Money and power: lessons from history for stablecoins and US dollar dominance – speech by Carolyn Wilkins
Given at Queen’s University, Belfast Thank you for inviting me. It is a pleasure to be here at Queen’s University in Belfast to talk about payment innovations, and what they mean for international money and power. I’ll focus on stablecoins. They have some affinities with the local banknotes issued here. And while stablecoins are often presented in very dry terms - blockchains, tokens, settlement layers - the bigger questions are about money and power. Payment means and systems are like electricity grids. When they are working, they are in the background, and when they are not, there can be widespread disruption. And, payment systems can be used by governments to enforce economic sanctions, as we saw after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. They can also be used to monitor financial flows and to project influence. That has made the infrastructure of money and payments an increasingly important part of economic statecraft.