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b'The public needs protection from the Wild West land grab that\\u2019s now going on in money, says Rohan Grey, our guest on the latest episode of the New Money Review podcast.\\nGrey, Assistant Professor of Law at Willamette University in the US, was one of the authors of a controversial bill brought before the US Congress late last year, called the \\u2018Stable Act\\u2019.\\nThe Stable Act\\u2019s objective\\u2014it is due to return to Congress later this year\\u2014was to protect consumers from the risks posed by emerging digital payment instruments, such as Facebook\\u2019s planned new \\u2018Diem\\u2019 currency and other private sector \\u2018stablecoins\\u2019.\\nThe authors of the Act called for stablecoin issuers to be regulated as banks, a suggestion that went down like a lead balloon with much of the cryptocurrency community.\\nStablecoins are digital versions of existing fiat currency, such as the dollar, euro or yen. Their value has been growing explosively (https://newmoneyreview.com/index.php/2020/11/27/central-banks-brace-for-stablecoin-explosion/) in recent years. They have also been called \\u2018the first battleground of the coming crypto regulation wars (https://www.coindesk.com/stablecoin-regulation-wars-stable-act)\\u2019.\\nNotable stablecoins include Tether, the cryptocurrency market\\u2019s version of the dollar (https://newmoneyreview.com/index.php/2021/05/13/tether-reserve-disclosure-leaves-unanswered-questions/), which has grown from $3bn to over $60bn in size in just a year. \\nThere\\u2019s Circle, which is now growing even faster and whose issuer went public on the New York Stock Exchange last week. And there\\u2019s tech giant Facebook\\u2019s planned new version of the dollar (https://newmoneyreview.com/index.php/2021/05/14/diem-could-slash-dollar-payment-costs/).\\nAmidst all this private sector experimentation with digital money, what role is left to the state? According to Grey, we shouldn\\u2019t leave the crucial discussion over the future of money in the hands of private actors.\\nIn his view, it\\u2019s time for national parliaments to step up and make crucial decisions on digital money\\u2019s design.\\nThis is a crucial debate and one we\\u2019re going to hear a lot more about in coming years.\\nHere are some excerpts from the podcast discussion:\\nWhy the money infrastructure is a public good\\n\\u201cIt\\u2019s a matter of democratic legitimacy. We\\u2019ve seen throughout history these key infrastructural moments when we hand over control to certain private actors. Then we spend decades living in the repercussions. This is one of those moments. When it comes to the digitization of currency, this is a Wild West frontier land grab. I hope we don\\u2019t end up repeating the same political dynamics of most historical land grabs.\\u201d\\nThe risks of shadow banks and shadow deposits\\n\\u201cIf you allow private actors to create something that walks and talks like public money, but has none of the safeguards and none of the policy oversight that comes with public money, the result is recurrent crises and systemic breakdowns, where the public has to bail out these actors.\\u201d\\n\\u201cOne of the major causes of instability in the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis was that various actors which we now call \\u2018shadow banks\\u2019 were issuing instruments that were effectively deposits.'