All-time high: The Singapore dollar surged to a new high against the ringgit two days ago. - Thomas Yong/The Star
JOHOR BARU: Many Malaysians working across the Causeway are planning holidays and home renovations as the Singapore dollar surged to a new high against the ringgit.
Jason Wong, 27, said he felt that his decision to cross the border daily to work was the right one as he now has more cash in hand due to the strong currency exchange rate of S$1 to RM3.50.
“One by one, many of my peers and relatives had gone to Singapore for work, which led to my decision to do the same. I started working there in March after finding it difficult to get a stable job in Johor Baru.“I start my commute at around 6am and reach home after 8pm every day. It is tiring but the exchange rate makes it worthwhile. I can give more money to my elderly parents now that I have extra disposable income,” he told The Star.
Wong added that he was also saving to take his parents on a holiday for the first time next year.
The Singapore dollar shot to a new high of 3.5086 against the ringgit on Tuesday morning.
Ardy Zainuddin, 33, who works as a purchasing executive in Singapore, was happy to have extra money to renovate his new home here.
“My wife and I have just got the keys to our new house and with a second baby on the way, anything extra is welcome,” said Ardy, who has been commuting across the border for work for the past five years.
However, he hopes that the Malaysian government would come up with policies to strengthen the ringgit.
“The strong Singapore-Malaysia currency exchange is good for those working across the border, but I am concerned that the weakening ringgit will make things more expensive for other Malaysians.
“My relatives living in Johor and Melaka have been complaining that it is costly to eat out or even cook at home. They are also hesitant to travel overseas because of the weak ringgit,” he added.
Checks by The Star at several popular money changers in the city found that they were well-stocked with the ringgit to cater to the expected higher demand.
A money changer who only wanted to be known as Wan said, “This is the first time I have seen the ringgit dip so low against the Singapore dollar in my 10 years of being in the industry.
When the exchange rate was S$1 to RM3.41 in May, our business rose by about 30% as those working across the border as well as Singaporeans rushed to buy the ringgit in large quantities,” she said.
GOVERNMENT-backed coins and private cryptocurrencies will coexist for a while, despite rising regulatory walls set by the government to counter virtual coins, experts at a global webinar session said Thursday.
Noting that cryptocurrencies and digital currencies by governments are “two different animals,” they will coexist for now partly because current cryptocurrencies are not actually solving payment problems.
“How many of them (cryptocurrencies) are solving actual payment problem? Most of them are speculative and used as a means of storage,” said Nelson Chow, chief fintech officer of the Fintech Facilitation Office at the Hong Kong Monetary Authority.
Chow said that some central bank digital currency, or CBDC, projects such as Multiple CBDC Bridge have the potential to solve decades-old problems for cross-border transactions. Multiple CBDC Bridge is a wholesale CBDC co-creation project between the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, Bank of Thailand, the People‘s Bank of China and the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates.
Under the current regulatory environment, John Kiffmeiste, a former senior financial sector expert at the International Monetary Fund, said that it is unlikely that the emergence of CBDC projects, now numbering nearly 60 according to Kiffmeiste’s data, would make crypto assets obsolete.
“CBDC has to operate within confines of tax regulations, anti-money laundering, KYC (know-your-customer) and so many other regulations whereas cryptocurrencies don’t operate in that environment,” the economist added.
Speakers at the webinar co-hosted by The Investor, a tech media outlet run by The Korea Herald, Malaysia’s The Star and the Asia News Network.
But, Kiffmeiste pointed out that as the regulatory and legislative walls are closing in on crypto assets, they will come under the same rules that other types of conventional currencies operate under. “In that case, that levels the playing field. Perhaps in that new world, CBDCs and cryptocurrencies coexist, but crypto assets become redundant as at least payment medium.”
Andrew Sheng, one of Asia’s top economists, stressed that authorities should understand the complex contextual backgrounds that have brought about the rising interest in CBDCs and cryptocurrencies.
Noting that the value of the cryptocurrency market has reached US$1.2tril – half the value of the official gold reserves – Sheng said cryptocurrencies had grown outside of the purview of public control. “This was the big lesson of the Covid-19, private cyber currencies will be with us whether you like it or not,” Sheng said.
The tug-of-war between regulators and cryptocurrencies is most apparent in the US in the area of stablecoins like USD Coin, a digital equivalent of the US dollar.
The US-proposed Stable Act will bring USD stablecoin issuers into conventional regulatory perimeters.
Kevin Werbach, a professor of legal studies and business ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, said that the cryptocurrency industry does not have to be allergic to regulations.
“There is always a notion that we have to choose either innovation or regulation. And I think it’s a false dichotomy. For new technological markets to mature and develop, they need to be trusted. They need to get to the point where ordinary people around the world are willing to participate in these activities at scale, and regulations are an important part of that,” Werbach said.
As to the increasing public controls on crypto assets, speakers called for regulations compatible with the emerging cryptocurrency industry. They shared a similar view that cryptocurrency companies and regulators must work together on bringing the industry into the system.
“Since innovation is always ahead of regulation, it is inevitable for regulators to rely on us when drafting policies. It is crucial to reshape their ‘legacy mindset’ and make them understand the nature and dynamics of cryptocurrency,” said Marcus Lim, CEO and co-founder of Zipmex.
They were speaking at a webinar co-hosted by The Investor, a tech media outlet run by The Korea Herald, Malaysia’s The Star and the Asia News Network entitled “The rise of Govcoins & What’s next for crypto”. Speakers at the July 22 virtual seminar included a group of experts in the US, Europe and Asia who are navigating the current situation surrounding the development of central bank digital currencies and challenges posed by and to cryptocurrencies.
Experts said that central bank digital currencies have a huge potential to solve many issues, ranging from decades-old problems involving cross-border transactions to digital transformation.
Kiffmeiste noted that almost 60 jurisdictions are currently exploring retail CBDCs, with countries like the Bahamas and China at the forefront, but they are divided in their motivations for issuing the CBDCs. For instance, emerging economies consider CBDCs as a way to spur financial digitalisation, while advanced economics mull digital currency as part of financial stability and to improve monetary policies. — The Korea Herald/Asia News Network
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Why the global financial landscape is undergoing a seismic shift
Regulators
are struggling to keep up with fintech’s rapid growth and the impact of
big data, even as intense geopolitical rivalries mean accidents could
easily escalate into crises
AUGUST 15, 2021 marks the 50th anniversary of United States President Richard Nixon delinking the US dollar from gold. Instead of a crisis, the ensuing half century marked the pre-eminence of the US financial system to global dominance.
In 2017, US Treasury Secretary Mnuchin commissioned four major studies on the US financial system that reviewed its efficiency, resilience, innovation and regulation. These surveys highlighted the US dominance in all four areas of banking, capital markets, asset management and financial technology.
To quote the reports proclaimed : “The US banking system is the strongest in the world”... “The US capital markets are the largest, deepest, and most vibrant in the world..(that) include the US$29 trillion (RM119 trillion) equity market, the US$14 trillion (RM57.5 trillion) market for US Treasury securities, the US$8.5 trillion (RM35 trillion) corporate bond market, and US$200 trillion (notional amount or RM820 trillion) derivatives market.”
According to the reports,“Nine of the top 10 largest global asset managers are headquartered in the United States.” In the area of financial technology, “US firms accounted for nearly half of the US$117bil (RM480bil) in cumulative global investments from 2010 to 2017.”
Under-pinning the US financial system’s success is of course the US dollar’s dominant currency pricing role. The dollar accounted for 88% in paired foreign exchange currency trading in 2019 and 59% of official foreign exchange holdings in 2020. It is widely used in trade invoicing in manufacturing but less so in services trade. As a major International Monetary Fund study has shown, this pricing role impacts on emerging market economy (EME) exchange rate policies, as their devaluation would have only limited positive impact on their exports, but amplifies their import contraction.
Furthermore, because EME debt is largely denominated in dollars, any dollar appreciation would have an overall contractionary impact on EME liquidity and growth. This is why US interest rate increases are feared not just by the US Treasury, but also almost all EME economies.
Several factors combined to create the recent seismic shift in the global financial landscape.
First, financial technology has eroded the dominant share of the banking system. The Financial Stability Board (FSB) 2020 report on non-bank financial institutions (NBFI) revealed that as of end-2019, they accounted for 49.5% of global financial assets of $404 trillion, compared with 38.5% for the banks. Indeed, total NBFI lending now exceed bank lending, partly because of tighter bank regulations and higher bank capital and liquidity costs.
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Second, financial technology has enabled new arrivals in the financial sector comprising not new fintech startups, but also Big Tech platforms that are using Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, apps and their dominance of cloud computing to provide more convenient, speedy and customer-oriented finance for individuals and businesses. This month, a major BIS study on the implications of fintech and digitisation on financial market structure showed how Big Tech has muscled into traditional banking services, especially in payment services, lending and even asset management.
Taking the growth of NBFIs and Big Tech together, the traditional bank regulators and supervisors find that they regulate less and less of the financial system, but central banks are responsible for overall financial stability. Regulating the complex financial eco-system is like trying to tie down a huge elephant by a bunch of specialists each trapped in their own silos. And politically, no one wants to give a super-regulator power to rule them all.
Third, the financial landscape entered new minefields because of intense geopolitical rivalry. If global supply chains are going to be decoupled by different standards, and we arrive at a Splinternet of different technology standards, how should finance respond? As the US applies pressure on Chinese companies and individuals through new sanctions and legislation, financial institutions and companies struggle to deal with shifting goal posts and game changes.
A woman and a child walk past the People’s Bank of China building in
Beijing on March 4. China’s central bank, like others around the world,
is grappling with how to regulate the fintech industry. Photo: Bloomberg
The Ant Finance and Didi events are more a reflection of regulatory concerns whether large domestic Big Data platforms should be subject to foreign legislation with national security implications. Will India, for example, continue to allow foreign Big Tech to own all their client data?
Fourth, the regulatory trend towards “open financial data” in which banks would open up their client databases to allow new players to access customer accounts and data will provide new products and services. But this means also severe concerns on client privacy and data security. No country has yet figured out how to manage competition fairly in the fintech world when five firms (Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM, Oracle) dominate 70% of cloud-related infrastructure services.
Fifth, blockchain technology, cyber-currencies and central bank digital currencies are now increasingly coming on-stream, making possible payments and transactions that rely less on official currencies and also outside the purview of regulation. In short, the official regulators are responsible for system stability, but may not have access to what is really going on in blockchain space. That is an accident waiting to happen.
https://youtu.be/oukokqq1s_o
In addition to more than 600,000 COVID-19 deaths, growth in the US is based on a strong stimulus package of excessive money-printing. China's growth is more solid: Editor-in-Chief Hu Xijin
All these suggest that the global financial system has grown faster, more complex and entangled than any single nation to manage on its own. If the largest financial systems are caught in increasingly acrimonious geopolitical rivalry, what are the risks of financial accidents that can easily escalate to financial crises? In the 2008 global financial crisis, the G20 stood together to execute a whole range of responses. This time round, there is no unity as the US continues to apply financial sanctions against her enemies and rivals, amounting to 4,283 cases as of January 2021, of which 246 and eight respectively were against Chinese and Hong Kong entities.
The bubble in fintech valuation that has fueled rising stock markets and investments in technology is fundamentally driven by central bank loose monetary policy. Central bank assets have grown faster on an average of 8.4% per annum between 2013-2018, than banks (3.8%) or NBFIs (5.9%) to reach 7.5% of global financial assets. Does this mean that financial markets can assume that central banks will continue to underwrite their prosperity?
As inflation rears its head, central banks will have to reverse their loose monetary stance, thus putting the global financial system under stress. The global financial system has structural and regulatory cracks, but they can only be fixed by having some political understanding amongst the big players. Without this, expect a messy outcome.
Andrew Sheng comments on global affairs from an Asian perspective. The views expressed here are his own.
Don’t be surprised if by the end of the
current decade, the e-wallet on your smartphone resembles a
multicurrency account. But instead of dealing with commercial banks, you
may be a customer of central banks. Several of them, in fact
THE idea that much of today’s cash use will shift to digital tokens is neither faddish nor outlandish, as long as you don’t start equating the future of money with bitcoin.
Sure, governments will borrow some elements of the distributed ledger technology behind private cryptocurrencies, but they will very much want to retain control of what circulates as money in their economies. Some will succeed.
Don’t be surprised if by the end of the current decade, the e-wallet on your smartphone resembles a multicurrency account. But instead of dealing with commercial banks, you may be a customer of central banks. Several of them, in fact.
Sound far-fetched? Apart from the Bahamian Sand Dollar, there’s no official online currency in mass circulation yet.
Still, digital yuan pilots are gathering pace as Beijing aims for a possible rollout coinciding with the 2022 Winter Olympics.
Sweden may be the next major nation to follow suit. The Bank of Japan has no immediate plans, but it acknowledges the possibility “of a surge in public demand” for official digital cash going forward.
Even in the US, which is only toying with the concept, digital payment vehicles that don’t rely on traditional bank accounts can increase financial inclusion among cash users, according to a September 2020 paper by Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta president Raphael Bostic and others. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says a digital dollar is “absolutely worth looking at”.
Once China and the US are both in the fray, virtual money is bound to become a tool for wielding global influence by carving up the world into new currency blocs. That’s because any token will have dual uses outsidethe issuing nation’s borders.
The dollar or yuan that pops up in a phone wallet in Indonesia or India – backed by a solemn promise of taxpayers in the US or China – could be used for buying goods, services or assets internationally.
Just as easily, this new money can end up replacing domestic currency in people’s daily lives. Although this is no different from traditional dollarisation that occurs in countries plagued by inflation and exchange rate volatility, the convenience and accessibility of central bank-issued digital cash could enable “substitution at a faster pace and larger scale,” according to Tao Zhang, a deputy managing director at the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
To stay in control of monetary policy, authorities in smaller economies will need their tokens to be attractive in domestic situations.
The goal for bigger nations may be different: China and the US may want to offer add-ons that make the E-CNY or the Fedcoin the preferred choice for foreigners in settling international claims.
An efficient future will be one in which all central banks’ digital currencies are interoperable. In other words, they’ll interact with one another – and with private-sector alternatives including bitcoin, says Sky Guo, the chief executive of Cypherium.
The US enterprise blockchain startup is a member of the Fed’s Faster Payments Council and of the digital monetary institute of the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum, or OMFIF, a central banking think tank.
Guo is working on the challenges that will arise when sovereign money gets digitised:
How to process high volumes of transactions quickly, cheaply, and with a strong consensus among registries updated automatically across a network? How to give people a sense of privacy in everyday payments, even after the anonymity of cash is lost?
Central banks will have to make choices. Not all smartphones can run advanced virtual machines, effortlessly executing the software code for automated contracts.
Choose the wrong technology, and the unbanked population might once again get excluded. Ditto for overseas remittances, a US$124 trillion-a-year opportunity for tokens to replace an expensive network of correspondent banks moving money by exchanging SWIFT messages.
But it won’t work for small transfers if the computing power to verify transactions in a decentralised network costs too much. The ideal technology doesn’t necessarily have to be a blockchain, but it should be something “lightweight, flexible and capable of working with legacy systems,” Guo says. Above all, the distributed ledger must be transparent.
There will be other obstacles. “A driving force for lobbying against central bank digital currencies has been established among payment processing giants like Paypal, Venmo and Stripe,” Guo tells me. “Fedcoin won’t need these intermediaries to send funds.
As these companies fall victim to innovation, it’ll be interesting to see how they try to protect themselves from disruption.”
Paypal Holdings Inc, which owns the person-to-person service Venmo, contests Guo’s assertion as false. Supporting and distributing central bank digital currencies is part of Paypal’s vision of an inclusive future, CEO Dan Schulman told investors last month.
Former Bank of England governor Mike Carney, who has proposed an alternative to the dollar through a network of central bank digital currencies, recently joined the board of Stripe Inc.
One way to resolve the tension may be to co-opt the private sector. As IMF economists Tobias Adrian and Tommaso ManciniGriffoli have argued, an official virtual currency could be like Apple’s IOS operating system, with commercial banks and e-money providers running apps on top of it.
The Apple Health app may be fine for a lay user; an athlete will want something more sophisticated. Money could go the same way.
Countries will also have to cooperate with one another. Take M-CBDC Bridge. The project for 24/7 cross-border remittances using central bank digital currencies was begun by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and the Bank of Thailand, but has now been joined by the central bank of the United Arab Emirates and the People’s Bank of China. ─ Bloomberg
-- China's central bank on the brink of launching a digital currency. How will this revolutionize the monetary landscape in China and abroad?
-- and, we meet a scholar whose calling revolves around friendly China-US ties. How can people on both sides maintain the relationship.
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Made in China" used to be a synonym for cheap products, but all that has changed. China has made huge progress in innovation and technology. From the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer, the fastest in the world, and the 500-meter-wide radio telescope in southwest China's Guizhou Province, to the development of lithium battery and 3D-printed blood vessels made from stem cells and renewable energy technologies, Chinese innovations are making a name for themselves.
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China's central bank speeds up digital currency drive
Private-sector players likely to participate in project
Photo: VCG
With internet technologies advancing and cryptocurrencies flourishing amid a broad digital transformation, individual countries are starting to issue legal tender in digital form, and the People's Bank of China (PBC), the country's central bank, is also accelerating its pace in this area.
As of Sunday, the PBC had applied for 74 patents involved with digital currencies to the National Intellectual Property Administration, according to a report by the Economic Information Daily on Monday.
The PBC said it will speed up the development of legal digital currency on Friday.
Wang Xin, director of the PBC Research Bureau, said in July that the authority is organizing market-oriented institutions to jointly research and develop a central bank digital currency and the program has been approved by the State Council, China's Cabinet.
"China is beefing up efforts in digital currency innovation, a trend driven by emerging technologies that is spreading worldwide," said Huang Zhen, a professor at the Central University of Finance and Economics.
Rather than letting cryptocurrencies challenge the position of sovereign currencies, it is wiser for countries to roll out their own digital currencies, Huang told the Global Times on Monday.
Chinese authorities ordered a ban on initial coin offerings in 2017 and stopped direct bitcoin-yuan trading as the rapidly expanding market spawned concerns over financial risks.
The PBC, one of the earliest central banks in the world to start the process of digital currency innovation, launched its program in 2014 during the tenure of former governor Zhou Xiaochuan. In 2017, the PBC established a research institution for the digital currency.
"China is among the leading countries in terms of its research into a government-backed currency," said Huang.
Favorable conditions
The basic conditions favorable for China's implementation of a digital currency include comprehensive and fast networks, broad digitalization in the financial sector, and advanced financial technologies - particularly blockchain, a digital, public ledger that records online transactions, according to Huang.
In recent years, Chinese internet companies have made huge achievements in the mobile payment and e-commerce sectors, helping create a digital economy of more than 30 trillion yuan ($4.36 trillion), according to media reports.
In June, US social media giant Facebook released an official white paper for its cryptocurrency project Libra, a blockchain-powered stablecoin expected to arrive in 2020.
The move stepped up the global race for digital currencies, with China's central bank paying close attention.
The central bank is closely working with market participants on creating a central bank digital currency, PBC official Wang said.
"China's private market players have accumulated some experience in the digital currency sector. Their participation in the government's work will effectively help promote the project," Cao Yin, an expert in the blockchain sector, told the Global Times on Monday.
It is likely that the sovereign digital currency will be issued within two or three years at the soonest, although the authority tends to take a prudent attitude, Cao said.
Once it is broadly implemented, the new currency will have a big impact on Alibaba's Alipay and Tencent's WeChat Pay, the two dominant mobile digital payment tools in China, as the PBC's digital currency is featured by decentralization, unlike the former two.
Challenges ahead
There are still some bumps on the road to promoting the digital currency.
"For this new kind of currency, its nature actually poses challenges to existing policies in such aspects as foreign exchange control, so it takes time to balance benefits with potential risks," said Cao.
A flexible and open mechanism is needed by the PBC to attract more talent, he added.
Digital currencies can help strengthen regulation as transaction data can be tracked and analyzed, including illegal money laundering, according to Huang. But laws and rules should be formulated in a timely fashion to protect individual information. "Safety is the biggest issue," he added.
"Use of the digital currency to better serve the real economy also requires policy guidance," said Huang.
Newspaper headline: PBC accelerates digital currency drive.
in China to launch a national digitalcurrency, following the central government's plan to work...
Source: Global Times | Author: Li Xuanmin and Shen Weiduo in Shenzhen | Column: Economy
: 3pxFile photo: ICpResearch into a national digitalcurrency, as mentioned in a central government...
Source: Global Times | Author: Zhang Hongpei | Column: Economy
