With the emergence of Bitcoin and recently proposed stablecoins from BigTechs, such as Diem (formerly Libra), central banks face growing competition from private actors offering their own digital alternative to physical cash. We do not address the normative question whether a central bank should issue a central bank digital currency (CBDC) or not. Instead, we contribute to the current research debate by showing how a central bank could do so, if desired. We propose a token-based system without distributed ledger technology and show how earlier-deployed, software-only electronic cash can be improved upon to preserve transaction privacy, meet regulatory requirements in a compelling way, and offer a level of quantum-resistant protection against systemic privacy risk. Neither monetary policy nor financial stability would be materially affected because a CBDC with this design would replicate physical cash rather than bank deposits.
Safe assets usually trade at a premium due to their high credit quality and deep liquidity. To understand the role of credit quality for such premia, we focus on Swiss Confederation bonds, which are extremely safe but not particularly liquid. We therefore refer to their premia as safety premia and quantify them using an arbitrage-free term structure model that accounts for time-varying premia in individual bond prices. The estimation results show that Swiss safety premia are large and exhibit long-lasting trends. Furthermore, our regression analysis suggests that they shifted upwards persistently following the launch of the euro but have been depressed in recent years by the asset purchases of the European Central Bank.
