Lagarde Suggests ECB Has To Set Objectives For Digital Currencies

Lagarde suggests that the European Central Bank will have to determine objectives for the cryptocurrencies taskforce in 2020 according to her speech at the first policy meeting. The ECB president Christine Lagarde is known to be one of the major supporters of crypto in the community.

Following our latest cryptocurrency news, Lagarde suggests that the ECB will have to reconsider its status on crypto. The Governing Council met to decide about the interest rate and the monetary policies and Lagarde held her first press conference there along with the ECB Vice-President Luis de Guindo. She said that the central banks want to figure out new objectives for a digital currency before the first half of the year saying that the ECB will have to get ahead of the ‘’curve’’ on that matter.

The ECB has to also set new priorities and determine what it wants to achieve with the new taskforce and Lagarde said:

‘’Are we trying to reduce costs? Are we trying to cut out the middleman? Are we trying to have inclusive finance at no cost? There is a whole range of objectives that can be pursued.’’

Lagarde admitted to the increased demand for stablecoins ignoring Bitcoin and referred to the interest shown by the Canadian and British counterparts as well:

‘’My personal conviction is that given developments we see, not so much in bitcoin but in stablecoins projects… we’d better be ahead of the curve because there is clearly demand out there that we have to respond to.’’

Last month, the bank was thinking about launching a digital currency and the proposal was a part of the new draft that seeks to ban the high-risk crypto projects. At that time, a target for ECB was Libra and the global digital currency projects developed by some entities such as Facebook which have been repeatedly criticized by European leaders. With a digital currency that will be parallel to the euro, the consumers will have a cheaper means of payment option and this will also have a huge impact on the bank’s fiscal policy.  The Central bank will also be able to inject funds into the economy to achieve inflation targets which the ECB left unchanged so far.