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Some cryptocurrency advocates are promoting the use of stablecoins as a common currency, arguing that this new currency could help the cost-of-living crisis and promote economic equality – particularly for young people. Law professor, money expert and SCP Fellow Dan Rohde is not convinced that crypto can help address economic inequality. In this explainer, he breaks down what stablecoins are and aren’t, and how to think critically about their promises.
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The Bank of Canada is an independent Crown corporation that sees its primary responsibility to be promoting Canada’s economic welfare by maintaining low and stable inflation. When it was first created in 1934, however, the Bank was a radically different institution—a privately owned corporation primarily meant to anchor Canada’s economy globally and manage foreign exchange. Not only was the Bank not tasked with managing inflation, but key policymakers behind its founding thought doing so would be a severe mistake. This article offers the first legal history of the Bank’s founding. It maps the enormous public debate that accompanied the creation of the Bank and the various, often contradictory visions expressed for it. The article labels these five visions: a Bankers’ Bank, a Government Bank, an Imperial Bank, an Economists’ Bank, and a Bank of the People. The article then looks at the original legal design of the Bank and argues that it largely fit the Imperial Bank model. Charting this history helps us better understand this vital organ of Canadian government, and has the potential to upset many of our accepted, contemporary notions of central banking.
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Recent global financial crises have resurrected debates over money and its provision, not only in economics but in law and history. This presents an opportunity to revisit past moments when money and banks were viscerally political and considered central to our legal order. This paper looks at one such moment: the conflict between Upper Canada’s Conservatives and Reformers leading to rebellion in 1837. While little mentioned in the literature, the legal architecture of money and banks played a central role in the Reform movement. The British had previously flooded the colony with publicly issued notes to fund the war of 1812. By the 1830s, this government monetary issue was fully redeemed and replaced with notes issued by the colony’s first three chartered banks. The reformers saw those banks as public agents, playing a public role, but without democratic accountability. After several failed attempts to reform that system, they turned to establishing their own institution, named the Bank of the People. In doing so, they saw themselves not as merely engaging in private commerce, but as directly contesting this fundamental public provision. This article provides a legal-political history of that early contest over Canadian money and sovereignty, and explores the way in which Upper Canada’s Reformers put forth a critique of bank-issued money that remains relevant today.
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