How Do We Define a Currency?

What is a currency? This turns out to be one of those questions we just kind of skip over because we don't have clear answers to it (and because economists often like to skip over these foundational things). This special episode of the Odd Lots podcast was recorded as part of Princeton University's “How to Write the Biography of a Currency” event, hosted by the Princeton Economic History Workshop and the Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy & Finance. In this discussion, we talk about how we should define a currency and how that definition has changed (or not) over time. Our panelists were Iñaki Aldasoro, an economist at the Bank for International Settlements, Indiana University Bloomington Professor Rebecca Spang, and Stefan Ingves, the former head of the Sveriges Riksbank, the central bank of Sweden, from 2006 to 2022. Read more: Dollar Drops on Renewed Trade Uncertainty, Soft Economic Data Asia’s $7.5 Trillion Bet on US Assets Is Suddenly Unraveling Only Bloomberg - Business News, Stock Markets, Finance, Breaking & World News subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.