The Bank of Canada has stated they are starting an initiative to look into changing their monetary policies. The central bank’s second in command Carolyn Wilkins had some encouraging words to say about Bitcoin. Tired of the results of quantitative easing and manipulated interest rates they have begun looking at alternative tools to stave off the financial crisis and a stagnate economy.
“One important challenge that central banks now face, many of them, is that conventional monetary policy is stretched to its limits in many countries, where policy interest rates are at, or below, zero.”
Canada has always been an innovator when it comes to technology. Wilkins said, “Canada has a history of being a monetary-policy innovator.” and the financial sectors there attest to this statement. The region is home to seven of Deloitte’s Canadian Technology Fast 50 FinTech companies, and the financial tech industry is growing fast. On February 11, 2014, Parliament passed the first official national law towards cryptocurrency and many saw this as a sign of a country attempting to regulate it. Close to a million people are employed by the FinTech industry in Canada, and disruptive startups are seen everywhere. At a speech in Toronto, CIBC CEO Victor Dodig said:
“These days nimble organizations, both large and small, have begun to disrupt the Canadian financial landscape.”
Carolyn Wilkins believes there are excellent examples of innovation within the Canadian economy like Uber and PayPal. The Bank of Canada representative believes there needs to be a radical change in thought concerning traditional financeand emerging technology. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are on the rise to becoming financial disruptors as well. Wilkins feels Canada will always invest more into bolstering economic reform so they can make better decisions and avoid certain financial turbulence in the future. Wilkins and fellow constituents believe some kind of e-money could break the chains of inflation and bogged interest rates throughout the land. On the Vancouver Sun, Wilkins states:
“We have to envisage a world in which people mostly use e-money, perhaps even one that’s not denominated in the national currency, like Bitcoin,”
The second in command at the Bank of Canada says these kinds of new dynamics in global monetary order would be a change from the current ways the central banks handle things. Wilkins says, “central banks, quite frankly, struggle to implement monetary policy.” Wilkins stresses that Canada will curb the global crisis in their region by being open to new technologies. Canadians are taking the FinTech industry by storm with the region’s popular publication The Globe And Mail stating: The country is becoming a hotbed for these “fintech” firms, threatening a dramatic shift in the financial services sector, driven by technology and a set of savvy entrepreneurs.
The countryside is also home to some very fine cryptocurrency startups like CryptoCapital and Blockstream. Innovator and venture capitalist Anthony Di lorio resides in Toronto spreading the ideas of decentralized technologies with his projectsDecentral, Kryptokit and the Ethereum Project. Kraken has opened an exchange in the country, and Coinbase now does service there as well. Canada has an array of choices when it comes to financial technology and digital currency solutions. Just recently Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) CEO Dave McKay praised distributed ledger technology calling it “quantum innovation.” RBC is one of the largest lending institutions based out of Canada and looking into a hybrid version of Bitcoinas the currency itself is not up to their expectations. The country has a vast and cooperative relationship with disruptive technologies and seems to recognize old methods like quantitative easing are not working.
What do you think of the Bank of Canada siding with Bitcoin? Let us know in the comments below.
Images courtesy of Redmemes and Pixbay
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