In a recent episode of Professor Scott Galloway’s podcast, he talked with one of my favourite writers: the eminent historian and Hoover Institution senior fellow Niall Ferguson. The subject of the conversation was the relationship between the United States and China. Their fascinating and informative discussion ranged across many fields, including financial services and fintech. Ferguson touched on a particular aspect of “Cold War 2” in this context, saying that American regulators “have allowed the fintech revolution to happen everywhere else” going on to say that “China has established an important lead in, for example, payments”, clearly referring to the dominance of mobile payments in China and the role of (in particular) Alipay in bringing financial services. He made this comment around the same time that the Chinese government pulled the plug on the Alipay IPO, what would have been the biggest IPO in history.
One of Ferguson’s central points is that the US depends to a greater extent than people realise on the US dollar being the international reserve currency. As he says in the podcast, the US has “an almost unlimited capability” to borrow in its own currency because the dollar is so dominant nand that “we are going to have a period of challenges to the US dollar of various forms and tenacious defence of its dominance by a US government that understands its existential importance to the United States”.
If you want to understand some of the big picture around the coronavirus, currency and what Ferguson referred to as “Cold War 2”, but what I call “The Currency Cold War” in this book, then you might want listen to this podcast from CoinDesk. It is a wide ranging conversation between Ferguson and CoinDesk’s Michael Casey about our disrupted world, inevitable crisis and what it could mean for money. As the author of one of the best books on the history of finance, The Ascent of Money, Ferguson has a very wide and well-informed perspective on the issues and, indeed I quote him more than once in my book!
