29  This was not the first time Norwegian authorities established a silver standard. In accordance with the regulation of King Haakon V of 1314, silver was to have a standard of purity of 13 ½ lødig, which is equivalent to .844 silver according to the modern method for calculating fineness (Halén, Widar (2009): “Arvesølvet og Peter Wessel Zapffes sølvgave” [The family silver and Peter Wessel Zapffe’s gift of silver]. Lecture at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. 30  The speciedaler became legal tender shortly after Norges Bank was established. 31  Adam Posen, a former member of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee, compares central banks to pharmacists: “[W]ith a limited medicine cabinet, and restricted by law from exceeding certain bounds, both must make sense of scrawled prescriptions from differing specialists, decide what side effects to take into account, and then ultimately dispense the proper dosage of medicine to their customers, all without knowing or controlling everything else the patient is consuming.” See Foreign Affairs: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/ articles/139465/adam-s-posen/the-myth-of-the-omnipotent-central-banker. 32  Karl Bomhoff was appointed as the first Governor of Norges Bank in 1893. When Norges Bank’s head office was moved to Oslo, Bomhoff also moved to the head office, where there was more extensive expertise than earlier. This facilitated Norges Bank’s role as bankers’ bank. The theme of my speech is institutions. It might seem paradoxical to refer to physical persons, such as Bomhoff, and not decision-making bodies.
As far as the decline of cash is concerned, the immediate response is to make sure cash will remain available to any and all that want to use it. The Bank has made clear that we will continue  Page 5  to produce it and the Government is taking powers under the Financial Services and Markets Bill to give the Bank of England and FCA new powers to ensure the future effectiveness, resilience, and sustainability of the cash ecosystem[6]. However, we cannot ignore the fact that the safest form of money, ‘public’ money, that it is to say money issued by the state for general use, will become increasingly less useful and useable and of shrinking relevance to a large part of the population. Nor can we ignore the likelihood that we will see the emergence of new forms of money, offering new possibilities and issued by new as well as established players. This raises, particularly for the Bank of England, the question of how we can continue to ensure that all of the types of money used in the UK are denominated in Sterling, remain safe and that each is interchangeable on demand and to all of the other types of money without loss of value, including publicly issued, Bank of England money. We ensure trust in money at present by regulation of the commercial banks that issue money, by requiring banks to settle amongst themselves in Bank of England money (i.e.