The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance

Eswar S. Prasad
Belknap Press, Cambridge, MA, 2021, 496 pp., $35.00

Among the many technological changes in today’s digital economy, disruption is also occurring in one of the most fundamental technologies of our societies: money itself.

In his new book, The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance, Eswar Prasad puts this disruption into broader context. He argues that for all the digital innovation in finance in the past decades, we are standing on the precipice of what may be an even more dramatic change, with broad social, economic, and political implications. He shows convincingly that amid fintech, cryptocurrencies, and stablecoins—and the potential demise of cash—one of the most far-reaching innovations would be central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), a new form of central bank money.

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