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problem, as elsewhere, lies in the relative size of the residual. Could the local money's share of the total monetary stock become too small to be effective in steering aggregate expenditure? The question has been posed most starkly by a central banker, the ECB's Otmar Issing (1999): In a world of electronic money, he asks, "would the familiar existing units of account, the euro, the US dollar, the pound sterling, etc., continue to mean anything?"
The empire strikes back?
Is the threat real? Helleiner (1998) and others, as indicated, contend that the challenge is unlikely to be serious. Three broad lines of argument are offered, none entirely persuasive.
First, the very possibility of new privately issued e-monies is discounted. Both Helleiner (1998) and Goodhart (2000), for example, argue that the scenario is unlikely because of the inherent advantages of incumbency already enjoyed by existing national currencies. In Goodhart's words, conventional money "has first-mover advantages; it is already there.... The demise of [conventional money] at the hands of [e-money] will not happen" (Goodhart 2000: 17, 19). But that skeptical view ignores the powerful forces gathering to overcome the conservative bias of the marketplace - the immense new opportunities created by the expanding world of electronic commerce; and, above all, the potent allure of seigniorage. As already acknowledged, there is little reason to expect new "rootless" monies to gain acceptance overnight. But there are good reasons, I have suggested, to assume that given enough time, the necessary trust can be created. The issue is not the "demise" of conventional money but rather the emergence of non-conventional rivals. Even Goodhart concedes that "over time it is possible that some brand (or brands) of [e-money] may become increasingly widely accepted [and] may indeed substitute for currency in a wider range of possible uses" (Goodhart 2000: 17-19).
Goodhart also stresses the difficulty, with today's technology, of providing complete anonymity for transactions in e-money. "How can the payer/payee be confident," he asks (Goodhart 2000: 8), "that the other counterparty will not be recording the transaction in a manner that will leave an audit trail that can subsequently be followed?" The question is not unreasonable. Clearly, the technology does not exist to make e-money as anonymous as paper currency - at least, not yet. The trickiness of the challenge of providing adequate assurance of privacy has also been acknowledged. But it is reasonable to note too that banknotes account for a decreasing share of overall transactions in most economies. The same threat to anonymity exists with electronic payments systems using conventional currency. E-money, in fact, is at no special disadvantage in this regard.
What then of the inherent advantages that central banks enjoy in providing a payments system? This point has been stressed by Freedman (2000), in effect harking back to Knapp's state theory of money. The fact that the central bank is a state institution, Freedman contends, backed by the full faith and credit of the national government, makes its own settlement mechanism virtually riskless as compared with that of any private money issuer. Hence "it is very unlikely that other mechanisms, including variants of electronic money, will supplant the current types of arrangement