Tucker: Five years is too long for digital euro debate

The European Central Bank is dragging its feet with its five-year timeline for its decision on the digital euro, according to Paul Tucker, former deputy governor of the Bank of England. The ECB launched a two-year investigation phase in July 2021. Once completed, it will decide on whether or not to develop a digital euro, targeting deployment around 2026.

Tucker said in an OMFIF keynote speech on 18 November: ‘These big questions don’t take five years. They take the right people having a handful of meetings over a few months, not five years.’

Nevertheless, he praised the ECB’s decision to investigate the possibility of introducing a digital euro, saying that there ‘must be no technical or policy obstacles to introducing a central bank digital currency if that is the prudent thing to do’.

Although Tucker believes these decisions can be made quickly, he did not diminish the scale or importance of the task facing policy-makers. The stakes, he pointed out, are particularly high for the US, since its geopolitical hegemony depends, in part, upon the dollar’s continued dominance. Losing that could, Tucker believes, compromise the west’s US-centric defence strategy. And with China far ahead with its own retail CBDC trials, the rest of the world has a great deal of catching up to do.

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Πηγή: omfif.org