The Economist on CBDC—and SVB

The Economist refers to our work in the `Free Exchange’ section:

But some argue banks would work fine if the public switched their deposits for central-bank digital currencies, so long as the central bank stepped in to replace the lost funding. “The issuance of [such currencies] would simply render the central bank’s implicit lender-of-last-resort guarantee explicit,” wrote Markus Brunnermeier and Dirk Niepelt in 2019. This scenario seems to have partly materialised since the failure of svb, as deposits have fled small banks for money-market funds which can park cash at the Fed, while the Fed makes loans to banks.