Text | Xin Nan Editor | Lu Xiaoming

Odaily（ID：o-daily）

Since the launch of the white paper in June, Libra has not received positive support from any country. On the contrary, the attitudes of the central banks of various countries towards Libra are like enemies, and they have teamed up to start a collective boycott campaign.

Libra, which is expected to be launched in the second half of 2020, is now difficult to jump the regulatory gap. Libra seems to be unaware of whose cheese he moved, but it has aroused the vigilance of the relevant parties.

On the one hand, Libra is struggling to move forward, facing the most stringent joint supervision in history; on the other hand, under the pressure of Libra, the central banks of various countries have woken up, and the legal digital currency has been put on the agenda.

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Libra promotes twists and turns, and various countries supervise and suppress

Libra is being sieged by regulators from various countries.

Since its launch in June this year, Libra's road to advancement has been bumpy. In the past three months, people can hardly feel any progress of Libra, but the dealings between Libra and regulators have become the biggest attraction.

For Libra, receiving subpoenas from regulators has become commonplace.

A year ago, the performance of Xiao Zha, the head of Facebook, at the privacy hearing is still fresh in people's memory. Today, Marcus, the project leader of Libra, has to walk into the high hall in a suit and leather shoes, and fight wits with hundreds of congressmen in large and small hearings.

Statistics show that after the launch of the Libra white paper, the U.S. Congress held three consecutive hearings within half a month. However, Libra's efforts in many ways still haven't won the trust of the United States.

U.S. President Trump still does not recognize the status of Libra, bluntly saying that in the United States, only the U.S. dollar is a real currency; and said that "Facebook's Libra will not have any status or reliability. If Facebook and other companies want to become banks, They have to apply for a banking license."

On September 16, Libra held talks with 26 central banks including the Federal Reserve in Switzerland. This once again aroused the industry's attention.

In this meeting, Libra was asked to answer key questions about the scope and design of the currency. It also discussed with central bank officials the policy and regulatory risks of stablecoins supported by financial institutions and technology companies. A report will be formed and submitted to the G7 finance ministers in October.

Before the meeting, Germany and France made high-profile statements that Libra should be prevented from launching.

German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz bluntly stated that a parallel currency like Libra cannot be accepted. French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire believes that Libra threatens the monetary sovereignty of governments.

Subsequently, the German cabinet officially approved the draft blockchain strategy, which supports the tokenization of securities but opposes the Libra stable currency. Not only that, but the attitude of Switzerland, where Libra is registered, has quietly changed.

At first, Libra hoped to seek a payment license in Switzerland, and Switzerland also expressed its willingness to actively promote it, believing that Switzerland could play a role in an ambitious international project. However, under pressure from the U.S. Treasury Department and other European countries, Switzerland recently expressed its readiness to cooperate with other countries to ensure the regulation of Libra.

If the countries were still a little ambiguous about Libra before, and Libra could still survive in the cracks, but now the regulatory attitudes of various countries can be said to be jointly encircling and suppressing Libra.

At the same time, in order to gain regulatory approval in various countries, Libra continues to recruit lobbyists with high salaries. According to reports, as of August this year, Facebook has spent more than $7.5 million on lobbying in Washington and hired more than 12 external lobbying companies.

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Libra is not allowed to issue coins, countries must issue their own coins

Many people use Libra and Bitcoin as an analogy, thinking that both are emerging things that are changing the global financial infrastructure.

But Bitcoin has never been closely watched and investigated by regulators in many countries in such a short period of time like Libra.

In Libra's white paper, more is written about Libra's application in cross-border payments and transfers, so some people regard Libra as an overseas payment method that rivals WeChat and Alipay.

Of course, some people have analyzed that Libra wants to become a super-sovereign currency. If this currency is circulated on a global scale, coupled with the billions of users behind Facebook, it will undoubtedly have an impact on the sovereign currencies of small countries with unstable monetary policies. But it will increase the new demand for the basket of currencies linked to it.

According to this logic, the United States, Britain and Europe each have strong demands for globalization, and it is expected that Libra will not encounter major regulatory obstacles in countries such as the United States, Britain and Europe.

But this time, the first to stand up and openly oppose is not an island country far away in Oceania, nor a small country with a fragile sovereign currency system in Southeast Asia, but France and Germany, which have always been stable in the euro system. However, financial analyst Cathie Wood believes that considering the decline in European bank stocks, Franco-German considerations are normal.

Interestingly, while boycotting Libra, countries are invariably planning to issue Libra's competing products.

According to reports in July, the European Central Bank (ECB: European Central Bank) is studying the issuance of the euro digital currency ECB-Coin. The market is also speculating that the European Union may launch its own digital currency. On September 13, French Finance Minister Le Maire called on the EU to consider launching its own "public digital currency" plan.

In August, Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, also urged global central banks to unite to create a Libra-like "synthetic hegemonic currency (SHC)" in a speech to end the dollar's dominance, reduce potential risks, and weaken the dollar's spillover effect .

Currently, Uruguay has launched a CBDC (central bank digital currency) pilot project. In addition, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates are also exploring the application of CBDC in their legal currency systems.

This time, China was not left behind. As early as when Zhou Xiaochuan was in office, China set up a small team to study the central bank's digital currency. On July 8, Wang Xin, director of the Central Bank’s Research Bureau, revealed that the State Council has officially approved the research and development of the central bank’s digital currency, and the central bank is currently organizing market institutions to engage in corresponding work. On August 10, Mu Changchun once again disclosed the central bank’s digital currency at a meeting in Yichun: “The digital currency of the central bank of China can be said to be coming soon.”

In addition to the central banks of various countries, there are also many companies that want to issue coins. From Wal-Mart to Wells Fargo, after Facebook’s wave of currency issuance, companies are also everywhere.

Of course, there are restless currency circle members. Binance, the big brother of the three major exchanges in the currency circle, has created a Belt and Road version of Libra "Venus" against Libra. Recently, its officials have clearly positioned the Venus stablecoin project as a competitor of Facebook's cryptocurrency Libra.

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Behind the obstacles is actually a brand new currency war

"There is no digital currency that can cause tension in the entire monetary and financial world like Libra." Even Mu Changchun, director of the Central Bank's Digital Currency Research Institute, lamented that the world's tension with Libra is not unfounded, it is Its real reason and background-Libra has value support, which means that it has the potential to become a currency in the usual sense.

Why are governments so nervous?

The words of German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz expressed the considerations of powerful countries to suppress Libra: "We must protect consumers and national sovereignty. The core element of national sovereignty is the issuance of currency, and we will not leave this task to private companies. .”

The emergence of Libra has made various countries feel a sense of crisis about sovereign currencies for the first time, and the industry has been speculating about Libra's true intentions.

In his article "Libra: Principles, Influences, Opportunities and Challenges of Digital Currency", Ren Zeping, director of the Evergrande Economic Research Institute, mentioned the important reasons why all sovereign countries are cautious about Libra: First, Libra may replace the sovereign currencies of some countries The second is that the difficulty of foreign exchange control in various countries has increased greatly; the third is that the implementation of monetary policies in various countries has become more difficult; the fourth is that it has increased the difficulty of anti-money laundering and anti-terrorism.

In his view, the key factor is the country's concerns about monetary sovereignty.

The English version of the Global Times article "China Cannot Be Absent from the Era of Global Digital Currency Competition" also believes that after Facebook issues the digital currency Libra, "it has the right to issue currency for 2.7 billion people around the world, becoming an independent 'central bank' in the digital economy. ".

"Monetary policy is a vassal of fiscal policy. The minting power brings the government's financial power. Without the minting power, the finance will be unable to control the market." Hong Shuning, a digital currency analyst, analyzed to Odaily.

Even if Marcus has repeatedly assured the central bank that he does not intend to create money, he is not doing a bank's job. But no one has made it clear whether Libra will usher in the day when the dollar will be decoupled from gold like the US dollar back then.

In response, a new currency competition has sounded.

Gu Yanxi, an early researcher of blockchain technology and applications, believes that the emergence of the Libra project has forced central banks of various countries to seriously consider their own currency digitization policies, and adopt corresponding countermeasures to grasp the trend of currency and asset digitization.

"If a central bank continues to maintain the existing currency and financial system, and other central banks take corresponding countermeasures separately or even jointly, then this central bank will definitely fall behind in the process of currency and asset digitization and become a global leader. The isolated island of the financial industry." Gu Yanxi believes that in order to avoid this situation, each central bank will take this challenge seriously, and formulate corresponding coping strategies separately and in cooperation with other central banks.

Cai Weide, a special expert of the national "Thousand Talents Program" and a professor at Beihang University, believes that in the past currency competition was that countries obtained benefits by issuing currencies, usually by devaluing legal currencies to stimulate exports and gain benefits from exchange rates, but this is an old-fashioned currency competition , and the new currency competition can also use stable currency to enter the market of other countries, and can control transaction information in a timely manner.

For the central banks of various countries, Facebook's currency issuance is not only a challenge, but also an inspiration-to end the central position of the US dollar since 1944, now is the best time.

"What defeats gold as the world's common currency is not another metal that is better than gold, but paper money. It may not be the next paper money that defeats the US dollar, but digital currency." Xiao Lei, a digital currency analyst, believes that future trends on digital currency.

Zhou Xiaochuan, the former governor of the central bank, also commented: "The concept of Libra represents the possible emergence of a more global and strong currency."

Inspired by Libra, many countries have embarked on the road of developing digital currency. Everyone wants to seize this opportunity to create a new "Bretton Woods system".

This global new currency war forced by giant companies has quietly begun.