Description
This article investigates how competing institutional approaches to multilateral payment systems based on CBDCs (central bank digital currencies) may reconfigure global monetary relations. While most analyses of CBDC projects assume that central banks and private financial actors have inherently conflicting interests, this article starts from the premise that central banks have historically built their monetary capacities by cultivating strategic relationships with selected private financial institutions. This is particularly relevant in the domain of global money, where national monetary authorities rely heavily on the relationships established by private global banks within correspondent banking networks to connect their monetary systems to the rest of the world through cross-border payments. Against this backdrop, the article compares two flagship multilateral payment platforms based on CBDC that embody contrasting principles of institutional coordination for processing wholesale cross-border payments: Project mBridge, comprising the People’s Bank of China and other Asian and Middle Eastern central banks, advancing a public–public model based on cooperation among central banks; Project Agorá, featuring the Federal Reserve and other closely aligned central banks, promoting hybrid arrangements between central banks and major private financial institutions. The article argues that these competing institutional models reflect not just alternative preferences for organizing global monetary relations but fundamentally different geopolitical priorities. While mBridge aims to reduce reliance on the private correspondent banking relations that underpin the current USD-centred global monetary system, Agorá seeks to reinforce the institutional foundations of that very system.
