accounts. There's always been this sort of balance of how much individual freedom people have versus how much information is centralized. And so to think about making digital cash as sort of some extreme departure or helping the bad guys is in my opinion to flip the dynamic. The real dynamic is if we move to a digital centric world and we don't preserve anonymous cash, it will be a massive shift in our balance of freedom and privacy towards surveillance and control. Brett Scott, who I know that he's sort of been a friend of many people, this group has been writing about the war on cash for a long time. And if you people like Daniela Gabor have been writing about the financialization of development, people coming in into sort of poorer countries or developing countries, claiming they wanted to help those countries whereas really what they're trying to do is build financial infrastructure for the aim of data mining those countries in the name of larger corporations. So when we think about anonymous cash, there are two ways that I would say to deal with that concern about tax avoidance. One, focus on individuals, not corporations. Corporations don't have a right to privacy, individuals have a right to privacy. And I think that's a way to start to think about the difference there. We can require every corporation to declare their funds as a part of being a publicly chartered entity. The other way is to think about where the real power is. If you look at the way that tax avoidance regulation schemes work, they target the big fish. They don't target little people who, you know, sort of don't declare $20 or something. They target the millionaires and the billionaires. If you're really concerned about tax avoidance, closing down international tax loopholes and ending legal protection for huge pots of money that are getting to operate with impunity is a much more effective first step and dealing with those concerns. I've proposed sort of jokingly but increasingly less jokingly that we could simply tell the entire world that anybody that has over a billion dollars that doesn't declare it could be open season to hackers. You know, just say we are literally gonna let anyone come and try and steal your money and we're just not gonna protect you. We're not gonna get the police to go after them if they steal your money. You know, every heist maybe in the world, they can just go for it. And you can think about flipping the logic there because what we currently do is we put a huge amount of state resources into protecting the wealth of the wealthy in Swiss bank accounts, in Cayman Islands, in the middle of the United States in banks in New York. We don't need to do it that way. And rather than worry about the sort of average person who might hold $200 in an anonymous cash wallet, we really need to be looking where the real money is and the real crime and the real great deeds. And it's always at the top. Great, thanks, Sankara. And Zach, did you want to come in on the anonymity a bit? Asking people to keep their answers brief so you can get through as many. Oh, for sure. Yeah, so just a couple of quick thoughts on anonymity. The first one is just to remind everyone, we are on the clock with that decision because a big company like Google, Facebook, they're the ones who are deciding what is and isn't anonymous, like with stable coins, things like that. We need to find a way for the state to get into the digital currency gain that's safe, that can protect civil liberties because frankly, I don't trust the private sector to do it alone. And I don't trust the state to do it alone either, but we need to, like we can't have ideals, like we can't aim really high and just talk about it like it's, oh, it's gonna happen further down the line, like it's coming, it's really soon. Like, you know, Facebook has a white paper, they have a lot of resources, they have a lot of capital, like they're, you know, and if it's not opposed in some countries, like that might be enough to get it going. So, yeah, just to note that we're on the clock, but I'll leave it there and we'll go on to the next question. Any thoughts quickly from Frances or Isabella on anonymity for or against? Sorry, my two-year-old just fell down the stairs. She's okay, she's just got bad bruise, but I'll have to go on privacy. I don't know what was said, because I wasn't just here, I was, I left from work and was still talking. Oh, sorry, I've just been running up and down the stairs. So, I just think it's very easy to say, oh, these things don't matter. I echo the points made that, you know, because there are lots of people who've been thinking about this for a long time. That said, I'm not sure they're the ones that are best placed to suddenly hand over the decision-making to, because they are, in that sense, also vested interests. And they might think that they've been thinking for, on behalf of all stakeholders, but I don't think it's as simple as that. We need to actually have a public debate about this stuff. And privacy does matter, because actually it helps with the fungibility of money. If you know who's had it and who, you know, you can discriminate against different types of money. I mean, there's a famous saying, your money's no good here. And if money is not private, then you can sort of end up discriminating against people and blocking people and having sort of compartmentalized access to the economy. We're kind of seeing this now when you see the virtual queuing for the Ocado orders. And there's currently a moral justification for that. We don't mind sort of corporations saying, we're going to prioritize X customers over Y customers. But in a functioning economy, there should be a neutrality. Money should be neutral. And that is why it is so important to maintain its privacy. It's for the neutrality of the market and to ensure the price signals are really, money should be the thing that the economy sort of uses to vote on where investment should go. And that is impossible if we kind of cheer it and associate too many identities with it. That's what I was going to say. And I'm really sorry, but I'm probably going to have to go now. No worries. Thank you so much for joining us, Isabella. We really appreciate your contributions and keep writing about this in FT Alpha Bill. We'll be reading and really appreciate you having to take time out of the childcare that many people are having to juggle at the moment. I'm the classic example of that. So thank you very much. And I'll definitely watch, if this is recorded, I will definitely watch the end of it and be available for comments on Twitter or whatever. So thank you for having me. Great. Take care. Have a good rest of the afternoon. We'll send you the link. So yeah, let's, sorry, I muted myself. Let's move to Francis. And because this is your kind of specialist subject, I'm going to check in the next round of questions. So we had three coming in on whether we should think about linking CVDC with UBI. Now, you know, we know you don't want to do this in response to COVID. So put that separately, you know, whether you think it's a good idea. And just to kind of mention, they came from Peter Knight, Hans, Florian, Hoya and Gerard Soya who all asked about the connection between those two. But feel free to also answer the privacy anonymity question too. Okay. If I can just make a comment about the privacy anonymity thing, I kind of want to sound a bit of an awful warning, which is that although we tend to think of state things as benign, there are groups of people for which they're not. And they're people who for one reason or another, we can sort of undesired this, you know, we as a democracy, as a society, the majority thinks are undesirable. People like migrants, for example. And the power to shun, to simply cut somebody off from an entirely public monetary system would essentially leave those people without the means to live. I think we need to be very, very careful about giving any government such power. So I would not want to shut the door on private forms of money for exactly that reason. Or indeed on physical cash for that reason, which governments are unable to trace and which therefore can go to people who are otherwise cut off from the means to live. So it's a huge humanitarian issue there that I think needs to be considered. And that does actually lead me on a bit to CBDC and UBI, because as I said, I am not a fan of trying to shoehorn either a CBDC or a UBI in right now in a crisis. But I do think that both of them need to be considered for the longer term as how do we ensure we don't end up in this mess again. It seems to me that one of the big things we've learned from this crisis is how extraordinarily difficult it is to get money to people in a crisis. And crises happen. I'm okay, we've got a pandemic now, but we've had crisis before, we'll have them again. We will have people who we need to get money to and hurry. And at the moment, we don't really have a means to do that. It's been an absolute mess, just about everywhere. Trying to think up ways of meeting needs of this group and that group and the other group. And if you had set up already a central bank facility which could simply deliver money, put money in central bank accounts or place money into wallets, tokens into wallets that were available to everyone. I mean, there will always be some people who don't have access to them. We do need to think about that. Then you aren't scarring around, desperately trying to find ways of getting money to people. You've got something set up and we'll already do that. Whether we call that a helicopter money facility or we call it a universal basic income because we could pay a small amount all the time and simply flex it, up it or reduce it and use it as a monetary policy tool is up for debate. It's kind of the same thing. But I think having that facility to get money to people or potentially remove money from people at different times is, I think, immensely powerful and something that we really need to be seriously considering. Great, thanks, Francesters. Zach or Roe, want to comment on the UBI-CVDC connection? Roe? Yeah, I'll just make a quick comment, which is that I propose giving cash to everybody. This bill that I worked on with the Congresswoman in America so I obviously think that's a really important thing in crisis moments and I agree with Frances that if anything, what we need to do is make sure that we never put in this position again for future crises and I think that having the right framework to have a public debate is the point that the public deserves to have a role and this is absolutely well taken. I think the point is that the urgency of this moment is the urgency that we need to get on this. As Zach said, the debates are happening now. We can't just keep saying this is a long-term thing. Let's slow down, we need to speed up, but not speed up, put the car before the horse in the process. But on the UBI point, the only thing I point out also is this is a crisis sort of unique in the sense that we want a lot of people to stay home but a lot of crises are crises where what happens is there's a drop in production and so even in this crisis, there's a lot of work that could be being done from home, including just things like communicating with other people in the community, providing sort of online support or whatever else. But another way to think about it in addition to just providing cash is to think about nationalizing payroll and ways to transfer people automatically from jobs that they lose into a public job system and using the currency system that way. So one day you're on payroll, your job, you lose your job, the next day you're on payroll on the government job office and then we can work out where exactly for you to have the opportunity to work in the way that's most useful to you. But I think that often the debate gets reduced to the cash itself and loses sight of what we should be giving people cash to do and the reason why the whole monetary system exists is to facilitate production so that then we can all have access to consume that production. So cash is important to preserve cash flow and to manage inequality, but that ultimately the functional monetary system should be in the service of a production system and there's a way to think about digital currency in that context too. Great, did you want to comment at all on that, Zach? Sure, I think I would just reiterate what I said earlier that I think CBDC would be very well placed for a universal basic income. If you want to make it more targeted, you probably want to do it through, not through the central bank, you want to do it through government. Like maybe using central banks, CBDC is a platform, but like the fact that it's universal or targeted, I think makes the difference between whether it should be kind of monetary or fiscal, if that makes sense. But other than that, I am excited about the possibilities of UBI, but I think it's a bit of a double-edged sword because if you're not, like there's only so much wealth, so you're moving money around, but are you moving wealth around at the same time? Like are you redistributing access to things effectively or are you just moving numbers? So yeah, universal basic income, I think it's very exciting, but definitely not something we want to jump into again. It's a risky one and there are potential downsides, like it could be used as an argument to weaken welfare programs, for example, which I wouldn't before, but I'm concerned about, but that's me on UBI. Great, we have so many questions coming in on so many different topics, but I can't really cluster them together anymore, so I'm just gonna read out a few and then hopefully our panelists can pick up on the ones that they feel they want to answer. So somebody, I can't find the question now, but suggested that rather than thinking about the Treasury or the central bank, we need a new institution that looks at this because of the kind of baggage that comes with either of those. So be good to have your thoughts on this. Another question is whether the government would be responsible for developing and maintaining CBDC thoughts on that. Any conditionality in terms of opening an account, should there be or shouldn't there be? Duncan asks, if the public were to adopt CBDC, is it a replacement of bank money? Is there a problem with centralization of power? Obviously Isabella talked a little bit about this earlier on. Thoughts on a CBDC alongside credit allocation and if private banks remain as intermediaries, can they be constrained in monetizing such accounts? I'm guessing CBDC accounts to compensate for any perceived loss of income and that's Mike from Essex on Facebook. So that covered quite a bit, but hopefully you could give me a couple of points on, there's quite a lot around the institutions and the control. So who wants to kick off with a thought? It can just be on one of those or a couple of them. Should I go to you first, Francis? Or Saks also got his hand up, so that's fine to start off with him. Okay, I'd like to go first. Institutions, I mean, I thought about this because what we're hitting here is kind of almost like perceptions of what institutions do. So we think of the treasury as being the place that collects taxes and then there are spending departments. The way governments organize themselves, yes, you might say perhaps we need to rethink how we organize governments. I mean, in the UK, why wouldn't you involve, say, the DWP? And then the central bank, certainly in the UK, is another arm of government because it's fully owned by the UK government. So all you're doing it, and I don't know how many people know this, but there's also kind of an internal bank within the treasury as well. There's the DMO, the Debt Banshrin Office, which is like another internal bank. So there are all these institutions, and it may be that you need some redesign of government for a CBDC and a general facility to distribute money, to be kind of independent of the existing institutions. But I would be a little bit wary about over-complicating government really. I think it's quite complicated enough already. So you'd need to be looking at streamlining, I think rather than adding on. And I also wanted to say something about the question of whether there should be conditionality on an opening account. I think I've touched on this already, about the power to shun. It really depends whether there is any other means of people accessing money. If there isn't, then applying conditionality essentially deprives people of the right to life. Thanks, Frances. That's very well put. Anyone else? Zach, shall I come to you next? Sure. So I think on the institutional level it's worth bearing in mind the more ambitious you get with the scale of the reform, the greater the level of complexity you're going to face in actually getting it to happen. So the paper that we put forward today is very carefully tuned to be the safest CBDC that we could envision. So you can put it in front of policymakers right now and they can look at it and go, I can see that this isn't going to make my job really hard. And I think that is something to bear in mind is keeping the conversation, keeping in mind what's blue sky thinking further down the line, that kind of thing and what is achievable, what can we convince our politicians to do in a reasonable enough time frame to avoid a fully privatized payment system and also avoid either the government or a big financial, private financial entity or tech giant getting all of our data, like payments, social, everything in one place. So we need to think about ways to split up, check some balances, like accountability, all of these things. There's going to be private sector and public sector involved. It's a huge question. So the one we're proposing, we think is safe-ish for what we've got right now. It's pretty good. There are some open questions. But yeah, just bear in mind the kind of time scales and the scale of the change. But I'd be open to new institutions for sure. And streamlining government is always a good idea. Rowan, did you want to comment on any of those questions? I can repeat some of them if you want. No, it's okay. I got some notes. So the first question about having a new entity, I think the way that I would think about this is more about coordinating across entities. And the real question would be sort of who's the lead of that network if you think about the internet as an analogy. If we developed a sort of department of the internet that wouldn't stop every other department having thoughts about how the internet's going to affect their workflow. And so if you think about digital currency, I think there's reasons to put it in the Treasury as a sort of central hub. But I think that it affects everything else. I agree with Francis DWP and others would be obvious entities to sit at that table. On the question of kind of just building what Zach just said, I mean, I think I would sort of push back a little bit on the idea that this is about blue sky versus pragmatic. To me, I see this as about providing a vision and then making the compromises politically. Because if we don't articulate the vision the right way, then nobody knows what the right end result is. You know, if you think about politicians, they're sort of the true North politicians. And then there's the politicians that sort of work on where things are at right now. And at least from my point of view, some of the hardest questions are hard precisely because they're politically contentious. And if we say we're just going to take politics where it is, then we are reinforcing a certain kind of political value system rather than saying that is actually wrong on certain issues and we need to change it. On the question of conditionality of accounts, we've been talking a little bit about sort of state versus market. I don't like that dichotomy. I would talk about it often also in the context of individuals. If you think about, for example, email, a lot of people use email systems that are hosted by an intermediary. But email was designed at the technical level to be federated, which means I could host an email server in my house and it would talk to the email system alongside everybody else. So I would frame it as really about individuals versus the government and thinking about cash wallets particularly as something individuals could hold themselves. Not a market actor, not a private actor, but an individual could theoretically host one at home and there wouldn't be any conditionality on that. So in that respect, I agree with Francis. This is about preserving people's right to participate in the economy as people. And that means being able to hold money in your pocket. On the last question about centralization of power and credit allocation, I think the reality is, and this is a hard point, but one that positive money has done really important work over the last decade, that we already have a centralization of credit allocation power because to be a bank, to be a financial institution is to get a charter from the government, to get access to special privileges, to be subject to all kinds of regulation about what assets you get to create. And so in that respect, I don't see this as centralizing power as much as making visible, making explicit the existing centralization of power and of credit allocation processes. And once they're explicit, then we can have a very different kind of public debate about it. But it's not about changing that power dynamic as much as it's about revealing it. Thank you, Ryan. That's really helpful. Lots of really good comments. So I'll just read out a couple of things people have said just because it's an interesting input. So one on kind of anonymity and both a couple of the panelists mentions DWP. So Mark from Farnborough just wanted to comment here. He's long-term sick and disabled and over most of the years, he spent a majority of his money in cash, but that has become more difficult. And now it's even more difficult in full kind of isolation lockdown. One of the key things that he's noticed in the last few years is he used to send a yearly document to DWP to register his wealth. And now it seems that the DWP already knows exactly his finances, which yeah, I'm not exactly sure, but he suggests that they have kind of direct oversight which leaves him feeling very uneasy. So I think there is already issues around kind of trust essentially at all levels, both with the government taxation system as well as the potential of a CBDC. Mike Clarke just wanted to check that he heard that 20% of the US population is unbanked. Is that correct? Not that 20% uses cash necessarily, but 20% is unbanked. Yeah, unbanked. Yeah, okay. And then I thought we could come across, there's been a few people kind of talking about lots of different kind of crises facing us, including climate change. So I just, there's one interesting idea which I thought the panel might want to kind of comment on from Michael Evans. So is there a benefit in linking the value of a new currency to something like remaining carbon emissions capacity in the atmosphere before two degrees is locked in? He says, once this has been maxed out, new currency can be generated through carbon drawdown from reforestation and carbon capture, utilization and storage. This would incentivize beneficial behaviors to reverse climate. So maybe, you know, thinking of other types of currencies that we could have, thinking on that would be interesting. And I'll just add one more question, which again is quite high level to the panel. So Leslie Haroon asks, in order to build a holistic and democratic money system that can take us through this century intact, democratic, transparent, meets people's basic needs, serves the long-term needs of society, doesn't exacerbate inequality, et cetera. What is the process for creating that? And what would need to be resolved? And I think it's totally fine if panelists want to say things that you've said already, but kind of ask us what direction we need to be, tell us what direction we need to be going into things through some of these really, really big questions and challenges for society. So anyone feeling like comment going on either, these are, I know that all of the questions are like, basically what do we do with everything? So they're not easy, I must admit. Anyone fancy chipping in on either the kind of climate change or the holistic roadmap one? Rowan, go for it. Yeah, I'm happy to defer a further bit last week. So I think on the first question about the cash, I think it's really important to preserve physical cash. I think that fight has to be seen in parallel. And again, kudos to Positive Money for fighting that fight in parallel. One thing I would say is I think I'm a bit sort of hesitant to use terms like digital cash, if what we're talking about is digital accounts, because it's so important to keep a vision of what digital cash means. So I often say digital cash on one hand, digital accounts on the other, and they're complementary to each other. But one of the reasons it's important to, in my opinion, to frame it that way is so that we can link the fight for a digital anonymous cash token to fighting the war on physical cash. So to say, you know, we need to fight this on two fronts. We need to keep physical cash. And as we digitize, we need to have a digital cash. And that's different from having digital accounts. On the question of carbon capture, I mean, this is kind of what I mentioned when I was talking about payroll before and when we were talking about the assets that banks get to issue. So whether it's what kinds of credit you get to create or what kind of income you're paying people to do, we can think about the value of labor and the value of credit and what we are issuing that against. And, you know, when you think about transition to a green new deal or a green adjust transition or a green, you know, industrial policy, however you want to call it, part of the goal there is to think about forms of labor that are less carbon intensive and to be able to pay people to work in those areas, to build those industries. And I think we can apply the same logic to credit creation. You know, there have been talks to sort of green central banks balance sheets. But I would apply that more broadly. Look at all of the areas that we're investing money in or supporting private credit creation and to think about what kind of value we want to be, you know, creating that against. On the last question about sort of how to go forward on this, my view on this, and I think it may be even more possible in the United Kingdom than America, is the best way to go forward will be some sort of independent commission, some sort of royal commission because these questions are complicated. They are interdependent and the public does need to be involved in a sustained way. And it's very hard to do that in the general rough and tumble of parliamentary back and forth. And it's very hard to do that with sort of one bill or something that captures every part of this topic. So some sort of independent commission that thinks about this route to branch, thinks about it everything from fiscal and monetary policy through to payment system design, through to privacy and civil liberties, through to the future of the green economy in and puts out a very kind of holistic report that can then be debated and criticised and responded to is probably the way that I would see kind of the best procedural step forward. That's really helpful. We always like to advocate a commission at positive money. Do you want to join in any of the other panelists or should I go to further questions? Oh, Frances, let's go to you. Yes, I wanted to pick up the climate change thing. I'm always very nervous about proposals to anchor a currency to anything other than the productive capacity of the economy. The lesson we learned when we abandoned the gold standard is that actually even in a gold standard ultimately it's all about the productive capacity of your economy. If you try and anchor it to something that is the results of the productive capacity of your economy whether that is your ability to mine gold or your ability to buy gold come to that or the evidence that you're bringing your carbon emissions down then you're kind of mistaking the activity for each product. And I think that that's kind of not where you want to be. I think fiat currencies should remain as they are which is anchored by the productive capacity of the economy. Rowan touched on this earlier with this mention of a job guarantee that ultimately we need people to produce. We may need to lean against all forms of production that are damaging but I actually do think that's the case for fiscal policy maybe even for monetary policy and certainly for credit allocation decisions and the way in which we as a democracy through our government institutions direct the direction of travel of the private sector. I didn't think anchoring the currency to that is a stunningly good idea myself. Is that the way forward? I'm a bit meh about more commissions mainly because they tend to be populated by the great and the good who have invested interest in kind of looking backwards and trying to maintain what we already have. I'd be so disappointed by INET for example. You know, yeah, okay, lots of, all right, I miss men and a dearth of new voices and people who've arguably looked at things in much more detail. So it's a difficult one because my instinct is to look radically at sort of how we actually operate our democracy, how people participate in our democracy is I think that our participation is really quite broken and quite limited now and we need to be looking at forms of direct democracy of people getting involved through local institutions and feeding their wants and their needs into some kind of central hub, I don't know. I don't know how that would work but there's sort of lessons from the cooperative movements and things like that might help. I think that we can't use our existing ways of doing things to find a way forward. I think we've actually got to rethink even how we get people to participate because the level of apathy is just astonishing. Can I just quickly say, can I just quickly say, sorry, I totally agree with Francis's point. I certainly wouldn't ever emphasize the independent commission over social cooperatives and I think that's definitely the most important place. So I didn't mean to sort of suggest that I think an independent commission would be superior to that. I just meant that as a better than sort of trying to debate one bill in parliament as a way of sort of putting the ideas together. But you're right, absolutely public education and grassroots is the starting point and positive monies, local chapters are I think a very inspirational model for that. Great, we've got a couple of questions from local chapters coming up which I'm going to show next. Zach, did you want to comment on either of those or should we keep going? Just a quick, I think Rohan and Francis did a really good job. I will just quickly kind of point out that CBDC, it's a good platform for then building other stuff on top of later. So if we can make it safe, make it happen and get it the ball rolling, then we can start stacking other interesting ideas like UBI and how we respond to the climate crisis and things like on top and we can use these new tools and this new system to help us. And I think it's important to kind of think about how are we going to empower government and that includes kind of the Bank of England under that umbrella and when I say that to make interventions as the private sector becomes ever more sophisticated almost an exponential rate at doing things with money and cryptography and like all of it, like they need to have a foot in the door and if we're going to have a democracy, a democracy has to be up to date and they need a platform to do that with. I think CBDC could be a really good part of that whole process. But as to how we actually do it, that's a massive question. And I'd like to, all kinds of ideas coming into my head, but we'll move on to the next question. Well, hopefully there's a good starting point of how we do it in the paper that we've put out today. But yeah, there's still lots of questions to be answered. So here's one maybe Rowan could just answer quickly because it's kind of directed as, kind of MMTs as proponents of job guarantee. So Ian Beggs who organizes the local Brighton Group for positive money says recently they've had a discussion around UBI and job guarantee in the context of COVID, but how do you evaluate the relative merits of either of these as a response in the long term? Yeah, I mean, my view on this is a couple of things. And one is I think again, we always want to be emphasizing the productive output of the economy, not because we want to be workerists and sort of only focus on people who can work, but because we want to make sure that everybody has prosperity. And the way to do that is to maximize how much there's available to share to everybody. That's the first thing. The second thing is my view in general, I'm a pretty kind of leftist person. I don't think that market based mechanisms are the best way to distribute public goods. Whether that's food or healthcare or anything else, my view is as much as possible, we should be providing things free at the point of service and having public production systems provide critical goods and services. In that respect, given the choice between giving people cash and saying go buy your basic needs and giving those basic needs directly, I prefer the latter. That said, I do accept and believe that participation in sort of the ability to pay with money is an important part of our economy, certainly for now. And as a result of that, I don't think anyone should be denied a basic level of income. When I don't necessarily think that the way to do that is to give everyone the universal same amount of income, but there are ways to design systems where you have a guaranteed minimum income and then you can build on top of that and things like that. And certainly from my point of view when it comes to emphasizing the sort of social obligation to participate that comes with recognition that from each according to their ability to each according to their need, that if we wanna have equitable production that requires an equitable contribution from people who can contribute. That that should not be enshrined in laws that punish people. I'm a lawyer, I don't trust those systems to be perfect. So if somebody doesn't says that they can't work or shouldn't work, the answer shouldn't be a characteristic to sort of deny them their basic living standards or anything like that. So I think that if you look at the way that Martin Luther King and others in the civil rights movement in America talked about it, it was a guaranteed job for those who can and should work and an income for those who can't. And defining can't or shouldn't there as relatively broadly, not punitively is how I would describe it. And there are movements for a guaranteed annual income which are different from how a lot of universal basic incomes are designed. And maybe a lot of people who think who support universal basic income if it came down to it would support something like that anyway, and it's a matter of the details of the program design. But a lot of the way that I hear it talked about is kind of give people money and then let the market provide or kind of just give people money and don't even talk about the production side. And I think those have serious risks. And in that respect, that's why we kind of emphasize the job guarantee side of things. Okay, I'll just bring in another question, but you're welcome to comment on that as well, Frances. In your response. So, because it is related to UBI. So both Barb Jacobson and Susan Holden, good friends of Positive Money, bring up kind of a shared issue. They say a kind of nightmare would be a form of UBI paid either via vouchers which can only be spent in large supermarkets or with a condition that people get vaccinated or tested kind of constantly. And that, you know, you only, it's basically conditionalities on that. So how best to avoid such scenarios? So perhaps you could comment on that and the previous question on job guarantee and UBI, Frances. I'm gonna take Barb's point first, which I think is important to touch on something we were talking about earlier about conditionality. And I'm very much on the side of if you are regarding this as digital cash, then you can't have conditionality like that. The access to the means to live is, it needs to be right. And with physical cash, it is a right. Anybody can use physical cash. If you start putting conditionality on access to a CBDC, then it is not digital cash. And we have actually moved backwards. We've ended, we've ending up close to a police state and I wouldn't personally support that. So I think Rowan's point about digital cash, I think is really important. I'd rather see a CBDC delivered indiscriminately to wallets rather than, you know, going through accounts with conditionality and stuff like that myself. I think if I could just touch on the UBI as a job guarantee thing is actually, I mean, we kind of have huge fights about how many angels dance on the head of a pin with this one really, because my own view as a UBI supporter has always been that UBI should be seen as just simply setting people afloat. But it should not be high enough to destroy the incentive to work. And there is absolutely a case for job guarantee so that people can work, who struggle to find work through the private sector or when the private sector simply isn't providing jobs which happens from time to time. Or even just because we need people to do things in the public arena that the private sector doesn't provide. There are all sorts of reasons for a job government, job guarantee scheme and I personally right now actually would fully support one because right now we have a lot of unemployed people and we have some jobs that need doing. Bring it on. Thanks, Frances. Zack, did you want to comment on either of those questions or should we move on up to you? UBI Job Guarantee, CBDC. I think we've covered it quite well, Frances, respondable so in the interest of getting more people's questions answered maybe we can move on to another one. Yeah, and we're running out of time so I don't think, and it's been quite an intense and fast-moving debate so I'm going to get through everyone's questions so do feel free to send those over to Positive Money afterwards. We will be writing to everyone and sharing the video and sharing how you can get more involved in a discussion on this going forward. So I think there's been kind of three last questions I'd like to finish on so I'll just do one kind of long one and then the final two have kind of yes-no answers for the panellists. So the one which has more of a sentence or two for the panellists is from Rob Hawkes in North Yorkshire. He said, many thanks for this fascinating discussion. When does the panel could comment more explicitly on the issue of trust highlighted in the title event and what makes trust such a crucial dimension of this topic? So he wants to kick us off with just a couple of sentences on the trust issue. Frances and then Zack and then Rowan. Mully, the ability for money to operate from financial system to operate at all fundamentally depends on trust. If people don't trust their money, don't trust money. They don't use it. They dump it. That's how hyperinflation happens is when people lose trust in money. They stop using it. They dump it as quickly as they can in favour of something else, which is more valuable to them and in which they have more trust. So actually maintaining trust in the monetary system is hugely important. When we have shocks like we had in 2008, I was actually a major shock to the level of trust in the monetary system and it's not healed yet. So anything we can do that actually helps people to feel that the monetary system works for them is resilient, is supportive and isn't corrupt, is better. And if if moving towards a central bank, CBDC, particularly the small transactions for ordinary people and so forth, maybe and particularly digital cash, perhaps we might, if that helps to shore up trust in the financial system using banks less, maybe some direction of what banks do and how they direct credit, all of that. If all of that helps to shore up trust in the financial system, then it is a good thing. There are downsides. You know, it is a bit it can be more intrusive in terms of the level surveillance in the monetary system itself and regulation. But if that helps to maintain trust, then it's it's important. It's it's the whole financial stability argument, really. Great. Thanks, Francis. Zack. Yeah, so on trust, I think there's kind of two levels of trust is that you can trust you can trust something to do what you think what you expect it to do. And then you can trust it as in like you you you trust it without understanding it. Like so currently, I think there's people like there's a lot of people who trust money and but money has has changed and it's and it is changing and we don't understand it how those are used to. So I think part of that trust comes with the understanding. And I think engaging, especially there's another benefit of engaging the government and the Bank of England in the kind of digital money landscape is that as the people are going to have a way to engage with some of these questions one that jumps to mind is smart contracts which are a little bit outside the scope of the talk. But just for example, it can be used for for very kind of nefarious purposes. And we need to kind of get our heads around some of these larger questions like and start thinking about how to kind of legislate and how to protect against some of the fallout of going digital and going fully digital, which which it looks like run that run that course, which of course, we don't want to happen. We want to protect cash, but we need we need to be ready to take on those those challenges. And so there's like two levels of trust there. Great, thanks, Zach. Did you want to make a comment on trust, Rowan? Yeah, sure. I mean, I think one of the things about this about the sort of context in which this conversation is being had is that there's so much cynicism, well justified cynicism from people who've been let down and betrayed and misled in other policy discourses, particularly around finance and particularly around technology. So I would sort of say there's three things. One is having clear principles that really articulate where the values are coming from. And I think the questions that we had today about, you know, why anonymity or important ones to elucidate. Why is it important to not want totalitarianism? You know, why is it important to simultaneously be able to say, I think the government is an important actor to express our democratic will, but I also don't want them to have a list of everybody everybody knows and to be able to tell everybody when that when and when they can't participate in the economy. The second thing I think is about vision. And I think that, you know, it's important to be politically smart and to to make sure you can get results. But it's also important to lay out a vision of how the world should work and not sort of preemptively negotiate so that you're presenting a half loaf as a full loaf. And that kind of thing is where I think a lot of people in the public are used to not being told that they can have, you know, basic things that are good for them in society and they only get told what they what people think that they can sell in the next election or something. And so in that respect, having principles, having vision and the last thing is about accuracy and honesty, because it's really easy to to think that the public can't understand certain complex ideas or is too stupid, or that certain debates should be left to a highly educated, technically, and to say, actually, this is a topic that you deserve to have an opinion about, and we are going to commit to telling you honestly so you can trust us. You can trust us when we say X, Y, Z, that it's on a back door, that it's not some other thing that's going to come around and bite you, you know, a week after you've agreed to support this idea. And I think if we can if we can have this conversation on those terms and, you know, start from people's lived experience of money, start from people's lived experience of cash and build from that and say, we believe in good things, we are going to show you how we can get it in this new world and you can trust us. I think that's the right way to go forward. Great, two kind of one word answer questions, then, building off that. Do the panellists think that we should have this is a question from Jill? Do the panellists think we should have a citizens assembly on this topic? We've talked about participation, doesn't have to. Yeah, I mean, I think I think this is one of these things like like with the Commission, like the grassroots, the answer is yes. And we're not going to have too much democracy on this issue. I'd say go for it. Can't think of any reason why not. And so would I. Why not? Why not? I think so, we need to get people talking. And the second one word question, which came from Tony Rooney from Nottingham is in terms of implementing, or he said, in terms of real politics to the panellists really think that we're going to see CBDC in the UK or US in the next five to ten years. Yes, I do. I think I think all the indications are we're moving fast in that direction. The question is what it'll look like and how it'll work. Yeah, in my experience, working with central bankers on this, they really got scared by Facebook's Libra. It really scared them and made them realize they might actually lose some serious power to private entities. And if there's one thing that the central bankers hate more than actually doing public policy well for the people, it's it's letting their power be given up. I'd echo what Rohan said. And I just kind of say the the central central banks don't tend to be very they tend to be reactive. So if you want to kind of gauge how soon it's going to happen, like look elsewhere, so like look at Facebook and what they're doing, look at China and their program, like look around the world and kind of see like what are the things that are pushing central banks to act? And then you can kind of build a timeline based on that. And I think given how fast events are moving, we could be we could see CBDC a lot faster than we think. And there are other there are some central banks are kind of ahead of the game. So I believe the in the Bank of Sweden has like done some really good work. So I'd encourage people to check that out. We source them in our paper and they have some really interesting ideas about like redefining what legal tender is and like how to deliver prepaid cards with CBDC on that are not linked to a particular person. So you can just be given the card and use it, which is quite exciting because it makes a digital thing more act more like cash again, which is so definitely check, kind of check out them, check out what they can do. Thanks, Zach. Good, good comment to end on. I think we're going to we're going to close there. We've had like loads of interaction. We we try and make things participate with positive money, but it's a bit harder when we're all on Zoom. So sorry, you haven't been able to kind of see or speak to each other in the audience. Hopefully that in the future we'll be able to easily do kind of breakout rooms for hundreds of people, but that isn't isn't the case at the moment. So thank you all for joining online. Please do check out our paper, Money We Trust, and we're tweeting, I should have mentioned at the start, we are tweeting at hashtag Money We Trust today. We will be following up with you with kind of thoughts on how you can continue the discussion. And if you are part of a positive money local group, then please do get in touch if you want potentially Zach to give your local group a talk more about what we've come up with in the paper and some of the issues that we've explored today around implementation, around privacy and anonymity, linking it with UBI, the future of society, democracy, all the big things. So really appreciate everyone's participation and just want to thank our panellists again. And if you haven't yet had lunch, then please go and have lunch and Rowan go and have breakfast and people joining us from overseas too. Thanks, everyone. Thanks. Thanks, everybody.