City Boston Financial News

As central bankers in advanced economies consider launching their own digital currencies, top officials have warned that CBDCs should not replace existing payments systems entirely.

The Fidelity Stack was built in Decentraland, a web platform that mimics a metropolitan area.

Brett Arends is an award-winning financial writer with many years’ experience writing about markets, economics and personal finance. He has received an individual award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers for his financial writing, and was part of the Boston Herald team that won two others. He has worked as an analyst at McKinsey & Co and is a chartered financial consultant. His latest book, Storm Proof Your Money, was published by John Wiley & Co.

Stock futures rose early Thursday as investors assessed a new quarter of trading and a troublesome bond market recession indicator.

The collaboration forms part of the Bank’s wider ‘research and exploration’ into CBDC, and will be focused on exploration and experimentation of potential technology approaches. The UK central bank joins the Bank of Canada and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston on MIT's CBDC roster.

The Bank of England announced Friday that it had reached an agreement with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab Digital Currency Initiative, or DCI, on a joint twelve-month research project on Central Bank Digital Currency, or CBDC. The bank said in a statement that the new project was for research purposes only, and not intended to develop an operational CBDC.

The project will see the central bank and the MIT Media Lab’s digital currency initiative team experiment with potential technology approaches to determine how a CBDC could work. The Bank of Canada has spent several years working with the country's commercial lenders to explore the creation of a DLT-based CBDC.

The Bank of Canada has spent several years working with the country's commercial lenders to explore the creation of a DLT-based CBDC.

The Bank of Canada has partnered with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to work on a 12 month research project focused on the design of a Central Bank Digital Currency.

Private-equity managers are continuing to invest at a record pace while attempting to manage uncertainty around interest rates, inflation and global geopolitics, a report from consulting firm Bain said.

Private-equity managers are continuing to invest at a record pace while attempting to manage uncertainty around interest rates, inflation and global geopolitics, a report from consulting firm Bain said.

Peter Thiel-backed city-building startup Praxis has raised $15 million in Series A funding from a variety of crypto venture firms led by Paradigm Capital, Sam Bankman-Fried's Alameda Research, and Three Arrows Capital.

Federal Reserve officials won't be able to trade a slew of assets including stocks and bonds — as well as cryptocurrencies — under new rules that became formal Friday.

Eric Rosengren, the former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, said he is concerned that the central bank waited too long to start withdrawing stimulus and suggested the Fed should push to shrink its $9 trillion asset portfolio more aggressively this year. Mr. Rosengren, who resigned from his position last September after 14 years leading the Boston Fed, spoke in an interview on Jan. 31. Here is a partial transcript, lightly edited for clarity and length.

T. Rabi Sankar from the Reserve Bank of India compared cryptocurrency to ponzi schemes and said that banning them, not regulating them, would be the “most advisable choice” for the Indian government.

The world recently got a sneak peek at what a digital dollar, or at least one component of a hypothetical United States central bank digital currency (CBDC), might look like, courtesy of Project Hamilton, a collaborative effort of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the MIT Digital Currency Initiative. The results of the project’s first phase were originally expected last summer but were released on Feb. 3. The project, announced in 2020, is named in honor of Alexander Hamilton, the first U.S. Treasury secretary, and Margaret Hamilton, an MIT staffer who contributed to NASA’s Apollo program.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, or Boston Fed, has selected economist Susan M. Collins, University of Michigan provost, to serve as its new president and chief executive officer.

However, the idea has received significant pushback, most recently from a committee of peers in the House of Lords, which last month concluded that there is no convincing case for the digital pound.Project New Era, an initiative led by The Payments Association, paywith.glass and other private industry stakeholders, and supported by Boston Consulting Group, is looking to advance the conversation with its Green Paper, which will be followed by real-world pilots looking into design questions and how to mitigate risks.The project is putting together a private consortium to carry out the pilots using dSterling, a digital settlement asset similar to a CBDC. The focus will be on testing use cases, including retail payments, cross-border transactions Tokenisation-as-a-Service, and how to service Payment Institutions and Electronic Money Issuers.The project then plans to share their data and feedback with central banks and policymakers.Tony Craddock, director general, The Payments Association, says: “The widespread adoption of CBDCs could be as important to the 21st century as the end of the gold standard was to the 20th.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston selected University of Michigan Provost Susan M. Collins as its next president, filling a vacancy left last year when Eric Rosengren moved forward his retirement following a controversy over his and other officials’ financial-market trading.

The Boston Federal Reserve, which is heading the central bank's potential foray into digital currency and saw its leader resign last year amid a stock-trading controversy, has a new leader.

Major U.S.-based payment processor PayPal has assembled a team of industry experts to act as advisors on crypto, blockchain, and digital currencies.