Second session, Victor, dear Victor, I thought it fascinating when you think about, we are not talking about the past. Very often it's the case for people retiring. We talk about the future. So I thought it was a good idea to go into these topics. So we have two sessions now in the late afternoon.

First is my good friend Charles, the future of money and monetary policy. It's not the future of central bankers, but it's the future of money and monetary policy. And Peter, you're going to lead a discussion. So we have 25 minutes, 10 minutes for discussion, and 10 minutes for the Q&A if we succeed.

And then we go for the second round with the Lars and Dier, okay, Charles. You prefer the podium, I understand. Dear Vito, dear friends, it's always been a great pleasure. To be at meetings with Vito, particularly when he quotes an article of mine.

Although it's a great honor to be asked to talk about the future of money and monetary policy, I'm not sure that my credentials are really up to it. A number of caveats. The first is that at my age, the past looms rather larger than the future.

The second is that my forecasting skills are abysmal. In the world that I forecast, Hillary was president and the UK remained within the EU. So you can see how good I am.

And finally, the future is in large part supposed to be dependent on electronic and digital developments. And I'm the last of the pre-electronic age. When I went up to Cambridge as an undergraduate in 1957, there was one computer in the whole

of Cambridge University which took up a room not quite as large as this, but almost, because it consisted of masses of valves and links between all these valves. So you've been warned. You shouldn't necessarily take what I say all that seriously.

I'm going to argue that the underlying trends have been actually quite favorable for central banks and their operational independence, certainly during the 15 years or so of the great moderation between 1992 and 2007, but even to a degree after that.

After all, you were, in a sense, the only game in town. And during this period, interest rates both nominal and real have trended really fairly steadily downwards. As a result, although debt ratios have been generally rising and rising very sharply,

even after 2008, which was supposed to be a crisis of excessive debt, debt service ratios have remained low and steady. This has meant that borrowers, and especially public sector and corporates, have gained. Those already holding assets, the old and the rich, have gained.

The losers have been the savers without assets, the young and the poor, but they have tended on the old and blamed governments, not central banks. So I'll go rather quickly through these, because you know all the stuff about what has happened to interest rates.

And I'd just like to dwell for a second on these charts, and you can get the same charts in other countries, for example, in Germany. And you see the long, massive, exceptional downward trend in interest rates from the early 1980s to now, more or less exactly matching the rise in debt ratios,

particularly the public sector debt ratio, and particularly after 2008, 2009. In the first session, there was a comment about fiscal policy should do more.

Well, the prediction for fiscal policy at a time when aging is getting worse and medical problems, particularly dementia, will take up much more of the financing. There's a question about what we can afford to do.

But meanwhile, the debt service ratios have remained stable. Now, what has actually been the basic cause for this fundamental long-term, massive downward trend in interest rates? And I would actually claim that it has been due to a factor which has not been mentioned at all

in any of the previous presentations, although I think it is probably the most important background factor in the world that we've had over recent years. And that has been the combination of demography, with the baby boom coming through,

and dependency ratios improving grammatically, together with, and probably even more important, the effect of the entry of China and Eastern Europe into the world's trading system, globalization. Now, the effect of that was to more than double the effective labor force in the system

over these over 25 to 30 years. And if you're going to have a huge positive labor shock of this kind, the implications are almost inevitable. You are going to get very weak unskilled labor returns.

John was talking about the downward trend or showed the picture of the downward trend in union density. Now, where did that come from? It's not exogenous. It actually comes from these underlying globalization, outsourcing, immigration, and all that sort of factor.

And equivalent with the weakness of incomes to the unskilled and the increase within country inequality, you've got a massive improvement in the returns to capital,

to management, and to skilled labor. Now, the point that I want to make is that these trends are likely to reverse as demography worsens, notably particularly in China. In China, the labor force is going to turn around very sharply.

China has already reached what is known as the Lewis point, which is where migration from the internal agricultural provinces to the manufacturing coastline has gone about as far as it can go. Now, during the last sort of 20 years or so,

China, although being supposedly a communist country, has very little in the way of the welfare system. It did, however, have a one-child policy. Now, if you think of people who are approaching being grandparents, and you've got one grandchild to look after four grandparents,

what do you think you do? And the answer is, inevitably, you save like crazy. But what we are now facing is a world in which the Chinese grandparents are moving into the retirement and are going to have to spend the money which they built up beforehand. And the increase in the proportion of the old,

the proportion of the old who need to be cared for, is going to be really quite dramatic. So, household savings is likely to drop in most of our countries really pretty sharply. There's a huge question, which I'm not going to answer,

which is probably going to be one of the biggest questions that will need to be met strategically over future decades, is whether the Indian subcontinent and Africa can take over where China will be forced by its demographic factors to leave also.

Now, the deflationary pressures of the last 30 years, which would be the main reason for the decline in both nominal and real interest rates, was not just due to the massive increase in savings, the savings club, but it has also been due to the fact that the investment ratios,

particularly the corporate investment ratios, have been particularly low. And the corporate sectors have moved from generally being a net deficit sector into being a net surplus sector. And there are a number of reasons for that. Perhaps the best known is Bob Gordon's technology.

Incidentally, he's just written another splendid discussion paper in the NBER Working Baby series entitled Why is Economic Growth So Low When Innovation Appears to be So High? And again, you should all be aware of the Bob Gordon hypothesis.

Monopoly, John touched on that again in his presentation when he talked about concentration ratios, and there are quite a lot of people who argue that one of the reasons for the low investment rates

has been the growth in the monopoly. The third one, which my friend Andrew Smithers has been pushing, is its managerial incentives. The managerials have incentivized to try to maximize the, or to ensure the fastest and greatest possible growth of equity values of their company over the short term.

Now, the easiest and least risk way of doing that is to issue debt and use the debt to buy back equity. And that has been done on a massive scale. And so the money has been used very largely of the leveraging to undertake buybacks rather than to undertake

longer-term investment. The final one I put again is my point that I keep on raising, which is the cheap labor. People always talk about you can't raise real wages until productivity increases, the relationship

between real wages and productivity. The point that I would like to emphasize here is it's a two-way causation. If wages are so low, as they have been over the last 20 or 30 years, their profitability is dirt easy. You do not need to invest in order

to maintain your competitiveness and your profitability. Investment is risky. And trying to get people to be more productive takes a lot of time and effort. And if real wages start rising again, then it will be worthwhile for managers

to undertake the investment and the difficult managerial tasks that are involved lie behind raising wages, so raising productivity. However, let us assume that monetary policy is going to be renormalized.

And interest rates have reached the bottom of a long-term downwards trend. How will the politicians react? In effect, the central bankers have been the best friends of ministers of finance and of government leaders, because cutting interest rates benefits them.

What happens when it turns round? Are we going to get more urdigans? What happens when the interest rate increases start reducing the value of the stock market in the USA? What will Mr Trump say? How will the politicians react when interest rates start going up rather than going down?

How are you going to handle corporate insolvencies and the insolvencies of households that have gone in too deep over their head? The fear that many of us have is that central bankers have got themselves and are in what I would describe as a debt trap.

And the debt trap works as follows. In order to deal with the very awful crisis that we had with the GFC, interest rates had to be reduced as far as they could be. When those interest rates were reduced, it led, and it was intended to lead,

to a massive increase in debt. And it has led to a massive increase in debt, with the exception of the banks who have been forced to delever and Germany. Debt ratios virtually everywhere else have increased dramatically. They've increased to this point where if central banks start raising interest rates

either very quickly or very far, given those debt ratios is going to lead to very considerable problems among the debtors. That means they can't raise interest rates far or fast. That means that interest rates will remain so low that there will still be a massive incentive

to go on increasing debt and leverage. So how do we get out of this debt trap? It's not going to be easy. First one is the nicest way of getting out of the debt trap would be to have faster growth. But that's the one thing that demography and the end of China and the rest of it

is going to prevent. Second, we are all going to be Japan. And Japan has had a 1% decline in its workforce for the last, each year for the last decade. And it's had a 1% on average growth in real output. That's a growth in work up ahead of 2% per annum.

Most of the rest of our countries are nowhere near that. And most of the rest of the countries actually have to get as good as Japan if we're not going to find that growth goes down to the 1 to 1.5% per annum that we may fear.

Next possibility is canceling debt. We may think this is way out, but it happened to be in the news today because there are certain of those in Italy who think that it might be possible to get the central bank simply to forgive the debt that they hold of the Italian public sector.

And there are a lot of people who think, after all, we owe the debt to ourselves and it's all within the central banks. Why don't you just cancel it? Since I'm speaking to central bankers, I think they will understand

why you just can't cancel it. Actually, I had a great deal of fun working with a historian of antiquities, Michael Hudson, about why these debt jubilees did work back in sort of 2000 BC when they were used. And the answer is that the debt was mostly, the creditor was almost always the royal family

who lent directly to the sort of the farmers, the individual farmers. And you could simply cancel that. Now, in a world in which the public sector is a major debtor, and the debts are intermediated through financial intermediaries, including central banks, in practice, you can't do that.

But there are going to be a lot of people who are going to push this ahead, not only some of those in Italy. It raises its head frequently. One of the ways which we might reduce the debt overhang is by more inflation. There are already people who talk about good inflation

as compared to bad inflation. One of the suggestions that has been made was the inflation target should be raised. And back when we couldn't hit the inflation target because inflation was too low, I think that was a stupid idea. Because, you know, first of all, you lose your credibility. If you can't hit 2%, why do you raise the rate

up to 4%? And it just doesn't make any kind of sense at all. But over the next decades, the pressure on, the demographic pressure, the pressure from worker power back to John's labor market power,

which will grow, because there are not going to be enough people around. We're going to need every bit of robots and AI we can get our hands on, given what's likely to happen to the workforce and our economies. Well, we could default, but let's hope we don't. The final one that I have, there can be a degree of

rearrangement of debt, extend and pretend. But a much more, I think, desirable one would be to move from debt finance in a massive way to equity finance. That will need a whole series of legal, institutional, and other changes.

But I think it is at least possible. And that leads me on to the question of getting towards money, which is, why do we use debt as the basis of money creation? Because the counterpart assets of central banks and commercial banks are almost entirely debt rather than equity.

Well, one of the key reasons is the informational advantages that debt has. You don't need to know any of the details of the borrower, as long as the payment is regularly made, can be supported by collateral, and there are penalties of various kinds of bankruptcies.

But there are very considerable disadvantages. First one is ethical. And we all know that the, the rulings of virtually all the major religions, the sharing is very much to be preferred to a basis where you just take your interest pound of flesh,

irrespective of whether the borrower is doing well or doing badly. Moreover, limited liability is perhaps the greatest source of moral hazard in the modern economy. Quite why people worry about the moral hazard of deposit insurance and forget the moral hazard of limited liability, I simply don't know.

Because if you have a limited liability, it is to the advantage of the equity holder and the top management who hold massive claims on equity to undertake leverage, because they get all the basis of the upside and they get none of the downside.

I mean, it's a core option, as we all know. So we get excessive corporate debt, we get nonlinearities, and we get crises, all quite largely because of limited liability. And again, I'm interested in the question of whether for certain categories of equity holders,

whether one could go not perhaps to unlimited liability, but to multiple liability again. Could the data explosion and the changes in accountancy practices, and one of the problems with the accountancy practices that we have at the moment, is the auditor's response or response to management.

If you made the auditors responsible to a wider group of claim stakeholders, you might get a very much better picture of how the companies are actually operating. There's an interesting exercise blaming the auditors

for the failure of Carilion, a large public sector, which was again referred to in the FT this morning. And perhaps we could even move towards a shift to equity finance and participation, something in the order of Islamic banking. Now, the need for money is intimately related

to informational problems. If people don't know if X can repay her debt by transferring goods or resources, a claim on X cannot be used to pay for purchases from Y. So what you have to do is replace

the uncertain value claim on X with a claim on Z, who is a stronger debtor and the strongest is the state. Or an asset such as gold, whose value has been guaranteed in coin form by stamping it. Gold in raw form is actually pretty useless

as any kind of money. Those of you who have seen the Charlie Chaplin film, what was he called? It was about the Klondike rush. You will remember Charlie Chaplin coming with his bag of gold dust and trying to buy a lot of a drink.

How do you value a bag of gold dust? I knew how to be a metallurgist. And gold did not become money until he got the stamp of guarantee in coin form from the authority.

So we can think of money as an informational system, but monetary systems can be organized to incorporate more or less information on counterparties to a transaction. There are some forms of money which involve very little information. Currency, Bitcoin,

it's part of the claim of Bitcoin that you don't need to allow anybody else to know that you're using it. But of course there are massive problems with that. First, it's used inevitably for the black-gray economy. And second, at any rate with currency,

it leads to the zero lower bound. You can, on the other hand, have a monetary system with much more information. You can have a centralized ledger system. Now, the problem with that is it can be used for authoritarian purposes, especially by government.

You have to believe that governments not only are, but always will be totally beneficial, upright, non-authoritarian, perfect people for you to want all money to be provided

in a form that the government can actually check and see exactly what you're doing. And the question that I'm going to ask is how much information do we actually want others to have on us, on our financial dealing, and use to their own advantages? Do we want government to know all our financial transactions

because everything passes through their ledger? Would you be happy if you lived in Venezuela or a number of other countries that I shan't name, that the government knows everything about all your financial transactions? Would you be happy with the central bank?

Well, yes, but the central bank is a public sector institution, and with the exception, perhaps, of the ECB, the government can change things. So we can tell the central bank to let it have that information. Tech companies, now that's the sort of thing

that people are talking about. I don't think anything is probably damaged, the idea that tech companies are going to be the new sort of banking financial than the Facebook exercise. Tech companies are there to profit from knowing about you

and selling information on you to advertisers. Do you really want the tech companies to know all about your financial transactions and sell them to, presumably, to the highest bidder? So I think that the answer in that one

is no, and I think that if you rule out tech companies on those sort of grounds, one of the things I think one's got to say about commercial banks, whatever their other failings, they have actually handled our information, my information, your information on what you were doing really pretty well.

It's very, very unusual in my experience to hear claims that, no, they got it wrong. Others, well, there may be. Now, finally, on we go, how about the market for electronic digital money?

What can central banks offer that commercial banks can't? There's a very good BIS report that I assume that you've all read of it. Well, one of the things they can offer, of course, is less credit risks, but it was Marcus in his presentation who talked about microprudent is macro disastrous.

Think about having a central bank digital currency at the same time as you and I and companies hold deposits for various reasons with commercial banks. Slight a sniff of worry, and the flood out of the commercial banking system

into the central bank would become a torrent. And I talk about deleveraging. I can't imagine anything that would deleverage and lead to greater deleveraging. There is a belief, and you may be correct, that in certain economies

that, in fact, lower transaction, that e-money, digital currency issued by the central bank would involve much lower transactions, costs, and currency. And that, I believe, to be the case that the Riksbank makes for introducing, well, being prepared to introduce digital currency in their country.

I don't know that this holds other than in the rather special case of Sweden. Sweden is an extraordinary outlier in terms of currency usage, although a few other Nordic countries are along with it. The area where I think that these kinds of transactions mechanisms

may have an advantage is in cross-currency transactions, which are really quite extraordinarily expensive. If you go into an airport and you try and change your currency from the euro to the dollar at one of these currency exchanges, the margin that they charge is just unbelievable.

So what can commercial banks offer that central banks cannot and will not? And the answer to that one is access to credit, because one thing that a central bank will find it very difficult to do is to choose between borrowers. And again, there is always the fear

that being a public sector institution, that some central banks will be lent on by the authorities to lend to people who are politically in favor and against people who are not. The great advantage of commercial banking is that it gives people alternatives,

places where they can go to access credit. And that's about it. Have I taken up 25 minutes? Peter can have any spare that I haven't done. 30 minutes. Oh, gosh, I'm sorry. Tell us. Got the message from Ricardo.

He said we need the optimists. And was it optimists in the end? In the end, it was a bit better. You can't talk about risk premia without analyzing the views

about the probability of default. They're closely tied together. And one of the worst aspects of DSG models was they abstracted entirely from default. That sounds music to Vitor, huh? Thank you, Peter, to be here.

Okay, please. Yeah, thank you very much for inviting me. It's a great pleasure to be here and it was always a great pleasure to meet you, Vitor, especially in company with my colleagues from our council because together with you, I always felt a little bit more support for my views. So it was especially appreciated by me.

So now I have a trade-off because Charles addressed two different topics. One is why are long-term interest rates so low? Why do we have so much debt? And the other is evolution of money. And I decided now to focus more on the second part. Also, one could say a lot about the questions,

why are interest rates so low? One could ask, are they really so low? So, Barry has made the point that if you take the 1980s for the trend, maybe you're just an outlier. And if you go take more longer-term trends for the United States, you can see interest rates are not that low. And so I'm really wondering, all people take the 1980s and have this trend

and they are really an outlier because we had this excessively high short-term rate. So one can make some questions about this. One can also ask, is it really true that household saving is responsible for the interest rates? Because if you look at the data, household saving has not increased in the last decades.

It has come down. Most people say demographics lead to higher household savings. It's not true. Corporate saving has increased. Household saving has come down. So one has to be very careful with these stories. And with the savings, glad if you look at the net saving rates, not at the cross saving rates, and I would say net saving is a concept we should use,

you can see that net saving rates have come down. So there's a lot one can discuss about this. One can also ask, why do we have so much debt? Why do we have the debt trap? In my view, it's due to the fact that globalization has shifted incomes away from low-income earners

to high-income earners to profits. And this debt has simply created a demand gap. And this demand gap has to be filled somehow. It was filled with private debt until 2007, and now we are filling it with public debt. And in my view, the only way to get out of it is to have higher wages. But of course, it's also difficult to organize. Okay, so these are just some comments

on the first part of the presentation by Charles. So I want to talk a little bit more about the future of money and monetary policy. And Charles has also said a lot about this, and I will comment on your ideas when I come to the relevant points. So the future of money and monetary policy, I think it's quite obvious

it will be shaped by digitization because that's what will drive the future of money. I see four forms where digitization could change money and also the way how we have to deal with it. First, there will be a substitution of cash by electronic money. Second, there might be a substitution

of traditional bank deposits and bank notes by cryptocurrencies. Third, there might be a substitution of bank deposits by universal reserves, which means central bank deposits for everyone. And finally, there might be a substitution of bank lending by peer-to-peer lending on the basis of digital platforms. I think these are the four trends one should look at.

And of course, as I have only 10 minutes, I have to go through it in a quite sketchy way, but I think it might help to organize a little bit the debate on these things. First, substitution of cash by electronic money has so far remained relatively slow. We can see that the share of cash in euro area,

and one has declined, but not tremendously. And that's a very nice study by the ECP, which I can recommend to you by Esseling and Hernandez, which shows that until today, cash is still widely in use for payments. So 79% of all transactions,

of the number of transactions are carried out in cash, and 54% of the value of payments are carried out in cash. So cash is still there. But the question is, will it remain? And again, I can recommend you this study because it says, well, we know that 81% of all the payments are for value below 25 euros.

And now we have this fine technology maybe some of you use already with this contactless technology for payments, and so this could change very rapidly. So I think that's a quite interesting finding. So the fact that it has been slow so far doesn't mean that it can be some kind of disruptive processes. So what would a cashless society imply

for monetary policy and for central banks? Yes, I think you will all know that there would be no more bank runs, but those ones who like market discipline would say maybe there's also less market discipline on the banking system in total because people cannot withdraw their money from the banking system.

And of course, the lower bound would be removed and so central banks could enforce negative interest rates. But I think one has to be very clear about this, even if the use of cash declines to almost zero, which might happen. As long as you do not abolish cash,

these effects will not materialize because when interest rates get negative, people will demand cash. When there is a bank run, people will demand cash. And as long as cash is there, it does not change. So it's not a technical process that will change it. It must be a political decision to give up cash totally. And from my own experience, I can tell you that this is not very likely.

So I've made three years, four or three years ago, I made an interview with Der Spiegel where I said, why don't we abolish cash? And I can tell you, I got such aggressive emails that I was really frightened. And publicly in the Frankfrag, Mein and Seidung said, I will never make this proposal anymore. So you can have your cash in Germany.

No, no, it's really, never in my whole life got such aggressive and frightening emails when I made this proposal. And so I think this is probably not the future that at least for the time being that cash will be politically polished. So the second interesting development is a substitution of bank deposit

and cash by cryptocurrencies. And for all these debates, I very much recommend you the money flower developed by the BIS. So I have not filled it out totally because it would take an hour or so. Maybe it's not so good. But what is important to note, my money flower is different from the BIS money flower

because this red ellipse is a criterion that the BIS does not have. It's convertible versus inconvertible. And like Markus said, you can say inside or outside money. It's quite the same. And I think this is a very decisive criterion which the BIS does not have. I think it really helps to structure things more if you have this convertible versus inconvertible.

And if you look at this money flower, you can see the decisive feature of Bitcoin, at least it is not convertible, it's inconvertible. And so that makes a huge difference because bank deposits, they are convertible. And so Bitcoin is more or less similar to central bank deposits or to cash.

So it's really this inconvertibility. And what does it mean? Well, the inconvertibility means there's absolutely no intrinsic value. And then you can say, well, no problem. Central bank deposits and cash has also no intrinsic value.

But I would say there's a huge difference. First, it's legal tender. I think that prevents a total implosion of the value. And of course, one can say these public monies are managed very well. After all, I will contradict here. So there are central bankers who tried to prevent this implosion. They have a lot of skills

and have academics to help them just to keep it stable and to prevent the implosion. And with these cryptocurrencies, nothing prevents the implosion. Why? Because even if you have one supplier who tries to be responsible in this issue, there are many suppliers.

I think that's the logic of currency competition. So the number of people who can supply non-convertible currencies is countless. Each of you can do it. Tomorrow you can start your own cryptocurrencies. And so the risk is that this currency competition between cryptocurrencies means that investors jump from one cryptocurrency to another, leaving some kind of zombie currencies there.

And so there's no risk that the whole thing will implode. And I think the competition is not this fork chain competition, as you say, because that's within one distributed ledger. And this is only, and I don't think it's competition,

is the question, was it the right or wrong way to process certain transactions, these fork chains? Because you can process it this way or this way, and then there's a decision which is the right way to process it or not. And so in my view, it has nothing to do with competition. It's just, was it the right or the wrong way to book a transaction? And the competition is between the issuers.

And there can always be new issuers. And so the total amount of these cryptocurrencies is unlimited. And so in my view, they definitely do not qualify as a store of value, at least if you want to have a relatively safe store of value. And so from this, I don't see from these cryptocurrencies really a danger

for traditional monies. And it was already said, as for the means of exchange function, cryptocurrencies are very expensive and they take more time than the traditional payment systems.

Okay, so as far as cryptocurrencies are concerned, I'm not very optimistic. Maybe there are some people who like it hard, but on average, I don't think that this will be a major game changer. A game changer could be universal reserves. I think this is a very fascinating topic

which could change everything. Universal reserves, I mean, everybody can open an account with a central bank. And of course, so these universal reserves would be a substitute for cash and bank deposits. And this would be very attractive for people who have large deposits because right now, after the changes with the PRD,

if you have more than 100 euro deposit, you always have the risk of a billion. And how can people who like market discipline say this is wonderful, but if I have a company, can I check my bank? The bank balance sheet, finding out whether it's a safe or not safe bank. It's the same thing like people telling me you have to find out which airline is safe or not.

How can I do it? And so I think the demand would be huge for companies, people having higher deposits for these universal reserves. The implication for central banks, as Benoit has said, there's a risk of digital bank runs,

which would be more negative. The interesting thing is you can have now really operate helicopter money, which would be funny because if everybody has its bank deposits, you just give a certain amount to each central bank deposit and then you have helicopter money. Interestingly, one point that,

so that's what Charles said, why is debt always, why is money always issued as debt with the central bank money, helicopter money, you could just issue it like this. And as far as the zero lower bound is concerned, this would only work if cash is abolished because then again, as long as cash is there,

people will do it. So I think this is a fascinating thing and a nice thing for us is that in Switzerland, they will decide on this form of system in about four weeks. The full gauge, full money or sovereign money system, that's what the Swiss population will decide, which is fascinating

because if we had a discussion on this, we would have very different views. And so the man or the woman on the street, they have now decided we want the full money system or do we have the present money system? It's fascinating, but it would definitely change the role of banks because now they would be restricted in their credit potential.

It doesn't mean that they would be unable to provide loans, but they always would need a full refinancing from central bank. So this is a fascinating thing and I think Sweden, they have done a lot and this is something that would really change the system. So the final form of digitization could change the financial system is peer-to-peer lending,

which I call the Uberization of banking. What do I mean with this? Well, peer-to-peer lending means that bank intermediation is substituted by direct lending and peer-to-peer lending is so to say a capital market for small borrowers because normally it's not the big ones and peer-to-peer lending enables all the smaller guys.

So if you want a mortgage, you can, so to say, get on this peer-to-peer capital market and try to get money. And the interesting thing is that fundamental functions of banks can be provided by these internet platforms. It's the screening and monitoring of borrowers. I think Amazon knows so much about you. Of course, that's the information problem

that Charles raised. Of course, if you go this information problem is with these universal reserves because then the central bank knows everything. Peer-to-peer lending, Amazon knows everything. And one thing I want to mention, Bitcoin provides a lot of information. It's not true that people, that Bitcoin is a system

which is not transparent. You can go on the internet and you can see all the Bitcoin transactions from the very start of the system. It says no system which is so transparent as Bitcoin. Of course, it's not transparent in a way that you see the names, but you see the public key of all these people.

And so you can exactly see for a certain public key whatever he has done, wherever he got his money from. So Bitcoin is an extremely transparent system. From the first Bitcoin ever created until today, everything is documented. If a totalitarian system uses Bitcoin, they know much more about everything than with a normal bank account.

So that's really a misinterpretation that people think Bitcoin provides little information, provides huge information once you know, get out the public key. And I think that's, I'm not a specialist in this, but I think that's not very difficult. So the important thing with peer-to-peer lending is these platforms, if they have a lot of information,

they can provide the banking services, the screening, the monitoring, they find good borrowers for you. And of course, they can also do the diversification of risk. So what these platforms already do, if I give them a certain amount of money, they distribute it to a multitude of borrowers. So the diversification is also done by these platforms.

And so in my view, peer-to-peer lending could be out-compete banks because in my view, it would lead to less regulation than banking because the provider, he does not assume any responsibility. He does not provide any liquidity transformation. And so it could be less regulated than banks.

Of course, it needs to be regulated, but less. And so that could provide them information and could provide them a competitive advantage over banks. And maybe we get this Uberization of banks where suddenly the banks see all these platforms doing their job. And I think in China, a lot of along these lines

can already be seen. For the central bank, the good news is, even if we have the Uberization of banking, the central banks could still control the system in my view, because whenever lending is done on these platforms, it's always a certain bank deposit that is transferred from the lender to the borrower.

So the basis for the lending is always bank deposits. You always need to have a bank deposit in order to lend. And as long as the central bank can control the money market rate, and as long as the money market rate has an impact on the deposit rate, so there is still via this very traditional mechanism of control over this P2P lending.

So let me summarize. The good news for central banks in my view is that digitization does not erode the control of central banks over the financial system, especially because these cryptocurrencies in my view are not a real contender for central banks. There are massive regime changes possible.

You can abolish cash, you can introduce universal reserve, but this would very much strengthen the role of central banks. There are much more direct ways to control the system. So good news, you can all relax. It's not, life is not getting more difficult. But of course, the fundamental change

would be for the banking system, which would see a completely different role if peer-to-peer lending is gaining ground and which would also have to redefine its role if we get these universal reserves. Thank you very much. Thank you, Beth. So yeah, well.