Ex-Fed official says central banks should be ‘very concerned’ about Libra-like cryptocurrencies
Simon Potter, the former executive vice-president and head of the markets group at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, is the latest veteran to express concerns over Facebook’s Libra-like cryptocurrencies.
“Central banks should be very concerned about the private sector doing this,” Potter said at an event hosted by the Peterson Institute for International Economics in New York on Wednesday, as reported by Bloomberg.
Potter believes that a country’s control of its currency “is designed to protect people and get good outcomes,” while the private sector is “much more interested in selling products.”
Last month, Mark Carney, the current governor of the Bank of England, offered a proposal that would replace the U.S. dollar with a digital currency similar to Facebook's Libra. Responding to that proposal, Potter said:
“I see no argument that makes sense to have something that complicated out there when you have large, liquid capital markets in the U.S."
Potter further said that Carney failed to take into account how the U.S. dollar’s status has benefited other countries. “Not having one currency that you can basically price things and have a deep market in, that makes life much harder for the global economy," Potter concluded.
