Discussions on issuing e-New Zealand Dollar…

After Sweden, Australia, we now have some bit from New Zealand as well. Though, unlike the Sweden and Australia posts which were based on speeches of their central bank chiefs, the NZ one is from Michael Rendell, former  central banker from NZ.

He reflects on this report from the NZ central bank:

I’ve resisted the idea of getting rid of physical currency on both convenience and privacy grounds.  There is, as yet, no real substitute for cash if –  say –  one wants to send a child to the local dairy to buy the newspaper when one is on holiday.   And the ability to conduct entirely innocent transactions without the state being able to know what one is spending one’s money on (or one’s bank for that matter) remains a very attractive ideal.

And yet….and yet…..I wonder if it is a real freedom now to any great extent anyway.   We might not gone all the way –  yet –  to China’s “social credit” scoring system, but you have to be pretty determined to avoid the gaze of a government determined to find out what you’ve been up to.  Some of that is voluntary –  people choose to carry phones around, for example, which locate you –  and some of it isn’t (local councils put up CCTVs, and so do all too many retailers). AML provisions, and know-your-customer rules are ever more pervasive and intrusive.   Sure, using cash enables one to keep from a spouse what one spent on a birthday present, or where it was bought from, but it is a pretty small space left.

And so perhaps it is best for us to think now about serious steps towards phasing out physical currency.  Rogoff himself doesn’t recommend complete abolition at this stage, but rather ceasing to issue, and then over time withdrawing, high denomination notes.   Our largest note isn’t very large at all (NZD100 is only around USD70) but as I noted earlier a huge share of currency in circulation is in the form of $100 bills, even in New Zealand, which few people use for day-to-day transactions that are both lawful in themselves and where there is no intention to evade lawful tax obligations.   But if we were to amend the law to prohibit the Reserve Bank from issuing notes larger than (say) $20 –  and this is a decision that should be made by Parliament or at least an elected minister, not by a single bureaucrat –  we’d still make small cash transaction easy enough (school fair, or the kid sent to buy the newspaper, while greatly increasing the difficulty of a major flight to cash in the next serious recession, and increasing the difficulty of tax evasion and other criminal transactions.

Being a macroeconomist, he looks at how abolition of cash will help central banks implement negative interest rates more forecefully:

Somewhat reluctantly, Rogoff’s book has shifted my perspective on the physical cash issue.    As a macroeconomist, my main interest in this area in recent years has been to do something about the near-zero lower bound on nominal interest rates.  If the Reserve Bank cut interest rates to, say, -5 per cent, it would be attractive for people to pull money out of banks and hold it in physical currency in safe deposit boxes. If that happened to any large extent it would substantially undermine the effectiveness of monetary policy.  The fear that it might happen has already constrained central banks in various countries, and no one has been willing to cut official interest rates below 0.75 per cent (which was also about how far we thought the OCR could be cut when I led some work on the issue at the Reserve Bank some years ago).

Getting rid of physical currency altogether would solve the problem.  If there is no domestic cash, clearly you can’t hold any.  Of course, you could always seek out foreign cash, but the process of doing that would lower our exchange rate –  one of the ways monetary policy works, and thus not a problem.    But one doesn’t need to get rid of cash –  or even just large denomination notes –  to limit that risk.    There are various clever options that have been developed in the literature (effectively involving an exchange rate between physical and electronic cash), and as I’ve noted here previously, one could achieve the same result by simply putting a physical limit on the amount of currency the Reserve Bank issues, and then auctioning it to the banks (if demand surged this would, in effect, introduce an exchange rate or a fee).    It is disconcerting that, as far as we can tell, no country is properly prepared to use options like these in the next recession (which, in itself, risks exacerbating the recession because smart observers will recognise that governments have fewer options than usual) –  no one has (at least openly) done the preparatory legal work, or prepared the ground with the public.  Our Reserve Bank is, as as we can tell, no exception.

Hmm..

Lots of connected issues. As JP Koning reminds us, with this move to digital money, we are looking at the same set of questions which we faced when physical cash was monopolised by governments/central banks.