That would be a change with profound economic consequences. Central Bank Digital Currencies  The rapid decline of cash, the rapidly changing nature of payments and, potentially, of the assets used to make payments, raise the question of whether central banks should leverage new technologies to provide new electronic forms of central bank money – the creation of Central Bank-issued Digital Currencies (CBDC) – as a complement to existing physical banknotes? A CBDC could ensure that the public has continued access to a risk-free form of money issued by the central bank. It could also potentially be designed in a way that contributes to a more resilient, innovative and competitive payments system for UK households and businesses. But, while CBDC poses a number of opportunities, it also raises challenges for the way in which we maintain monetary and financial stability. The potential benefits to financial stability could include more access to and utility of central bank money, including greater public access to a risk free asset enhancing a resilient payments infrastructure. There could also be positive benefits to monetary policy, such as more direct control of the monetary transmission mechanism. But for all the opportunities, there are also some significant potential implications.
The state, as the ultimate backstop, was then forced to step in to bail out a number of banks, not just to ensure the means of providing credit in the economy but also, crucially, to back up the claims that these banks had issued as money to a large part of the population. Banks responsible for close to half of the UK’s personal current accounts6, holding some £ were rescued by the state.7  There has as a result been a major programme to tighten the prudential controls on deposit taking banks and to increase the size of the deposit guarantee that is paid for by the industry, which has reinforced further the reliability of commercial bank money and shifted the burden of backstopping that reliability from the state towards the private sector. Looking to the future  The shift towards transacting in private commercial bank money has accelerated greatly in recent years, driven by technology and by changes in the way we live. It is not possible to transact in central bank money over the internet or by using one’s smartphone. As a result, cash use is declining fast in the UK. In 2008,  4  The 1844 Bank Charter Act gave the Bank of England a monopoly on the issuance of Bank notes in England and Wales. It followed a number of failures of ‘country banks’, who had issued their own notes.