After leaving office, many central bank governors and senior central bank policymakers tend to become more vocal in questioning the dominant role of commercial bank money in providing liquidity to households and firms. Consider, for example, Mervyn King’s 2016 book The End of Alchemy or Andy Haldane’s June 2021 speech. Stefan Ingves, until recently Governor of the Riksbank, provides another example. SUERF Policy Brief 1507 summarizes his remarks at a recent SUERF event as follows:

His framing was emphatically political, not just economic: how much oligopoly power should banks have, and should the central bank’s role change merely because technology does? His own view: money is part of how a nation defines itself; the process should speed up; CBDCs will not threaten banks; and without a CBDC we are effectively living with privatized money — “wait until people find out.”

The same policy brief also summarizes remarks by Ulrich Bindseil, another prominent former central banker:

On CBDC remuneration he described an “unholy alliance” of opponents — financial-repression sceptics fearing negative rates, banks fearing competitive positive rates, and central banks willing to compromise to get a CBDC at all. On stablecoins he noted that prohibitions (MiCAR, the Genius Act) are leaky, with roughly $86bn of $290bn already remunerated via lending protocols. His conclusion: in a fully digital, 24/7 world, forcing money’s liquidity premium to swing with short-term rates has no economic rationale and breeds instability; a quantity-constrained CBDC would be a “reversal of values” placing public money under restrictions that private money escapes.