© Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
Federal Reserve Board of Governors member Lael Brainard
though it hasn't yet committed to issuance that would require a formal policy process involving the government and other stakeholders, Governor Lael Brainard said Thursday.
In addition to the Fed's own internal work,
research teams from the Boston Fed and Massachusetts Institute of Technology are engaged in a "multi-year effort to build and test a hypothetical digital currency oriented to central bank uses," she said.
"Lessons from this collaboration will be published, and any codebase that is developed through this effort will be offered as open-source software for anyone to use for experimentation," Brainard said, according to the
text of her remarks prepared for delivery to a virtual technology event.
James Cunha, the senior vice president at the Boston Fed overseeing the project, said the first stage will be
technologists from the reserve bank and MIT working together to build "an engine and the software that can meet the needs" of a digital currency for a country the size of the U.S. There are multiple challenges, Cunha explained, from the sheer volume of transactions to security and privacy.
Comment: As shown by multiple studies, smokers are significantly under-represented in serious Covid-19 cases, so the obvious conclusion is to encourage smoking, not ban it. But we're not ruled by people who can think straight.