Episode
S9 Ep30: Redefining the monetary standard
- Podcast
- VoxTalks Economics
- Published
- May 22, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1584
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://audioboom.com/posts/8906763
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/voxtalks-economics-504930/episodes/s9-ep30-redefining-the-monetary-standard/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/voxtalks-economics-504930/s9-ep30-redefining-the-monetary-standard.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
The fiat money system has survived the Great Inflation, the global financial crisis, and a pandemic. But can it survive digital currencies? Bitcoin and the blockchain solved a genuine problem in computer science: how to stop people spending the same money twice. Forty years of successful inflation control means central bank money is stable; that is the stability in stablecoins, attempting to solve the volatility problem. What's next? What if the unit of account itself were indexed to consumer prices? Digitalisation might finally make that approach viable at scale. Price stability, by design. Will we still need cash? Maybe not now, But if you never use it, it may not be there if the blackout comes. The research behind this episode: Stracca, Livio. 2025. Redefining the Monetary Standard in the Digital Age: Digital Innovations and the Future of Monetary Policy. Springer Nature. To cite this episode: Phillips, Tim, and Livio Stracca. 2026. "Redefining the monetary standard." VoxTalks Economics (podcast). Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE. About the guest Livio Stracca is Deputy Director General for International and European Relations at the European Central Bank, where he has worked for more than two decades. His research spans monetary economics, international finance, and the implications of digitalisation for central banking, with extensive work on exchange rates, capital flows, and the architecture of the international monetary system. Research cited in this episode The double-spend problem. The fundamental challenge in any decentralised digital payment system: how to prevent a participant from spending the same unit of money twice when there is no trusted central authority to verify transactions. Bitco…