Matt Levine, Columnist

Crypto Wants a Central Bank

Binance, FTX, greenwashing and cars.

Has there ever been a pure liquidity problem at a crypto firm? Like what I have in mind is this:

This, to be clear, is the standard story of bank runs in traditional banking. It is the Diamond-Dybvig model that won a Nobel Memorial Prize this year. The standard problem is “the assets are good but long-term, and the customers want their money now.” It is the problem that central banks are set up to solve. The solution is fairly straightforward: You have a central bank with lots of money (ideally, in modern central banking, the ability to print money). If a bank with good assets is facing a liquidity crunch, it can go to the central bank and say “we have $200 of assets but we can’t get $100 of cash, help,” and the central bank will help. It will help by “lending freely, against good collateral, at a penalty rate,” as Bagehot’s famous formula goes: The central bank will lend the bank $100 to pay its depositors, but first it will make sure that the bank really has $200 of good stuff. (And it will charge interest.) If a bank shows up at the Federal Reserve and says “hi we owe depositors $100 but don’t have it, we lost it all on roulette,” the Fed will not help.1