About the lecture:
Even before the creation of central banks, private banks pioneered the issuance of banknotes. In Scotland and Northern Ireland, this legacy endures today, sustained by robust backing arrangements that command public trust.
While money has since evolved into electronic deposits, a new wave of digital money called stablecoins is emerging to promise faster, cheaper, and more efficient global payments.
In this address, Carolyn Wilkins will examine this history to uncover the conditions required for private money to scale successfully, and how these conditions are helping to shape the regulatory guardrails for today's stablecoin regimes. She will also consider the strategic rise of US dollar stablecoins, exploring their deep integration with US Treasury markets and implications for financial stability and for global dominance of the greenback.
About Carolyn A. Wilkins
Carolyn A. Wilkins is an external member of the Financial Policy Committee at the Bank of England.
She is a visiting senior research scholar at Princeton University’s Griswold Center for Economic Policy Studies, where she is a lecturer in the Department of Economics. Wilkins also serves on the board of directors of Canada’s Intact Financial Corporation, a company that provides property and casualty insurance in Canada and specialty insurance in North America and Europe. Wilkins is currently co-leading an independent review of the Riksbank, and co-led the review of the Reserve Bank of Australia in 2022-23.
She is a mentor to fintech entrepreneurs at the Creative Destruction Lab (HEC), and co-leads the Bretton Woods Committee’s Digital Finance Project Team. Wilkins worked for twenty years at the Bank of Canada, and served as Senior Deputy Governor from 2014 to 2020. She has contributed to international financial regulation, including as a member of the Financial Stability Board and the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, and as the Bank’s Deputy to the G20 and G7.
Wilkins earned her MA from the University of Western Ontario and her BA from Wilfrid Laurier University, both in economics. She received an Honorary Doctorate from Wilfrid Laurier University in 2022.
