New Money Review podcast

Many large financial institutions have performed an about-turn in cryptocurrency during the last few years, moving from a position of outright hostility to one of acceptance and even enthusiasm. But there are still a few outspoken sceptics of the now-booming sector. One is Stephen Diehl, a software engineer, chief technical officer of a London-based fintech company called Adjoint and our guest on...

Political revolutions often go hand-in-hand with revolutions in money. Stores of value change, the way we make payments changes, our attitudes to credit change. According to Rebecca Spang, professor of history at Indiana University, the author of a prize-winning 2015 book called ‘Stuff and Money at the time of the French Revolution’ and our interviewee in the latest New Money Review podcast, we ma...

John Kiff, our guest on the latest New Money Review podcast, has always worked in what he calls the ‘edgy’ areas of finance—from over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives to fintech and digital currencies. For 25 years, Kiff worked at Canada’s central bank, where he was in charge of managing the country’s foreign reserve risk. He then worked as a senior financial sector expert at the International Moneta...

According to Dr. Franklin Noll, our digital money future will look a lot like the past: we are heading back to a time when humans had to juggle between many different forms of currency. Noll, our guest on the latest New Money Review podcast, is a historian who specialises in the technology of money—ranging from banknotes to cryptocurrency. “Our recent history, where you only have one kind of curre...

In the latest New Money Review podcast, Paul Gordon, the founder of Coinscrum, the UK’s oldest and most popular cryptocurrency networking and events group, shares his thoughts on the past, present and future of the now-booming digital asset sector. Listen in to the podcast, ‘the future of money in thirty minutes’, to hear a wide-ranging discussion between Paul Gordon and New Money Review editor Pa...

Our guest on the latest New Money Review podcast is Rich Turrin, a US citizen based for a decade in Shanghai, China, where he has had a bird’s eye view of the incredible changes taking place in money and payments. “I’ve lived first-hand through China’s experience of going cashless,” Turrin says in the podcast. “It’s changed from a place where I needed to have a large wad of 100 renminbi notes in m...

Far from being a problem, bitcoin’s electricity consumption is healthy. In fact, making an explicit link between energy and money would help promote sustainable economic development, says Andrew Webber, founder and CEO of Digital Power Optimization (DPO), a US-based start-up and our guest on the latest New Money Review podcast. “Our money and the things we produce with our energy—and the sources o...

It’s time to move away from a global economic model that’s based on the exploitation of individuals’ personal data. So says Diana Finch, managing director of Bristol Pound and our interviewee on the latest New Money Review podcast. “I am extremely anxious about the data economy and about how our personal data is bought and sold by big players whom we’ve often never heard of,” says Finch. And it’s...

  The appearance of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin is part of a much bigger trend—the re-emergence of private money as a competitor to state-issued currencies like the dollar, euro, yen or pound. That’s the central argument of Professor George Selgin, our guest on the latest New Money Review podcast and a specialist in monetary history. Selgin, who is director of the centre for monetary and financi...

Dan Hyde, a partner at UK-based law firm Harrison Clark Rickerbys, specialises in emerging technology. His beat includes artificial intelligence, robotics, the internet of things, quantum computing, cryptocurrency and distributed ledgers. “I really got interested in the regulation of disruptive tech about a decade ago,” he tells New Money Review editor Paul Amery in our latest podcast. “It became...

Nilixa Devlukia, our guest on the latest New Money Review podcast, is a regulatory payments expert who has worked at the top level of European government. After starting her career as an in-house lawyer at UK bank Barclays, she became the head of payments policy at the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), a six-year stint that included a year’s secondment to the Paris-based European Banking Aut...

One has been around for three billion years , the other for only twelve . Yet supporters of the upstart—bitcoin—say it can beat gold as a vehicle for long-term savings. In the latest New Money Review podcast, fund manager Charlie Morris talks about the relative attractions of these two asset classes. Morris, a long-time gold analyst, is chief investment officer at ByteTree Asset Management, a firm...

Humans have an innate ability to deceive . And nowhere is this skill put to more powerful effect than in the world of money. Financial fraud is the specialist subject of Dan Davies, author of ‘ Lying for Money ’ and our guest on the latest New Money Review podcast, ‘the future of money in 30 minutes’. “I had a ring-side seat at some of the biggest frauds there have ever been,” says Davies, a forme...

Economics textbooks tell us humans created money to overcome the drawbacks of barter. If your chicken wasn’t worth someone’s bushel of grain, you had no bread and they had no meat. Anthropologists see things differently. Markets didn’t necessarily come first, they say. In fact, they argue, it’s the money we use that determines the type of society we live in. In the latest New Money Review podcast,...

The increasing adoption of cryptodollars—digital dollar tokens that can be passed hand-to-hand like cash—is a sign of the revolution that’s going on in money, says Nic Carter, our guest on the latest New Money Review podcast. Carter, a former cryptoasset analyst at fund giant Fidelity, is a venture capitalist and cofounder of blockchain data firm Coinmetrics. Cryptodollars—Carter’s preferred name...

This year’s coronavirus pandemic has accelerated plans for the introduction of central bank digital currencies (CBDC)—a mobile-ready replacement for our state-issued banknotes and coins. But many of the most important design aspects of CBDC are still unanswered . In the latest episode of the New Money Review podcast , Aleksi Grym, head of digitalisation at the Bank of Finland , shares a central ba...

Facebook’s ‘Libra’ digital currency project combined incompetence and arrogance and was bound to fail, says David Gerard, our guest on the latest New Money Review podcast. Gerard, a technology expert and journalist, is the author of a new book, called ‘ Libra Shrugged ’, on what he sees as Facebook’s attempts to take over the world’s money. In June last year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced...

If we don’t fix our flawed digital identity infrastructure, says Bianca Lopes, our guest on the latest New Money Review podcast , we can expect repeat after repeat of crises like Covid-19. Digital ID is how we recognise people and things online. It’s how we know who we’re dealing with. ID systems also determine our money systems . To understand digital identity, we need to start by remembering tha...

The global cryptoasset market is growing fast, but it’s one of the most opaque areas of finance. Now the world’s academic institutions are gearing up to map the sector. The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF), part of the university’s Judge Business School, has established itself as one of the main cryptoasset research hubs. In the latest New Money Review podcast , Paul Amery, editor o...

When looking at financial markets, we should pay more attention to the physical stuff—the cables, boxes, chips and code—without which those markets wouldn’t exist. That’s because the money infrastructure has a huge impact on the way society and politics function . In the words of John Handel, our interviewee on the latest New Money Review podcast , “technical details are never just technical detai...

Bitcoin is a live, multi-billion-dollar experiment involving tens of millions of willing participants. It’s also a case study in game theory, the field of science that studies the interactions between decision makers whose choices affect each other. These are the central arguments of Hasu, the pseudonymous German cryptocurrency researcher who is our guest on the latest episode of the New Money Rev...

More and more of us communicate using digital platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok. And soon, social media will become indistinguishable from money, says Lana Swartz, our interviewee in the latest New Money Review podcast. This is because money is best understood as a messaging system, says Swartz, an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia an...

A new European data market will help break the grip of large digital platforms like Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon, says Michael Salmony, our guest on the latest New Money Review podcast. As money becomes increasingly digital, data has also become money. Starting in Europe, where regulators have pushed for competition in banking and faster, digital payments, financial technology (‘fintech’) fi...

Big tech firms like Google, Facebook, Apple, Alibaba and Tencent want our payments data. Are we right to share it with them? “The entry of BigTechs into the provision of payment services raises serious market power and data privacy issues,” Agustín Carstens, general manager at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS),  said recently . Although the tech firms have often only been in business fo...

We can all see the short-term impacts of the coronavirus pandemic: fear, lockdowns, falls in output, restrictions on travel, frictions in supply chains, growing social tension and unprecedented government intervention. But will there be big changes over the longer term? If previous pandemics are anything to go by, there could be some quite dramatic shifts in economic relations, working practices a...