How Do We Define a Currency?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hello, Odlots listeners. I'm Joe Weisenthal.
And I'm
Tracy Alloway.
Tracy, we're doing another live show and it's right here in New York City.
Yeah, this one should be our biggest yet. And we're gonna have a bunch of Odlots favorites and uh do something maybe a little different to some of our previous uh live podcast recordings.
When the guests are revealed, the show is gonna sell out right away. So you should really just go get your ticket right now. It's June twenty sixth, it's at Racket NYC, and you can find a ticket link at Bloomberg dot com slash oddlots or Bloomberg Events dot com slash oddlots live NY.
We hope to see you there.
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Hello and welcome to a special episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.
And I'm Joe Weisenthal.
Joe, this is special. I think this is the first time we've done this.
We're not used to like you know, we like to talk to academics, uh, certainly, but we've rarely ever done anything like in the proper academic setting, in the types of seminars where, you know, academics are on their home turf.
That's right. So we were invited by the Princeton Economic History Workshop to an event called How to Write the Biography of a Currency. I love that topic and that name. And we were invited to moderate a panel specifically on how to define a currency. How do we define what actually is money and what it does and all that good stuff? And we had an amazing panel.
That's right. So we had uh three guests. We talked to Inyaki Aldesoro, an economist at the Bank for International Settlements, Rebecca Spang, a professor at the University of Indiana, Bloomington, and Stefan Ingvas, the former head of the Sveted Riksbank, the central bank of Sweden, from 2006 to 2022. So take a listen to the three of them. So I'm Iakel
Dassoro and I'm a principal economist at the Bank for International Settlements.
Rebecca Spang, Professor of History at Indiana University.
Uh Stefan Ingves, uh former governor of the Swedish Central Bank, the Riksbank.
Should we go down the line? Shall we start with Stefan?
How to write a biography of a currency. Or actually maybe how to define a currency. And let me start by saying that it's a privilege to be here and discuss money, or actually, I think in the course of the day, money's using the plural. It just so happens that forty seven years ago, when I was a visiting graduate student here in Princeton, I took a course in monetary theory and I got hooked. And little did I back then know that with my Finnish background I would end up leading the oldest central bank, the Rixbank, and also became one of its longest serving uh governors. So Quite a journey, and with that as a background, what a privilege to be back. As a practitioner, that's my background when I'm talking about money today, and what I have sort of experienced and concluded over the years.
And let me start by saying that money is a social convention. Money is something about what we have in our heads. And this is also why we have moved. over the centuries from seashells to something on a hard drive or nowadays maybe in the cloud. And then that of course begs the question in terms of changing technologies, what is uh next? Тудей мані зен абстракtion. But we still talk about money in terms of something that we can both see and touch. And it's remarkable that each and every time in my bank, when a new group of politicians were appointed to the general council, they always wanted to see the gold, not talk about the money as such. It was always, can we get to see the gold?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–8:09
2
What is the purpose of the Princeton “How to Write the Biography of a Currency” event?
8:09–15:29
3
How do the panelists introduce themselves and frame the discussion on defining currency?
15:29–18:07
4
What does Stefan Ingves mean when he says money is a social convention?
18:07–24:19
5
How does the panel distinguish between “front‑end” (visible) and “back‑end” (central‑bank) money?
24:19–25:50
6
Why do physical forms of money (gold, cash) still affect people’s perception of value?
25:50–26:36
7
How does currency design reflect national identity and what challenges arise for digital money?
26:36–57:44
8
What are the implications of stablecoins and central‑bank digital currencies for the future monetary system?
57:44–59:51
Speakers
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