Libra Retreat Would Bring Joy and Relief to Asia
Facebook’s digital currency project is stepping back from global ambitions that threatened to weaken the levers of monetary policy.
Master of coin: Mark Zuckerberg.
Photographer: JOSH EDELSON/AFP/Getty Images
Facebook Inc.’s idea of a global cryptocurrency may get demoted to something more humble. You can almost hear a collective sigh of relief from Asian central banks.
The original plan was to create a synthetic unit that would hold its value against a basket of existing currencies. Libra was being billed as a future rival to the greenback, a blockchain innovation that would promote financial inclusion by catering to the daily needs of billions of people. It’s a so-called stablecoin, a virtual currency that avoids the wild, speculative gyrations of Bitcoin by tracking the value of a low-volatility asset such as the U.S. dollar.