Discussion of “The Macroeconomics of Central Bank Digital Currencies”

Abstract: The way consumers have paid for goods and services has been undergoing fundamental changes in recent years; and especially in the last year due to the pandemic. Canadians using cash to pay at retail outlets has gone from 54% of transactions in 2009 to 33% of transactions in 2017 (Henry et al., 2018). This trend of the reduction in cash has appeared to continue during the midst of the COVID pandemic with 28% of Canadians reporting holding no cash, compared to 20% pre-pandemic (Chen et al., 2020).